Tattoo!

And finally... on Monday I went down to Frith Street to get my tattoo! After three awesome days I was really starting to cheer up, and realise, that away from work my life is quite awesome! I have amazing friends that I can do neat things with like sewing and cycling and I'm able to do pretty much most of the things that make me happy. Like on Monday, I woke up, read some zines and listened to Beat Happening (how could that not cheer me up?!) then headed out on my bike to Soho to Frith Street Tattoo!

It was a really nice experience getting tattooed, this was the 4th tattoo I've had done by Valerie and we're getting quite comfortable round each other, so it was nice having a bit more a chat with her than usual. Anyway, enough babbling - onto the pictures!

I really love it, I can't stop looking at it :) I think it's my favourite so far!

Sewing and the Victoria & Albert Museum

Last week I went to my first meeting of the South East Sisters Needlework Union! How awesome is that name btw? Lydia, Mary and Sian set it up and I was invited to join, I'm really really excited and inspired by it! Basically, we're going to meet every two weeks and sew together. We're going to work on individual pieces of cross stitch and embroidery, but also we're going to make a sampler book together and hopefully a quilt!

Lydia, Mary and Sian were inspired to start the group after going to the Quilts exhibition at the V&A so on Sunday I went along to check it out myself. It was amazing! It's amazing how much work people put into making these quilts, so many tiny pieces and lots of them had individual squares of embroidered scenes on them, like this one:

I really loved seeing the really old ones, something about 4-500 year old household objects really grabs my imagination! I really enjoyed the quilt made by women aboard the convict ship the Rajah on the way to Australia, just looking at it I could almost see the women sitting around it sewing it.

It was great to see some modern quilts too, some of them I thought were amazingly pretentious, but others I think really understood the history the quilts and the feelings they envoke in people. Grayson Perry was amazing as usual:

His quilt was called 'Right to Life' and rather than the usual swirling hexagon pattern, he uses images of fetuses. This is all sorts of awesome.

Tracy Emin's was amazing too (I have such a soft spot for her):

Once I was done in the quilt exhibition I went up to the Textiles rooms and my goodness! There were these huge cabinets filled with screens which you could pull out and look at the needlework inside. The section with samplers left me speechless, there in front of me was the oldest known sampler, sewn in 1592! There was also some tudor blackwork and samplers and lacing from everywhere from Sweden to Italy!

Also, once I got to the shop I had to buy some of the Liberty limited edition fabric for my own quilt!

I was so inspired by the whole day and I literally spent the rest of the weekend sewing! Here's one piece that I did:

4 Day Weekend!

I had a lovely weekend, it was so good to get away from work for a bit longer than usual!

On Friday I went to ULU and finally got my zine reprinted ready for the zinefest! I've nearly mastered the art of double-sided copying, I only got two pages the wrong way round! Then I headed over to Lydia's (and on the way picked up some yummy vegan icecream!) and we watched Les Chansons d'amour which was an amazingly odd French musical, I liked it a lot!

Saturday was the day of the zinefest, so I was up early and on the new East London line to Brick Lane. I really enjoyed the zinefest this year. Last year was a total disappointment, I came away with not one zine! But this year I think there was a much better mix of people and stalls. I still can't get over some zines costing £7 or £8 though! There seems to be a lot more of these kind of art zines around nowadays and I'm not sure what I think of them. I think it's cool that people are using the zine as the format of choice for their art projects, and I think they look really neat, it's just they are so inaccessable to me and probably many others. I simply can't afford that much for one zine! Sometimes it feels, when you're at zine fairs, that there are almost two teirs of zines, the nice glossy art zines and then zines like mine, photocopied and 50p-£1 each and I always thinks mine ends up looking a bit limp next to them.

Anyway - here's a picture of my haul!

I also bought myself some rather lovely shoes on Saturday. They are very sensible, and they are from Clarks! I felt very grown and up and sensible buying them :)