Frustration leading to progress

I spent all week waiting for my four textile print jobs to be done.  This was frustrating but the textile technician has about 30 jobs queued and had been instructed that the Ted Baker competition jobs were to be prioritised.

So to use my time to best effect I had a couple of days out.  Shirley and I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the WW1 portraits.  Excellent. The layout of the Leaders and Followers room demonstrated how staging enhances an exhibition.  The Leaders were on one side, demonstrating traditional portrait style, personal profile and identity, authority via uniform and stance, and gallantry via medals.  Brighter lighting.  The followers were on the other side of the small room, and were portrayed as down-to-earth, ordinary people, possibly off-guard, anonymous or generic types.  Softer lighting.

Then we went to the Oxo Tower to the Spirit of Womanhood exhibition.  Annabel Rainbow's quilt was wonderful.  She does nude self portraits in art quilts, and this one was of her at her sewing machine , with a lot of embroidered script about how women form 50% of the population but hold title to 1% of the land and other statistics.  Absolutely brilliant.  I had a long chat with the invigilators (a very ethnically diverse bunch of women), talked quite a lot about my uni work "My Mother's Work" amd was most gratified that they really understood the theme.  These ladies were interested to come to the degree show, and some lived quite close to Hatfield.

Annabel Rainbow - "Life 5  - What did you do today dear?"
How fantastic is this!?

Then on Friday I went to uni, and one of my print jobs was done!  So with a couple of other students we had a a steaming and washing session.   I have plenty of work to be going on with over the weekend - cutting out, binding edges, attaching labels, cross stitching comments.

My four cyclical tea towels, freshly printed

Pinning the printed fabric to the steaming cloth

Rolling

Tieing

After steaming

Washing
When you wash something with as much red as this design,
the rinsing water looks like blood!

My class also had a seminar about portfolio preparation.  I am confused about what needs to go into the portfolio, but I can get on with preparing photos of my assorted projects, writing my cv, preparing business cards.