Tapestry.

So I've already told you about my paternal grandmother and her penchant for daytime television. My maternal grandmother loved books......her shelves groaned under the weight of such volumes as The Far Pavilions and RF Delderfield's Diana.....and tapestry.  Today is a public holiday in Hobart for show day. My plans to get into the garden have been thwarted by rain so I thought I'd show you my now dormant tapestry addiction. In my defence, they say that tapestry is the winter pastime of gardeners.....well in the UK anyway....and if you're middle aged veering towards elderly.

This is the first tapestry that I ever did and I worked on it with my grandmother:

I love the fact they her stitches and mine are all there together some twenty years later.

Soon after I moved to Hobart my now husband and I rented a Georgian sandstone house in the country. I was studying and teaching at the Art School and used to spend a lot of time reading and thinking about the Bloomsbury Group. I know, strange, yet I was transfixed by the story of Dora Carrington and her incredible love for the homosexual Lytton Strachey......she shot herself in the head after he died as she couldn't live without him....never mind that she was married to another man and sometimes indulged in lesbian affairs. And also about the curious life of Vanessa Bell and her art/family. Amongst others.....Vita Sackville West....Virginia Woolf.....Ottoline Morell. Anyway, this and tapestry deflected me from my study.

I have no idea why I embraced this prematurely middle aged repetitive type behaviour, yet I did. Over the course of a three year period I created all of these Elizabeth Bradley tapestry designs:

I even made a pilgrimage to her shop in Beaumaris on the Isle of Anglesey in Wales.....where Kate and Wills now live.

Then they were relegated to the ugly cupboard. I couldn't bear to decorate with them. It's only been in the last year that they have again seen the light of day......when I dug them out and put them in the children's rooms.

Last time we went to the UK my daughter and I were in Liberty and we bought a small Elizabeth Bradley tapestry, probably out of some misplaced nostalgia. We spent the next two weeks driving through Devon and Cornwall in a motorhome.....don't ask......doing tapestry.Who would have thought. And Jane over at Life on Planet Baby accuses me of being adverse to craft....is it any wonder.....I've done my time.

Rx