Friday 28 August 2009

Inspiring Pictures - Looking up part 1

It will be a crazy day today - I am organizing a "hen party" for a friend. Unfortunately, I am not yet sure what a hen party is supposed to entail. Hence, I am going North American on it and organizing a bridal shower. It should be fun, but I am really stressed about it!

I am happy to realize that I have a lot more pictures of looking up than I have of looking down. Hence, I will split this into a couple of posts.


The first picture is from the Dali Museum in Spain. Everyone must, must, must go to this museum - it is full of his work, work that he liked, and work that was inspired by him. There will be a lot of mention of this museum in the "inspiring pictures" posts.

This glass sphere was in the roof. Now, I have thought a lot about how to break up a sphere into smaller bits. You can see in my first post that I have tried to piece a sphere, but I was never happy with it. This ceiling sphere is cool because it looks like equilatoral triangles, but they sometimes have 5-fold symmetry. I could spend hours trying to figure it out...


Some day, I really want to make a wall-sized semi-sphere quilt, so that it either makes the room larger (if it looks like it is going into the wall) or smaller (if it looks like it is coming out of the wall).


For something a little bit more mundane, this is the ceiling of a ski lodge where I stayed in Switzerland. I could totally make a pattern like that. Someday I totally will.


For something more "artsy", I took this picture while sitting under an umbrella in a cafe on a sunny day. It gives an effect something like that Bushfire Sunset quilt from Birmingham. Mom - we could make something like that together - what do you think?


To bleak. This was last March in Seoul, S. Korea. There was a "yellow dust alert". It is fine sand in the air, blown over from China. My father has been in Bejing during a yellow dust storm and he said he couldn't see the other side of Tiananmen Square! I would love to capture in a quilt the repetition of the buildings and architecture and the shades of grey and beige. Obviously, not a quilt about beauty.

Since I live in Cambridge (and have a magic card that gets me into the Colleges), I must mention King's College Chapel. I spend a lot of time sitting in the Chapel, staring at the ceiling while friends and family go through the displays (which I have seen many, many times...) There are only 4 churches in the world with 3-D buttressing like this. It is truly astounding. I would love to make a quilt of this, and convey just how small you are in the face of God (I may not be religious, but there is no way you cannot feel that way when you go into a large church or cathedral).

Ok, off to do the last-minute party preparations! Then, long weekend! Hurray! So much quilting to do...

Kirsten

1 comment:

  1. I am awed by the photo of the Kings College Chapel ceiling. If it is this inspiring from a photograph, what must it be to be seen in real life... sigh...

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