Wednesday walk #2

It was a much shorter walk today. And in the sparkling winter sunshine, through the centre of town from Covent Garden to the City, it was also a more picturesque walk.  Along High Holborn, where the lawyers hang out, we saw some highly decorated buildings.

Shervington's - the famous tobacconist's in High Holborn

Entering The City at Holborn

High Victorian gothic architecture in High Holborn - the Prudential Assurance building

The Old Bailey - central criminal court

Inscription above the door of the Old Bailey: "Defend the Children of the Poor & Punish the Wrongdoer"

Then we came into The City, very close to where I used to work near St Paul's Cathedral and Cheapside.  It was really good to remind myself what a incredible place The City is to have an office. 

There has been a whole new fancy-pants shopping centre built and opened down Cheapside since I left work.  For a moment, it all felt a bit too new and different for my liking.

One New Change shopping centre

Workman painting red stars on a bollard down Cheapside

But then around another corner were old, familiar sights.  The City is the oldest part of London, and although buildings go up and buidings are pulled down, it doesn't really change.

Sir Thomas Gresham's golden grasshopper in Lombard Street

A procession down Gracechurch Street - no idea who they were, but lovely, embroidered gowns

Cranes down Bishopsgate - I do love cranes, and there are always cranes somewhere in the City

Leadenhall Market

London in the sunshine never fails to delight me.  This is my home.

Quilt progress

It's as if I am destined to make this birthday quilt in a record quick time.

On Friday a delivery van arrived with a fat parcel full of fabric for the quilt back.  All the way from California to East London in four days - amazing.  I bought the fabric from Fabricworm - who has an incredible selection of gorgeous fabrics.

This is the Village Path pattern in Saffron, from Anna Maria Horner's Folksy Flannels collection.  I especially wanted this particular fabric in this particular pattern and colour, because I knew from making O's strawberry quilt that flannel on the back of a quilt is very cosy, and the colours of Anna Maria Horner fabric are incredibly saturated and rich.  Just what I wanted, and worth ordering from California to get exactly what I wanted.

The fabric arrived just an hour and a half before I had to pick up C and O from school - just enough time for me to cut it, sew it back together the right size, and then layer and pin the whole quilt on the front room floor.

The colours in this picture above are awful - you wouldn't believe that I took this picture in front of our huge bay window at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon!

And then last night, with everything layered and pinned, I could start quilting the leaves onto the centre panel.

I've cut dozens of leaves from scrap fabrics in greens, browns, yellows, reds and oranges, and I'm attaching them by quilting their veins, through all layers of the quilt, in perle thread (thank you to Dragonfly for all her late night perle thread advice last night!).  I had a tiny bit of green perle thread in my embroidery box, so I've made a start on the green leaves.  I've ordered a whole load more thread in the other colours I need from Cotton Patch.  I draw the veins on with fade out pen, and then just stitch over the lines.  Already I prefer sewing the simpler oval shaped leaves to the more spiky maple and sycamore style leaves!

Once I've sewn on all the leaves there should be very little of the cream calico panel left showing.  I'll add some quilting to the borders and then think about binding...but I shall ponder more about that later.  For now, there's a quilt to be finished.

Lavender love

I still stir my hands through the lavender bowl whenever I walk past, and think of what designs I might use to make some lavender cushions and lavender sachets.   My fabric scrap basket is quite literally overflowing, so I might need to incorporate a solution to that as well.

I finished the three stalks of knitted lavender last night, and those are also featuring in my lavender cushion  and sachet plans.  They are knitted from Debbie Bliss baby cashmerino yarn and the pattern is from this glorious book.  The pattern is very easy and once I had it memorised and did not have to keep looking at the book, I could knit a stem in well under an hour.

Next up might be woollen snowdrops. They're not out in the garden yet, so why not knit myself some?  I also see with excitement that Lesley Stanfield has 75 birds, butterflies and beautiful beasts to knit and crochet coming out next month.  I could knit myself some worms to improve my soil quality!

Wednesday walk #1

Today was the first of what I hope will be many Wednesday Walks with Miss Moss Stitch, around London.

For our inaugural walk we picked a good, long, local yomp that incorporated:

• one of London's finest public parks
• the 2012 Olympic site
• the sewage system of East London
• the Meridian line
• one of Joseph Bazalgette's elaborate, high Victorian municipal buildings
• a dockside airport

We set off from Bethnal Green tube station at 9:30am and the first landmark we came to was Victoria Park.

Victoria Park is one of my favourite London parks, and really it is quite eclectic and delightful.  Today it was very quiet and empty, with just a few gardeners from the council trimming trees and clearing flower beds.  But on a warm sunny afternoon it is full of local people - walking dogs, running, riding bikes, reading the paper, stopping for a fag break, taking their children to the deer enclosure or the playground, sitting at one of the pubs around the edge or strolling along the canal.

We walked around the southern edge of the park to Hackney Wick, where we weaved through a few residential streets and joined the Greenway.

On a dreary winter's day, the Greenway is emphatically not a green way.

A rather grim start to the Greenway at Hackney Wick

It got us off to a very uninspiring start after the pretty landscapes of Victoria Park, but we knew that in less than a mile would be the sight we had based this whole walk around.  The new 2012 Olympic stadium at Stratford.  And when we got there, we were not disappointed.

The main Olympic stadium, Stratford, East London

The footpaths around the Olympic village are starting to be marked out

The Greenway runs right alongside the Olympic stadium

A wet information board, in front of the stadium

Cranes and diggers everywhere. The building in the centre of the picture, with the yellow grandstands, is the Aquatic Centre

Diggers, lorries and bollards outside the Olympic stadium

I took all these pictures from The View Tube - a cafe and Olympic viewing area at Pudding Mill Lane, at the western end of Stratford.  The stadium is very beautiful, but also very difficult to photograph with a little camera on such a grey day.  The inner struts of the stadium are jet black, and the outer struts and the lighting rigs are pure white - it looks dramatic, impressive and inspiring.  Everything it should do.

The Olympic Park as a whole still has the appearance of a construction site, but all the major structures are in fact complete and are now being fitted out.  The beautiful, timber-clad velodrome is my favourite building, but was sadly about the only one we couldn't spot from The View Tube.  The velodrome is on the other side of the Olympic Park, a short walking distance from our house, and it is the venue which I am most excited about using once the games are over.

After we had taken all our photos and admired all the buildings, we carried on along the Greenway towards Stratford and Plaistow.

Old Ford Lock, near Bow

We passed Old Ford Lock (former home of The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 - remember that?) and then discovered that we were crossing the Meridian Line, just a few miles north of its Greenwich home.

One foot east, one foot west

The Greenway is an elevated walkway, because it is actually built right on top of East London's sewage pipes! That sounds appalling, but for most of the time you forget - the pipes are buried deep underground, and you are too busy enjoying the contrasting views of modern Olympic buildings and beautiful old Victorian warehouses. But every now and then there are reminders of the municipal pipes under your feet.

An old sewage pipe - displayed on top of the Greenway to remind you what lies beneath

And then south of Stratford, close to West Ham station and the Jubilee Line depots, we had our strongest reminder of what we were walking over. The incredibly beautiful and impressive Abbey Mills Pumping Station, and a strong accompanying stench of sewage from the modern water works that lie alongside.

Abbey Mills Pumping Station

The Abbey Mills Pumping Station was built by Joseph Bazalgette in the 1860s as part of his practical but ambitious solution to London's grim sewage problems (I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in finding out more about this most Victorian and intriguing of civil engineering projects). Today his pumping station is a rather unloved, but nevertheless listed, building, with a modern sewage works tucked in behind it (hence the smell). I would have loved to explore the building more closely but sadly it is hidden behind three layers of metal fencing. Gill and I had to stand on tiptoe and stretch as high as we could to take our photos!

Abbey Mills Pumping Station and multiple layers of fencing

Gill, stretching high with her camera

We saw a good sculpture made from more old sewage pipes, that had been given some much needed colour with graffiti.

And then we looked over the bridge to see the Channelsea Creek and the Abbey Creek - both part of the complicated Bow Back River network - gushing past underneath us.

Bow Back Rivers

The very unlovely Channelsea Creek emerging from the bridge

I knew logically that this was river water, not sewage, but the sight of the creekside mud combined with the pungent sewage smell wafting around, still left me a little unnerved.  We picked up our pace, left the smells behind us and continued along the Greenway for a few more miles towards Plaistow and Beckton.  We passed more excellent graffiti as we walked.

Winter-themed graffiti near Newham General Hospital

We ended our walk a few miles further on, overlooking City Airport at the Royal Albert Dock in Beckton. We ate our well-earned sandwiches sitting on a bench on the north side of the dock.  As we ate, we had a fantastic view of all the aeroplanes taking off and landing at the airport across the water.  Next to the airport is the large Tate & Lyle refinery - home of the magnificent Lyle's golden syrup.

Planes at City Airport, with the Tate & Lyle refinery in the background

Twin-prop plane taking off from City Airport

And then we lolloped, really quite slowly, a few hundred yards to the Royal Albert DLR station (we even got the lift up to the elevated station!) and thence back home.

A DLR train pulling into Royal Albert station

We walked just shy of eight miles altogether (actually possibly a little over, as I confidently directed us completely the wrong way in Victoria Park), and my legs know about it this evening!

We both also know there will be more of these Wednesday walks, because there are so many great London walks out there for us to explore.  Today we made use of the excellent Walk London website, and followed all of Section 4 and part of Section 5 of the Jubilee Greenway.  The Jubilee Greenway is a long circular walk around London which is being set up over the next two years and will incorporate all the London Olympic venues and begin and end at Buckingham Palace.  It is being set up to commemorate both the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and the Olympics in 2012.  The East London Greenway existed already, and is being absorbed into the larger Jubilee Greenway over the next year or so.

This was a great start to the new year, and a great start to our Wednesday walks.  Next week we're heading to London's biggest and best map shop to stock up on inspiration, and then we'll be doing a shorter, but more glamorous walk than this week - right through the centre of London from Covent Garden to the City.

Unrealistic quilt expectations - again

I am doing it again. Making myself unrealistically ambitious promises about a quilt.

I haven't got a great track record in making quilts quickly.  The first one I made took just under five months back in 2008. This is the family quilt, which all of us share.

The second one I made was for C. It took a fairly respectable four months.

I sneaked in a quick quilt in an evening...

...but was then back on form as the simple Kaffe Fassett quilt I made for myself took eight long months.

The strawberry quilt I made for O took a shocking eighteen months.

And feeling both inspired and impressed by Florence's beautiful (and rapid) Christmas quilting, I finally got round to completing a half-embroidered label and attaching it today. A mere four months after I finished the quilt.

 

And now I've finally embarked on a quilt for G.  It is his birthday on Valentine's Day, and I've declared that I will have it finished by then.  That's just six weeks away!  What was I thinking?

Mind you, I do (kind of) believe myself this time.  I cut and pieced the basic top over two mornings last week, and today the wadding arrived in a great squishy parcel from Cotton Patch.  The backing fabric has been despatched from America, and while I wait for it to arrive I am cutting out dozens and dozens of leaves from leftover pieces of scrap fabric.

Because with only six weeks to make it, I have decided that not only will I quilt it by hand (it seems mean somehow, to give G a machine-quilted one, when everyone else has a hand-quilted one - even in the interests of speed), but I will also applique loads of leaves onto it as part of the quilting.  I know.  Madness.

I have to finish it though - I can't break a birthday promise!  So I'm ordering some films from LOVEFiLM and stocking up on podcasts.  Let's see what has happened by Valentine's Day....

Splash of colour - January

I always think of January as a clean, white month.  I love the sense of a new start and empty pages in a fresh diary...everything plain, simple and clutter-free after the green, red and gold excesses of Christmas. 

I wasn't sure how much colour I would find when I went looking for it for Silverpebble's Splash of Colour project yesterday, but it is here.  The house may be refreshingly free of decorations and holiday clutter, but there is still plenty of colour too.

My beautiful new green satchel, a Christmas present from G.  Other delicious, vibrant shades, sizes and styles can be found on the Cambridge Satchel Company website.

Strawberry and vanilla buns in bright, cheery, red paper cases, waiting for their icing.

Another Christmas present - this magnificent book.  I picked up some good, bright shades of cashmerino and organic wool yarn in the John Lewis sale, and have started by making the sprig of lavender you can see lying on the book in the picture above. 

I am a little obsessed by lavender at the moment.  When I finally made it to Oxford over Christmas, Mum gave me some of the lavender she harvested from her garden in France last year, and which she dried out over the autumn.  She had so much of it that we lost perspective somewhat.  She gave me three carrier bags full of dried stalks, which when I got it back home to London, suddenly seemed like an enormous quantity.  I stripped the stalks from just one of the three bags and have ended up with a huge bowl of lavender - so full that I can submerge my hands in it up to my wrists.  The resulting smell of lavender throughout the whole house is astonishing.  This may be adding to the general, and very welcome, sense of January calm and simplicity which is enfolding us all at the moment.