New arrivals!

 Yesterday we heard some bleating in the barn in the afternoon and found Csibi had given birth to her first kid - the white one in the picture above. Sometime later the second, beige-coloured one arrived. Csibi is being a totally amazing first-time mother, licking them and even letting the first one feed while the second one was being born. After trying to suck her hair, legs, the wall, and more, they finally latched on with a little bit of help.

This morning, one of the sheep had a lamb up in the top field. It was standing as The Fabulous K got there and already feeding, but not out too long. Unfortunately, this sheep is our least tame ewe - the rest will eat out of your hand, but there was a bit of kerfuffle getting her into the maternity ward (AKA the stable) as she is so flighty.

The other sheep got penned in during the ruckus.

Two down and two more ewes to go. The first ram they were with seems to have only impregnated one of our ewes, so we are looking at a bit of a gap now until the next two lamb.

 But the stable is filled with tiny new lives! Amazing!!!

Thankfully everything went well and there was no intervention needed from us. We picked these sheep in particular partially for their wool and partially because they are hardy and rarely need help lambing, which was a relief as we are on a learning curve with this, involving plenty of book reading and internet consultation.

Yay for the sheep and the goat! Awesome mothering from them and awesome impregnation from Chuck the Buck and Umber the ram!

Thanks to my sister for the photos!

Pinwheel quilting and geek sewing

 Normal activities were postponed for a short time as some therapeutic sewing was in order this week. For some reason I decided I'd like to know how to make a pinwheel quilt and decided to make a cushion cover for a rather grotty orange velvet cushion that has been knocking about since I made it 10 years ago or so... (Orange velvet has its places, but my home is no longer one of them.)

I used this great tutorial on how to make pinwheel squares and recycled a linen skirt (of roughly the same age as the orange velvet cushion cover) and some other recycled fabrics to make it.

In the process I re/learned a few things: 

1. Piecing a quilt together is SLOW!!!

2. Accuracy is key. (This is why I am not a quilter.)

3. Linen is very hard to quilt with. (It's not that I'm a messy and sub-accurate quilter, I'm blaming the linen on this one.)

 

I quilted it in the ditch (that means doing your quilting along your seam lines rather than sewing while sitting in mud) which just seemed easier and quicker than other ways of quilting it.

I'm not totally sure about this one. I made it more for the practice and learning, and it has definitely improved the look of the cushion by about a billion-fold, but I think it is still growing on me.

What excited me more to be honest was doing the other side. I decided that sashiko embroidery would be perfect for drawing a map for those who are lost in the Milky Way and trying to find their way back to planet Earth. 

 It is hard to catch on camera because of the colours, but it is based on the map on the golden record that NASA sent into space with the Voyager spaceship. It shows the location of our solar system in respect to 14 pulsars, which is essentially a map to home, which is what cushions are all about - home.

(More info on the map here in case you are interested. I had a book on the Voyager spaceship as a child and loved the idea that we had sent this amazing record of sounds of planet Earth out into space with instructions how to find us - a map even! And it is still out there, floating around the cosmos!)

So it seemed an apt thing to embroider on the cushion - a map to home. And somehow it is more meaningful to me than the other side! 

 Maybe that is the problem with the other side - it doesn't mean much to me. It looks nice, but that doesn't seem enough somehow.

On the subject of filling textiles with meaning, my dear friend Felix is running a kickstarter campaign for her amazing knitting book at the moment. Check it out here. Felix is also doing a blog tour and will be coming this way later in the month so keep checking in!

Three sounds, three volumes

I had to make a lot of extra cards for my own piece in the Hunter's Moon Score Trail.

People chose to interpret it in different ways, some using my framework and some using their own. There are some examples below.

The whole project made me think of how I look at things and how composers look at things and what the differences are. It made me realise that I look at graphic scores from more of a visual standpoint and composers read them totally differently - as a code for making sound primarily. It was interesting to see how many members of the public used my cards to make a score whose primary focus seemed to be the visual. It was obvious some really thought about sound and thought about representing that sound with this frawework I had supplied. And some made an interesting image which also happened to be a score!

It is hard to break away from your primary discipline but it was a great exercise in trying!

Hunter's Moon Art Trail 2013

This was the last year of the festival - at least in its present form, so we had to party extra hard this year. (Or at least as extra-hard as it gets with a toddler in tow...)

Some pictures from the Art Trail below...

Above is Sam Salem's meditative video installation which had two different screens showing footage taken in a Roscommon forest. Slow-motion views of the wind moving through the branches and typically Irish dramatic light changes went with a gentle and evocative sound piece.

Stephen Rennicks had a whole booth with information about his intriguing and humourous alternative guide to County Leitrim, where fact mixed with fiction to leave you wondering what was real and what was fantasy. 

Striking black and white drawings from Alan Doyle.

Above are Cian O'Neill's delicate and detailed drawings using microscopic images of plants as source material. (Hard to photograph the amazing detail!)

Ciaran Og Arnold had a series of black and white photographs of Ballinasloe during the night. They had that beautiful rich image quality that only comes with analogue photography.

Cormac O'Leary had a series of paintings called the Halloween Mummers - dark works of people dressed in strange costumes.

Gavin Porter had a series of detailed and well-crafted etchings.

McLoughlinPhelan had a video piece with some beautiful imagery and interesting sound recordings.

Above are Katie O'Neill's nature-inspired prints.

Roisin McNamee had an interesting piece involving knotted cotton cord and electronic components.

 

I spent some nice moments sitting on a cosy couch listening to Natalia Beylis's daily field recording diary.

Its hard to believe that was the last year of such an amazing festival. It was great to see so many amazing performers and artists converge on our tiny town. I'll miss it!