The Domestic Soundscape

Progress continues on the to-do list; I had a fruitful day of designing packaging for the sonic tuckshop at Sonic Art Oxford, and my recorder is filling up with sounds for Gentle Fire by Alvin Lucier. I will be performing Gentle Fire in the afternoon on Saturday 27th February at Oxford Brookes University in the same space where The Missability Radio Show’s knitted walking stick cosy competition was judged.

And the Sonic Tuck shop idea will be open on the evening of the Thursday just before then, and the designs on my sound-effect POPcorn bags might end up looking something like this:

I am still poring over my book of vintage firework package designs for ideas and thinking about how to represent sounds in images. My inner-knitter especially like that many old firework designs specify the use of woollen gloves as protection whilst holding certain fireworks!

I think screenprinting is the correct printing process to use for my sonic tuckshop, because it lends itself to the happy accidents of off-setting that give so much old firework packaging its psychadelic appearance.

In other news, I have been knitting and sewing. First of all I knitted this (Rav link) for Kate after reading her post from ward 31 and remembering how Bowerbirdknits made this pattern for a friend of hers who needed heart surgery. I love the pattern; it is very visceral and somehow for me evokes everything that is soft and beautiful and fragile and mortal and precious about the heart, and about friendship.

There was also lots of love in Liz’s birthday present, which I put together at the weekend from Amy Butler fabric and some oilcloth from John Lewis.

In that pocket, you’ll see red and green items. They are respectively, a heart-shaped cookie-cutter and a serviette with a fine grape print on it.

No self-respecting packed-lunch emporium would be without these essentials, no?

The bag is a really cute Simplicity pattern – Simplicity 4535 Totes and Organizers – and I enjoyed putting it together with pockets on both sides, an oilcloth lining, and enough room inside for a small flask and tupperware boxes containing tasty lunch fare.

I think I will make many more of these pleasing bags and foist them upon the people I love. In the meantime, I’m off to Oxford now to scheme about radio and teach about Music Theatre Practice.

Big love to you all, to your makings and your friendships and everything xxx

Posters at Love Is Awesome, group show, February 2009, Gallery 10, St Mary’s Butts, Reading

Last year around this time of year I was working on the Love Is Awesome show, and I made these anti-Valentine’s-day cards in celebration and recognition of my (then) very Broken Heart.

I am feeling much more positive about Love this year than I was around this point last year, but I still maintain that Love is an awesome force – much greater and darker and gutsier than the pink and red schmaltz that is in all the shop windows at this time of year. And so the Love Is Awesome anti-Valentine’s day cards – in recognition of the fact that Love Is Awesome in the true sense of the word (i.e. to inspire Awe) – are on sale again this year for the princely sum of £10 per pack including P&P. All 9 cards were designed and photographed by me, they are printed on A5 300gsm card, and they come hand-packaged in a set with one of the original screen printed Love Is Awesome tags that we used all over the show when it was open last year at Gallery 10, in Reading.

I am not selling these cards through Etsy; to buy a set for anyone you know who has a broken heart and needs cheering through February, use the Paypal button provided below.

Near me there is a bar which has, in a rather enlightened manner, opened itself up to artists of a Sunday, for trade. I have thus taken up a stall there and can be found some Sundays selling my finely-crafted wares.

On sale at my stall shall be…

Vintage buttons organised into sets and hand-sewn onto little labels, which I have printed myself with a pleasing button design. These sell for between £2 and 3 per card.

Love is Awesome posters… these are £10 each and still retain the original holes from where they were nailed to the wall of Gallery 10 during the exhibition back in February.

Button Badges from The Missability Radio Show and Magic Hour will be on sale for 50p each or a set of 3 for 1 of your fyne Englishe Pounds.

Original Screenprints from The Missability Radio Show, with prices varying from £1 for damaged prints to £25 for perfect-quality, 4-colour designs.

Here I am making the posters in 2007…

…and here are the posters once finished.

I will also have loads of freebies to give away including postcards and balloons, and can be commissioned to design you your own custom-made Love Assignment if you so desire. The Love Assignment will be hand-written and personalised to your life requirements, and created on the forms I screenprinted for my own Love Assignments during the exhibition, Love is Awesome.

Your Love Assignment will be a tailor-made task or creative activity, designed to either improve a specific aspect of your life, or expand your imaginative relationship with everyday reality. It can exist as a speculative document or an instruction that you choose to follow; you can take it literally and create a full assignment report for yourself if you desire, or frame the assignment on your wall, where it will be a daily reminder of the meaning of everyday actions and situations. To have me design you your personalised Love Assignment, you must bring a specific problem or question and modest expectations. Personalised Love Assignments will cost £10 and include an initial consultation + a small waiting time while I create the perfect assignment for you. By way of professional credentials for offering this small creative service, I can only attest to the fact that I have successfully completed 13 Love Assignments myself. Due to the nature of the product I cannot, sadly, offer any form of guarantee that the assignment will either bring about imaginative change in your life or improve your experience of being a human being on the Earth. I can, however, promise to give your questions/problems my most sincere and attentive consideration in the creation of your tailor-made Love Assignment.

I shall also be selling sets of the anti-Valentine’s day cards I created as one of my own Love Assignments for Love is Awesome; the assignment was ‘celebrate the broken heart on Valentine’s day in whatever way you feel’ or something similar and it was a tonic to my (then shattered, gladly now mended) heart. These sets of cards cost £8 for all 9 cards or £1 for an individual card.

There shall also be some handmade, handprinted CDs featuring images of sheep, tea and cakes, and many small radio features and sound pieces from my increasingly extensive collection of audio files. These retail at £4 each, but I am happy to swap them for CDs belonging to other artists who enjoy a DIY approach to packaging their music and creating their own audio.

I believe Liz is planning on joining me this coming Sunday; if you would like to come too, the Oakford Social Club can be found almost directly opposite the train station and I shall be trading – along with many other fine Reading artists – from noon onwards.

I hope to see you there!

The mics-on light in the BBC Oxford Studio

Today has been a productive day. It began with editing my feature and packing up my Art Object for an hour of recording at the BBC Oxford studios. On Sunday at 9 – 10pm, on 95.2fm in Oxford or anywhere online live, you will be able to hear the episode of The Hub that got recorded today. Helen who is also on The Hub team recorded an amazing review of a Chango Spasiuk gig, which led to much discussion on just how underappreciated and incredible The Accordion is. This pleased me no end and felt like another gentle push in the direction of my sorely neglected instrument. It also sounds very much as though Chango Spasiuk gigs are not to be missed; he has come out of Helen’s review as something of a legend, fully drawing out the latent passions and intensities of the Accordion in his performance.

Last week on The Hub, the Sticks’n'Strings knitters talked about the knitted headphones, which were playing my piece about an accordion – BOY – during Love is Awesome. I have attached both the feature and BOY at the bottom of this page. You’ll have to wait until Sunday to hear Helen’s accordion focussed feature and I’d recommend catching the whole show on the BBC website, because everyone bought really great features and ideas to the studio. I loved the process of recording live although I was much more nervous than usual without a script.

Not knowing how long the recording would take, I had put loads more money than necessary on my pay and display for parking and I came out of the BBC studio feeling rather like I didn’t want to waste an hour and a half of prime parking time. At least this is my incredibly flimsy excuse for spontaneously deciding that what I needed to do next was go into one of those paint-your-own-pottery places and make myself a sonic breakfast plate.

I don’t know why. I just wanted to do that and I decided to run with it. I am in an experimental phase, newly fragile and still prone to tears so anything that offers uncomplicated Joy is immediately undertaken.

I had so much fun drawing my favourite breakfast items and writing their sound effects around them. Next week I am going to take it into the studio with me as the Art Object.

…this is pre-firing so it all looks a bit pastel… let’s pray those joyous breakfast colours come shining through when it gets fired so that I can enjoy many a sonic breakfast upon its glazed surface.

I came home to discover that the radio show I was meant to make for Resonance FM’s framework – also to air on Sunday evening in London, on 104.4fm at 10pm – was due not on 8th of March as I had decided privately to myself, but on the 1st. So I got to it with putting that together pretty skippy, hence the all-nighter I appear to have pulled. (It is now 05:10am and I have had too much tea to go straight to bed.)

Collating the amazing recordings of Greg Wagstaff (ALL sheep/yarn-lovers need this recording!!! and if you are a sound-recordist who doesn’t care so much for it, yet you own a copy, please, please, please can you send it to me? I will love you forever and ever…) plus some sheep I found on Freesound and of course digging through my own comprehensive archives of sheep-related audio was more than my knitting nerve could take, and so on the second listen through to the show I appear to have finished the second Headigan that I cast on at Sticks’n'String only on Tuesday.

This is knit in the leftover balls of yarn from mine and Emmylou’s Hourglass Sweaters, which we worked on during Love is Awesome.

In the pottery shop where I glazed a plate I found some buttons that I think might be just perfect. You see Headigan is all about the buttons.

I am not sure exactly on these buttons though, as one of the highlights of making Headigan is the button-shopping expedition I have planned with Emmylou to Rachael’s lovely shop. The idea is to infuse our matching Headigans with as much Love is Awesome energy as can feasibly be summoned from the cosmos.

I am relieved the show has come down, but sad too. It was a very imaginative temporary space and I miss the pies from Sweeneys, the long chats with Emmylou and the repetitive soundscape with which the building was infused. I especially miss the geese that were playing through the knitted speakers in the very avian stairwell, and the way that their melodic cries would punctuate time at intervals as we sat there knitting and talking and trying to keep warm.

My head is whirling with all things knitting and sound related, and to top off my productive day, we launched a new project on the sound diaries website today that looks at the relationship between surface, texture and sound. If that isn’t a great creative workspace for a knitter who can’t stop recording things, then I don’t know what is.

Now I can sleep.

 

 Art Object featuring Sticks'n'String: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 BOY: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 noisy geese... how I miss thee!: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the assignments I set myself to undertake during Love is Awesome, was the recreation of the transistor radio detailed in the 1972 Ladybird book, ‘Making a Transistor Radio.’

I am not the first person to have thought of this and I am poorly versed in the complexities of circuitry. But the clear diagrams and the fact that the book was designed for children made the concept accessible to me in some way.

Of all the assignments this is the one designed to stretch my abilities the most as it involves grappling with elements of physics and sound that I struggle to comprehend. As with letterpress or other manual tasks which involve a lot of physical building and making, I am attracted to the physicality of the radio making procedure detailed in the 1972 Ladybird book. The circuit is created using copper wire and screws on a softwood base, rather than by soldering components onto a breadboard. The comparitive impermanence of the screws and wood arrangement means that my fallible approach and inevitable mistakes will not result in expensive electrical components being forever soldered into uselessness, and the step-by-step guidance involving screwing everything down stage by stage will hopefully result in a lot of learning with both hands and mind.

The biggest headache so far has been tracking down the same components that are specified in the Ladybird book. The ‘local radio dealer’ so blithely cited throughout the book is clearly an institution of the past and every strangely termed resistor, transistor or variable capacitor that I can’t find in the Maplins catalogue has sent me running to Google. I have discovered a secret and exciting underground network of vintage radio enthusiasts, for sure. But no ‘local radio dealer.’

Many mail-order components…

My approach to building the radio has been very literal; I have read and re-read each page, double checked everything against its circuit diagram and then returned to the beautiful illustrations to validate and double-check my component placement. I therefore present my photographs of the procedure so far in a step-by-step format, with the book illustrations first, followed by the photographs of my cack-handed immitations.

Let us begin with the extremely basic circuit-tester. This is an arrangement of battery, bulb and wire, and it is used to check whether or not current is flowing correctly through a circuit. Touching the ends of the wires onto either side of a connection in the circuit, the buld either lights up, (good) or stays dim (bad.) I was foolishly happy when the bulb lit up.

Now let us move on to less pedestrian activities. As per the book, I marked out a piece of wood with the correct points on it.

And then, because someone in the gallery was listening to the sound installations, I did not immediately pre-drill for the screws; instead, I concentrate my energies on the frustrating task of building my aerial using a piece of ferrite and some enamelled copper wire. I am confused as to whether or not I was meant to use a 6″ piece of rod and then snap it in half and tape it back together? This certainly looks like what they have done in the book, but I do not understand why the snapping in half is necessary. In any case, my ferrite rod came from a Maplins crystal radio kit and is only about 3″ long… this is what I did with it.

I confess to finding the task of winding that fiddly copper wire around the ferrite exactly 45 times extremely trying; perhaps on the same level of irritation/technicality as seaming up garments that were knit on the bias, whilst wearing motorcycle gloves.

Finally it was time to start placing things on the softwood base.

Once the first, most basic circuit was made, there wasn’t a lot to be heard through the earpiece. BUT, I didn’t really put a lot of any effort into sorting out the aerial and the earth wires required to get a signal. As I understand it, the aerial and the earth for this stage of the radio are crucial for getting any kind of signal. Having failed to do this, I contented myself instead with moving impatiently onto the next stage and adding in the first transistor.

There is much to do to complete the Transistor Radio, but I am very happy with how this project is shaping up so far and I am indeed understanding the physics a little better for my creative investment in radio building.

I have made a short video of Love is Awesome.

The video is just still shots, set to recordings I made inside the gallery space and you can see it on Youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C5j3Opb5xQ

Focussing on The Domestic Soundscape means that I am faced with an endless, ongoing, repetitive, banal, ordinarily ignored and totally undervalued raw material with which to work. We awaken to the domestic soundscape, we fall asleep to the domestic soundscape, we are surrounded at each moment of domestic activity by a set of sounds that is so familiar as to be almost totally background for each of us. In my PhD studies I am really interested in reevaluating the unconscious relationship that we have with our immediate environment, and in reviving the ideas of John Cage which were focussed a lot around actively listening and imaginatively engaging with what we hear all the time. There is something intentionally redemptive about what I am trying to do in drawing our attention to what we almost all universally ignore. I think The Domestic Soundscape is potentially a very rich imaginative resource, but in its unedited form – just existing around us all the time as it does – it is too big, too vast, too commonplace, to take in in its entirety. The Domestic Soundscape simply is and will be, whether or not anyone makes a decision to document it. But for years photographers have celebrated the is-ness of the world by documenting it in snapshot formation and other photographic processes, so it is possible for things that simply Are to be recontextualised as Art and I am interested in how that works.

Key to the success of any photographer is the methodology that they evolve around what they will or won’t photograph, how they will take their photos, what subject matter they will choose to focus on and so on. In a similar way I see my challenge in presenting The Domestic Soundscape to audiences to be a challenge that revolves around editing, format and methodology.

Love is Awesome is an opportunity to evaluate my methodologies and approaches. My main strategy for drawing attention to the value of everyday sounds is to build a context around how we experience sounds. Once you have heard a sound in a certain way, within a certain context and according to a specific imaginative framework, that sound is altered forever in your mind. On this principal, I am exploring many ways to recontextualise or shift our perception of sounds.

My favourite piece in Love is Awesome has increasingly become the piece that I made after reading about the assignment ‘Record the sound that is keeping you awake‘ on Harroll Fletcher and Miranda July’s website, Learning to love you more.

After moving house recently, I was struck by the role that sound plays in defining our familiar – or unfaimilar – territory. My new flat smells different, it looks different, everything is in a different place and everything feels different. But perhaps most striking to me is the massively different sonic life of the new place, and its unsettling and unfamiliar quality. During my first few days of relocating, I recorded the appliances, faucets, boilers, plugs and switches inside – and the very busy road outside – in order to try and familiarise myself with a totally alien soundscape. I still find the sonic qualities of this place unsettling.

All fridges, all sinks, all cupboards, all doors, all mattresses, all showerheads and all computers do not sound the same. All rooms do not resonate in the same way. All roads do not provide the same sonic backdrop as each other… sound is deeply specific and intimate and this place sounds wrong.

Most irksome to me in the new place initially was the sound of an endlessly running faucet in the bathroom. This dribbling tap is the result of a mystifying water-pipe system. For some reason the turning on of the hot tap in the bathroom causes great gushes of hot water to come out of the kitchen tap, whilst nothing comes out of the bathroom tap at all, and the cold tap in the bathroom quietly dribbles a vast quantity of water away each day, since it is an old and weakened faucet. I have gotten onto the Estate Agents about this, but until they can organise a man to come and fix it, I have to listen to the constant drizzle of this wasted water.

I therefore recorded the sound of the dripping tap in my execution of the LTLYM assignment. But the question of how to present it to an audience perturbed me until I made the decision to sequester some pillow speakers and a CD player containing my recording, into a pillowcase printed with faucets. I wanted to recreate the sense of nocturnal, audible experiences and to invite that same moment of being in bed with ones’ head on a pillow, listening to a sound that is just a bit too loud to ignore.

Because of this style of presentation, you can lean your head against the pillow and listen to the sound of the drizzling tap. Oddly enough in this context, the sound becomes hypnotic and soothing. In the description for the pillow speakers it is said that ‘Sufferers of tinnitus have also found relief using a pillow speaker connected to a radio tuned off station,’ and the sound reproduction qualitites of the pillow speakers do somehow convert the drizzling tap sound into a sort of calming white noise.

As with the siren sound that I was hunting for so long, I have discovered that specifically seeking out and examining a sound for any amount of time completely changes the way the sound is subsequently heard or considered. I love the sound of my dripping tap now and would like to use the pillowcase myself once the exhibition is taken down, to remind me of this whole narrative.

Thus the sound of the dripping tap is now transformed for me as part of an imaginative adventure undertaken in my very own home. I bet if you have a dripping tap somewhere in your house you are thinking about that too now…

Another sound activity I have been undertaking for some time now, is the SOUNDBANK project that I started back in October. I especially printed a Valentines’ Day themed set of SOUNDBANK cards for inclusion in Love is Awesome, as I was curious to see how visitors to the show would respond to them.

In truth I think that the screen-printed glassine envelopes, letter-press printed record cards therein and open-plan style of presentation (biro, record cards, pin-board containing prior submissions to the SOUNDBANK) do not – as a collection of things – adequately convey the meaning or purpose of the SOUNDBANK. I think it would benefit greatly from some clearer signposting.

…Either that or I need to broaden my views on what sounds the SOUNDBANK is intended to house! During the exhibition a treatise on despair has been submitted to the SOUNDBANK, along with an Aphex Twin Tune, and Bjork’s I Miss You. One gallery goer did, however, create a very interesting graphic score using the notation line on the record card and representing somehow ‘the joys of this exhibition.’ I will have fun trying to work out how to play it on my flute.

Something about the design of the SOUNDBANK record cards deters people from submitting sounds. It could be that describing ordinary sounds in detail is so alien (or just boring) for most people that they would not even know where to begin with it, as a process. Or it could be that I need to present a clear explanation of the project in order to invite contributions.

In either instance showcasing SOUNDBANK in Gallery 10 has been invaluable to me in terms of helping me to determine the relative accessibility or value – to an audience – of that work.

 

 The sound that keeps me awake: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A few visitors to Love is Awesome have quizzed me on the reasoning behind the assignment format. I have thought about this quite a lot during the past week and am forming a few ideas about my decisions.

I suppose I want to present a lot of ideas in ways that convey both the meanings that can be ascribed to small gestures and activities, and the sense that such activities may be reproduced by anyone. I want to make work that could be adopted by any person and used like a recipe or a knitting pattern, almost to provide an empowering stimulus for artistic activity. I am interested in conveying the idea that anyone else could go out and utilise the format of a specific assignment as the basis for doing something creative or meaningful, and that in this way, some kind of ideas-exchange or dialogue may take place as the assignments are taken on and adapted and changed and altered in the world, by other people. Even if none of that stuff happens, I want to make work that is always suggestive of this trend.

I think that a very exciting exchange takes place when the audience participates in the work, but the terms of this participation are always very varied. In terms of assignments and participation, the main kind of response that I am encouraging is one of imitation. To draw something is to try and copy it, and to try and copy it, is to try and figure it out. This copying and rendering of things is (potentially) a more involved, experiential way of making sense of the world than merely digesting someone else’s efforts at the same task. Now not everyone wants to draw, but many activities can reproduce things in a process akin to the inquisitive process of drawing, and the assignment format is perfectly suited to this idea. Like a bowl of fruit that people draw, an assignment is a thing that can be copied in a personal search for meaning and experience. The difference is that for the assignments I am not using oil pastel; the assignments are derived from the material of daily life. A day I spent in London provided the basis for my flier. Personal experiences of using mobility aids generated the brief for the knitted walking stick cosy competition that I set up in 2007. The memoryphones explore the material that is memory and mixtapes. Finding beauty in the city is an exercise developed through my own experiences of walking, and my willingness to participate in Anna Francis’ web-based project… and so on. So some of the assignments are my own, some are assignments that I found in the world – and which you can find too – and decided to undertake.

In the same way that someone might make a sketch of something that they enjoy seeing (which will undoubtedly deepen their relationship with said thing) someone who has seen Love is Awesome could potentially now go away and knit a walking stick cosy or start writing down sounds they find interesting, or remember a mixtape they have loved or make a flier of their day. I am very interested in that; in who might invent an assignment after seeing this show or feel compelled to reconsider the meaning of something they have already done, and in how other peoples’ interpretations of the tasks or assignments could change the way I see them. So those are some of the ideas I have concerning assignments and the artist/audience relationship.

Additionally, the assignment format reflects my own uncertain and studious position in relation to the ideas I am exploring in my PhD and – I hope – presents ideas in an open way that invites debate and input rather than in a manner that suggests I am making some sort of final statement about anything. I think it is important to openly fail, to make mistakes, to try things out, to demonstrate a fallible and curious stance and to therefore create a permissive, imaginative environment.

Principally in setting up the work as I have done for Love is Awesome, I am presenting the work as a kind of study of life and sounds. The 13 assignments each explore the meanings of everyday actions and things and ideas and sounds, and collectively represent a complex set of ideas to do with participation, exchange, recording and creativity. I wanted the humble manilla folders with their lovely screenprinted designs to convey simultaneously an air of care and attention to detail, and also study or unfinished work. In the same spirit of continuous study, some of the assignments are being completed during the course of the exhibition.

From observing visitors’ responses to my assignment folders I feel that in some ways the closed envelope style of them deters the less confident gallery goer from digging around and reading my ‘reports’ on each assignment, thus somewhat negating my intentions. This is why it is so essential to present work in a gallery space, and to get feedback on that work and to test out ideas. I am forever learning that what makes sense in my head doesn’t translate in real life! So I think the manilla folders have not been such a success. Although many people do open the assignments and read the contents, I think a more open presentation style would have made the assignment idea accessible to those people who are afraid of getting it ‘wrong’ in a gallery situation and opening or touching something they are ‘not allowed’ to touch.

So that is some of what I have been thinking about assignments.

Good assignment sites and resources:

Learning to love you more – Miranda July and Harroll Fletcher

There is beauty in the city – Anna Francis

The Artist’s survival kit – Kerri Smith

101 Experiments in the philosophy of everyday life – Roger Pol Droit (book)

Mundane Appreciation – Claudia Figueiredo & Kayla Bell

Usually – at least according to Monkl – there are not enough bananas in modern Art shows. So when Monkl came to Love is Awesome, he took a banana along with him and put it there. Then he knew it was going to be a good show.

Monkl loves his knitted banana: to his mind it is my finest work to date.

Monkl liked Stav’s video piece especially the middle character who goes around telling everyone to spread the love and hugging them. I think Monkl was excited to see Stavroula on the television as he kept asking me later if she is famous and a movie-star like Audrey Hepburn. I don’t know how he knows about Audrey Hepburn, but somehow, he does.

Monkl wanted a spread the love t-shirt but they are all too big for him. I may have to make him one in Monkl size, using stranded knitting. Do you think it’s possible?

Monkl paid his respects to the Love is Awesome prints by climbing on them. He only climbs on his very favourite Art. Monkl likes the prints with the toasts very much but thought the whole display could be enhanced by a little knitted peel…

Monkl was a bit scared of the idea that there were monsters at Love is Awesome and he made them biscuits so they wouldn’t be hungry and eat him. He put banana flavour in the icing because we didn’t have any yellow. Monkl thinks red and blue food colouring are rubbish.

He does like using the monkey-shaped cookie-cutter though.

Monkl approached the monsters with great caution and timidity.

But he soon relaxed when he realised that Emmylou’s monsters are very friendly to monkeys.

I think they reached an amazing, interspecies understanding.

They liked the biscuits he made them.

Monkl got bored listening to the memoryphones. I think it was a bit long for his attention span.

Maybe that is why he started swinging from the second pair of knitted headphones…

Monkl especially liked using the rubber stamp station, but he did need a hand with using the printing blocks, to get a good impression.

He liked the bird stamp because he enjoyed the birds in our stairwell so much. Here he is climbing on the knitted speakers, (from which bird recordings emanate…) contemplating Emmylou’s bird print, and looking deeply into the crocheted Kingfisher and Budgie pieces made by Rachael.

After all the birdy action Monkl decided to take a nap on the pillowcase stuffed with The Sound That Keeps Me Awake At Night. It is the sound of the tap in my new place, which won’t stop running. It actually doesn’t keep me awake at night, but I am constantly aware of it as I lie in bed trying to get to sleep. The sound doesn’t seem to bother Monkl so much…

Monkl was curious to find that when he kissed Emmylou’s frog, it didn’t instantly turn into a Prince. I consoled him with the idea that perhaps it only works with desparate princesses?

Looking around Rachael’s Relics of an Awesome Picnic, Monkl was initially quite afraid of the skull, and he hid behind the giant glove in order to escape its menacing gaze.

…but then he got a look at the knitted sandwich and was overcome with the desire to nibble on it.

I had to tell him off a bit for biting The Art.

So then, in a slightly apologetic and chastened mood, Monkl decided that actually he thought the skull was a bit sad. He went to comfort it.

Finally, Monkl decided to write a little banana song and record the sound of a banana being peeled, for the Sound Bank project.

Monkl finished up his trip to Love is Awesome by looking at SAY YES for a little while. He asked me what to SAY YES to and I explained that the encouraging banner is about saying yes to what we most deeply dream and wish for in our lives, and not being afraid to chase those things. I think he understood, but it may have been a little deep for him as right away he fell asleep into a happy little Monkl doze.

I asked him what he thought of the show afterwards and he said ‘it was OK, but there could have been more bananas.’

Ages ago I got this kind of woollen smock from Primark. At the time I marvelled that something that was 80% pure lambswool could cost so little, since there is no way the yarn to knit such a thing could have been bought for a comparable price. It was about £10. I have loved the smock, but the smock is so infinitely wearable that it got filthy, paint-splattered and ripped very quickly. Although this sounds brutal, for me this kind of treatment is only reserved for the most beloved of garments. A quick trip to the washing machine promptly felted it.

And since that point it has sat in my mending basket. Today I took it into the gallery with me and mended it. I know, you must all be thinking that me and Emmylou are just spending the whole week making clothes in Love is Awesome. And you’re right. But there is a lot of love bound up in the mending and creation of clothes. And it is freezing in the gallery so working with yarny items keeps us both occupied and warm.

I decided to make a design feature of the paint-splashes, and used them as the basis or blueprint for some freestyle embroidery. Here is a paint-stain before and after my interventions:

Then I cut the shrunken armholes to the correct size for my arms and blanket stitched then back-stitched the newly widened holes and continued to cover up the paint-stains with little blobs of lovely green yarn. I also sewed up the giant rip that went right across the back.

And here I am in the gallery, posing in the ammended and now once again useful garment.

To sustain ourselves through this day of sub-zero temperatures and mending work (Emmylou is working on her Hourglass sweater) we ate pies from Sweeneys. They make the best pies in Reading. You must come to Reading and have pies with us.

Mmmmmm…. pies.

I promise to write more about the domestic soundscape and indeed the show itself soon. At the moment I am too busy eating pies and skipping about in my nice new smock.