A busy week
Coming to the end of a remarkably busy week now, so I finally have time to post something. The g-d has finally got her flat in Greenwich sorted out (an ex-council one, by the river, it sounds very nice), and moved out this evening. I shall miss her, for watching Heroes and sharing diet tips, she'll be back from time to time, and on the plus side, I'll now have my workspace back. Tomorrow I plan to stay at home and rest my hip and shuffle stuff around between bedrooms.
Her younger sister turned up on Monday, staying over after seeing a favourite poet in Covent Garden. She's very much the younger sister. She skateboards, wears a sideways baseball cap, loves hiphop and is very loud indeed, but is somehow so devastatingly charming and wildly enthusiastic about absolutely everything that none of this matters.
Yesterday, I went to the V&A with her middle sister, who is studying fashion, bought her a birthday lunch and made a flying visit to the couture exhibition with her. Since she had to keep stopping to sketch things and I had to keep sitting down, we mad a good exhibition team. The show is very good indeed, but was completely packed, with several two- or three-generation sets of women all cooing and coveting happily away. We also kept running into one really scary woman who spent the whole show savagely telling off the young (13-14ish) girl with her, who had apparently and quite understandably run off into the museum and had to be retrieved by a member of staff. The kid may have been annoying, but the mother(?)/aunt(?) was a nightmare, like the wicked guardian from a Victorian novel. Hana swears she heard her say "remember Daisy, if you don't like the school you're at now, I can send you to one that's much worse".
I'll have to go again at least once, to get a really good look at the first section, which was full of reconstructed workshops and details of the "fairy fingers" who did the exquisite embroidery and actual dress-making. No photographs allowed, but there are some nice pictures on the museum website.
I was especially interested in this part, because I'd been enchanted by a film on BBC4 on Saturday night. Brodeuses is a quiet, slow, beautiful film, about a pregnant teenage girl with a passion for embroidery, who takes a job with a woman who embroiders for one of the big couture houses. The scenes where they embroidered a huge net panel with beads and sequins were so engrossing that I ordered a pair of tambour hooks for myself, with every good intention of teaching myself the technique. We will see. The film was followed by an episode from last year's documentary series The House of Chanel, but only one episode, alas.
Her younger sister turned up on Monday, staying over after seeing a favourite poet in Covent Garden. She's very much the younger sister. She skateboards, wears a sideways baseball cap, loves hiphop and is very loud indeed, but is somehow so devastatingly charming and wildly enthusiastic about absolutely everything that none of this matters.
Yesterday, I went to the V&A with her middle sister, who is studying fashion, bought her a birthday lunch and made a flying visit to the couture exhibition with her. Since she had to keep stopping to sketch things and I had to keep sitting down, we mad a good exhibition team. The show is very good indeed, but was completely packed, with several two- or three-generation sets of women all cooing and coveting happily away. We also kept running into one really scary woman who spent the whole show savagely telling off the young (13-14ish) girl with her, who had apparently and quite understandably run off into the museum and had to be retrieved by a member of staff. The kid may have been annoying, but the mother(?)/aunt(?) was a nightmare, like the wicked guardian from a Victorian novel. Hana swears she heard her say "remember Daisy, if you don't like the school you're at now, I can send you to one that's much worse".
I'll have to go again at least once, to get a really good look at the first section, which was full of reconstructed workshops and details of the "fairy fingers" who did the exquisite embroidery and actual dress-making. No photographs allowed, but there are some nice pictures on the museum website.
I was especially interested in this part, because I'd been enchanted by a film on BBC4 on Saturday night. Brodeuses is a quiet, slow, beautiful film, about a pregnant teenage girl with a passion for embroidery, who takes a job with a woman who embroiders for one of the big couture houses. The scenes where they embroidered a huge net panel with beads and sequins were so engrossing that I ordered a pair of tambour hooks for myself, with every good intention of teaching myself the technique. We will see. The film was followed by an episode from last year's documentary series The House of Chanel, but only one episode, alas.