Back To The UK

Home again after not only a calm and uneventful flight but also an easy and uninterrupted drive around the normally appalling M25! Unfortunately, we arrived back in time for the annual Brighton "Gay Pride" event, which we always aim to avoid as the town is just too busy and too noisy for that weekend. (I also have a grumbling thing about "I remember in 1985, being spat at by striking miners...", memories of when Pride rallies were fiery, political events, not loud, drunken excuses for 'camping it up'! Just ignore me, like when your grandad goes on about the war.)

Anyway, the upshot of that was that we decided to head off to Essex for the weekend, taking full advantage of the wonderful warm weather. A quick trip to the internet and we had booked our accommodation and set off on a not-so-amenable M25. I really loathe that road. It just blocks up all the time, unless you are travelling in the early morning or late at night. When we finally arrived, we decided to look at the church at Fingringhoe - yes, that is a real place-name - which is a quite lovely little Norman church:

And which contained some dubiously earnest "crafts" for us to enjoy...

We had lunch in the churchyard and it was so warm I fell asleep!

Dingo cannot be trusted with my camera. Whenever I leave it with him, I come back to find odd photographs on it, such as this one.

Essex is really the home of what is known pejoratively as the "little-Englanders", the politically conservative, probably racist but definitely xenophobic, homophobic and strangely anti-government types who vote for idiots like our current Prime Minister, David Cameron: the sort of people to whom Cameron is appealing with his censorship of the internet in the UK. I didn't much like our next stop on the trip - Maldon...

There is something so very "Daily Mail" about this! (I did like Stephen Fry's observation last week that the Daily Mail "still can’t quite live with the shame that it has always, always been historically wrong about everything - large and small - from Picasso to equal pay for women" and let us not forget their championing of Hitler...)

Maldon is a very pretty town with a waterfront on the Thames estuary. It is also very, very dull. It has a boring church with incredibly rude people working in it, some pubs and a horribly crowded waterfront. The only thing which stood out was the great cafe we found in which we ate an excellent breakfast.

The following week was back in Brighton, preparing for the sad journey - the M25 again - home to glasgow.

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Back in the workshop again where I found that the painters were in and painting. I got them to leave all the furniture out so that I could re-order the workshops which felt like a mistake when it looked like this:

I used the time while they were painting to organise my gemstone collection. I was quite surprised to realise how many stones I have bought over the years but not until now have I bothered to catalogue them in any way. The decision to do this came before the holiday when I made the surprise discovery of a box of tourmaline crystals in my safe:

I honestly don't remember buying these and have no idea where they came from. I know that they are mine as there was a label on the bottom with my name and the price of each crystal on it!

It is good to be able to say that this won't happen again as I've now boxed and catalogued every stone I own.

I also took the opportunity to catalogue all the amazing objects people have made for me, such as Lisa Stevens' ceramic elements;

Dee Wilder's polymer clay skulls;

and Lucie Veilleux's wooden gemstones;

By the time I had finished, it was time to go back to the workshop and tidy it, ready for action tomorrow morning:

Boston and Home

It has to be said that this is the longest it has ever taken me to bring my blog up-to-date. It is amazing how much I was hampered by not being able to reliably edit photographs and upload them due to the terrible internet connectivity we had in Pittsburgh. I was working on it very piecemeal and lost momentum.

After leaving Pittsburgh, we landed in Boston and had a three-day break there. Neither Dingo nor I really took to Boston and I have to say that we felt very out-of-place there... a real shock considering the warmth we had felt in New York, Pittsburgh and Touchstone. We just didn't quite fit in with what I viewed as a very "preppy" and very divided city... perhaps I am wrong and this is the jet-lag talking! I am happy to be persuaded otherwise.

The main things of interest we found in Boston were the amazing glass flowers in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the sort of antiquated museum that I really like. The flowers were made by the legendary Blaschka family as a teaching aid for Harvard University and are really quite incredible:

On the following day, we went to the Museum of Science, which was great and actually occupied us for the full day. The highlight for me was this dish served in the exorbitantly expensive museum canteen:

You would have thought someone might have known better in a science museum!
Anyone visiting the museum should certainly go to the "Lighting" show and see the enormous Van de Graaff generator and Tesla coils sparking away spectacularly. No matter how naff the commentary or music, the show is brilliant:

By accident, we managed to see it twice!

The next day, we had a day wandering about town and then flew home.

I've not much more to say about the three days we spent there, so a couple of photographs for padding!

Tomorrow: Essex and back to Glasgow.

Pittsburgh Fun

I do like Pittsburgh, especially as I have good friends there who can take me about and introduce me to new things such as the marvellous Klavon's Soda-Fountain:

To the immediate right of Dingo is Elizabeth and her daugher, Eliza. We went in here to avoid a monumental downpour with occasional claps of thunder... and to sample the old-fashioned ice-cream sundaes.

This had hot-fudge sauce, salted peanuts, cream and delicious vanilla ice-cream. The atmosphere of the place was amazing too although it has just been re-opened after having been refurbished, so it was a bit empty but once the coffee machine is moved back in and it gets re-established, it will be amazing.

We were taken to another well-established favourite of Pittsburgh's by Gerry and her partner, Rocky; Vincent's Pizza Park:

Vincent's was a shack on the side of a main through-road in Pittsburgh which has recently been refurbished - read the comments on the link above to see how shack-like it was! The pizzas are enormous. I mean really enormous. Thick, puffy bases, wood-fired with the wood-ash on the bottom like they should have (not cigarette ash on top like they used to have, I'm told). Four of us couldn't finish the one we ordered! It has to be said that this is not in any way an "Italian" pizza, nor is it refined food, but it is good and the experience of visiting and hearing the stories was great.

One of the great things about going places is that you can often discover things that people who come from the place had no idea about. For example, Elizabeth - and most other people I spoke to - had no idea that Pittsburgh is home to the first ever industrial particle accelerator, still in place although now abandoned. Of course, I really wanted to go inside, but it wasn't possible. An amazing place and one which should really be kept as an important scientific site.

I especially love the fading Paul Rand "Westinghouse" logo on the side.

Some of you may recall that last time I visited Pittsburgh, I was rather taken with the local speciality of "pierogi" or, in Pittsburgh-speak, "pierogis", delicious little dumplings filled with cheese and onions, fried in butter and served with fried onions and sour cream. As Dingo was with me this time, I knew that he would like them and that we would need to find somewhere good to go and get them. Elizabeth's partner, Kirk, found the very place and we had a pierogi feast at Szmidt's Old World Deli!

Szmidt's is an odd place, to say the least. It is a tiny shop in the suburbs of Pittsburgh (Greenfield) which sells a variety of traditional and non-traditional pierogi, including sweet ones, served with ice-cream. We started off enjoying the traditional kraut, cheese and potato dumplings and moved onto the more bizarre strawberry, finishing with "peanut-butter cup", which is a chocolate dumpling stuffed with peanut-butter. Somewhat surprisingly, they were very good too. Five of us managed to clear many plates and none of us felt much like eating again that day...

One of the things which made this visit special was the amazing staff, who were unbelievably helpful in making suggestions and letting us try samples. Can't wait to go back next time!

Pierogi are a cultural phenomenon in Pittsburgh and rightly so, I think. We were in a cafe one day for a drink and free wi-fi when we spotted the "Craft-O-Tronic", a modified cigarette vending machine which yielded little objects made by local craftspeople. A bit like a cheap and cheerful version of the shop in the SCC, perhaps?

Dingo spotted this lovely souvenir of the pierogi!

Some real pierogi to compare:

One of the other things I found before Elizabeth was the most monumental and eccentric junk shop that I have ever seen. It also, alas! proved to be one of the most ridiculously expensive. Crown Antiques and Collectibles... well, that is as maybe, but it is one great big, sprawling mess of a junk shop and junk is the word. Four floors of it.

I have no idea what he is doing.

The place is at 1018 Fifth Avenue and is just stuffed with stuff and is the most fascinating place: the basement is full to bursting:

And the further up the building you go, the more cluttered and bizarre it gets...

The downside of the whole place is that everything is just a bit too expensive and haggling is not an option. There was an enormous box of rusty keys, not all of them interesting or useful to me but I thought that if the owner was willing, I would make an offer for the box. I took some of them down to him and immediately he started talking about how "popular" keys were and how he sells them daily at $6.50 each... no deal to be struck. A similar pattern followed for Elizabeth and when Eliza wanted to buy a book, she was met with a somewhat aggressive "what do you want that for"? A very odd place indeed. Worth a visit as one might visit a museum, perhaps.

After all this, it was off to Boston for three days and then home again. More soon!

Secrets and Surprises

It wasn't all work in Pittsburgh and in between teaching the workshops, I got a chance to socialise a bit too. Quite apart from my non-metalsmithing friends, Elizabeth Avery and Kirk Savage and their wonderfully odd family, I also managed to see Lizzy DaVita and hooked up with Glen Gardner for an evening of dinner, his workshop and an exhibition.

Dingo and Glen in Glen's workshop.

Glen has just moved workshop to the north of the city and I am so envious of his space in a converted factory. Not just the space, but the tools and equipment he has managed to amass over the years are most impressive.

The exhibition in one of the other studios in which he is based was not especially interesting. In fact, it consisted of a room of badly-made, derivative nonsense of which an art-history expert and friend of mine said, "It may have been the most repellent man-made/person-made environment I have ever been in". I was so disinterested in it that I didn't even get the name of the artist responsible.

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My adult workshop at the SCC was "Secrets and Surprises" about using boxes and hinges, colour and found objects to create jewellery which moves and invites exploration. It was well-attended and the participants were good fun, enthusiastic and keen to learn. Although this year three days did not seem nearly long enough, the projects created were sophisticated and the students enjoyed pushing their skills forward in new ways.

Bangle made from a cleat, copper and a pebble. Unfortunately, the pebble fractured when being set.

One of the most popular things I teach is stone-setting. People always seem keen to learn ways of setting stones beyond the general rub-over setting and I like teaching it very much. Unfortunately, many of the places where I teach are not set up to allow for the teaching of more sophisticated techniques. John Cogswell was teaching at Touchstone the week after I left and Megan told me that he brings his own toolkits, which is a solution but not an easy one if travelling any distance.

After these workshops were over, it was time for meetings at the SCC to discuss the display of the "Enough Violence" show and to enjoy myself in Pittsburgh, which I always manage to do.

Before I conclude the working part of my visit, Gerry Florida just sent me a picture she took of me when in the Shuman Detention Center which I share with permission:

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The current show in the SCC is the international Fibre Arts show. I am not really thrilled by fibre arts generally but this is a great show. I was especially taken with this portrait of the artist Marie Bergstedt's brother in fibres and buttons:

The detail close-up is wonderful.

In the ex-cafe space, Jennifer Moss was creating fantastic felt cup-fungi, which were taking over the worksurfaces:

There is more about this exhibition here.

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Fascinating junk shops, an abandoned particle accelerator and knitted pierogis tomorrow!