Weathering the Weather
The outer cloth and silk lining ready to sew a sachet - I dyed these cloths while at Dartington this year.
There’s something about sewing by hand. It’s a bit like drawing with a pencil. You have to engage your hand in movement, allowing the rhythm of the stitching to carry your thoughts to where they want to go.
I brought my sewing kit with me, a tiny felt needle case, some snips, embroidery threads and an awl. This last tool is the most important for when you are sewing through paper or card as it marks where your stitches will go and creates holes for your needle to slide through.
Part of making art for my Masters Arts & Place is in the research. You can do some of this online before the residency but much of it is done as you respond to what is around you. I found this wonderful letter carrying tartan sachet from the collection of the West Highland museum online (pic below). This has determined some of my thoughts about how we collect data and how this data is stored and disseminated.
I am going to create my own little sachet or ‘husif’ (meaning sewing kit from the words of house and wife) to house the data I’ve been making and collecting about the weather. Each day I collect the day’s print out of the Mountain Weather Information Service forecast for the West Highlands from the caravan park office.
It’s a really rich source of lexigraphy describing the weather. Phrases like “extensive cloud shrouding”, “early cloud breaking to leave a patchwork of cloud and sun”. Oh the fun it must be writing these, throwing in a sentence such as “feeling close to freezing where exposed to stronger winds on higher Munros”.[1]
I started the idea of creating a poem a day while on this residency when I saw a picture of the old Ben Nevis weather observatory which operated for 20 years in the late 1800s. The sheer willpower and determination of the meteorologists to collect all that data through hail wind and snow still amazes me.
I’m not sure how I will create these weather documents, but I have been making daily notes on little index cards about the weather as I experience it, both external and internal. I added a little grid square, not realising that each of the Met reports has a little grid square too. Mine are mostly lines relating to what I’ve seen, but I may change this and add more weather type lines. Who knows, it’s all a work in progress.
It’s raining (again) so a perfect time to be inside stitching. I’d better make that first stitch and get started…
[1] Mountain Weather Information Service West Highlands, Friday 11 August 2023, p2 Looking Ahead Forecast for Saturday 12 August.
“A charm for good luck” ~ letter and keepsake inside a folded cloth sachet from the West Highlands museum collection, Fort William. It belonged to Colonel John Cameron of Fassfern.
