There’s a Facebook page currently attracting a lot of interest among people around the world currently isolating at home: View From My Window. People are posting pics taken from inside their homes. Some are very humble places, some look out onto other walls dotted with windows, some are of expansive, elevated, million dollar views. Many are attractive, many not very exciting and some awful, but together they add up to an interesting and unusual travelogue of sorts. Whether the page admin will get round to printing off the book mentioned some time in the future, doesn’t really matter; it’s just interesting how different the world can look depending on where you are.
Being confined to home is easier for us than it is for many people, as we have a small but leafy garden, so that from every window in our house the main colour we see out there is green. As it’s autumn, this is changing, but even when many trees are bare, there will still be some evergreens, with snatches of green lawns and nature strips, and most of the pots on the patio just outside this window (right) will still be green.
My favourite colour has always been green. Some of my favourite garments down the decades were green. The very first jumper I lknitted, aged 10, was a lovely citrus green chatreuse colour. The very best garment I ever made for myself was fine dark green wool, using a technically demanding Vogue Designer pattern – reckon I could still sketch it out… My favourite evening dress was fashioned from several metres of rich malachite green Italian satin with a 30cm band of eyelet embroidery along one selvedge that Mum and I bought in George’s, on a rare trip to her home city, Sydney. Mum’s dressmaker, Mrs Lucas, must have done well from the patronage of a family of three teenagers with busy social lives, followed by two of our weddings (the third was a little later and by then she had retired) She was brilliant and cut and designed as she went. She used this fabric wonderfully – I can remember every detail so clearly. It was an A-line with halter neck and the 30cm band of embroidery was around the hem. There was enough of the embroidery to fashion a simple edge-to-edge jacket with above-elbow sleeves. I would have been 19-20 when she made that, and could see no good reason to get a new one for my 21st birthday party, no matter that I’d worn it a bunch of times – we went to many black tie, formal balls in those days, and every young girl needed several long dresses. Greens suit me, and shades of green have always made me feel good.
Interestingly, however, relatively few of the many art quilts I’ve made down the years are very green. Given the way I work, with many little bits of fabric set into backgrounds, it’s true that many do include some greens, as strips set into backgrounds have long been part of my design process, a signature style. “Lilydale”, 1991, has only ever hung in exhibitions, though it would serve well as a bed quilt (except that I’ve never had the right kind of bedroom for it) It’s an early work in my Colour Memories series:
Next is a detail of “Time and Tide”, a 2018 piece showing how my work has changed over many years.
Late last year we had the downstairs rooms painted and ditched the heavy scrim curtains we hung in front of the windows when we moved in 15 years ago. At that time the front in particular was very open to the street, and passers by could look right in: and similarly out the back there was very little vegetation between the house and the garden wall. I t was lower than what is there now, and on the other side of that wall was an access laneway to what was an internal block. We felt we were living in a goldfish bowl, and those curtains were our defence. Removing them made the windows seem much bigger, and any time we choose we can lower new blinds without cutting out the light.
