Sorry, I haven’t that much to update here, as I’ve been on holiday again, this time to Belfast. I had a lovely time exploring the city on my own for four days, and I did a lot of reading. Which included Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures. Tracy Chevalier is probably most famous for her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was made into a film with Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson (in one of her earliest big roles, after Lost in Translation). I actually prefer her novel The Lady and the Unicorn, which is about the famous Flemish tapestries, but I prefer both to Remarkable Creatures, which is certainly not one of her best.
Ms Chevalier specialises in European historical fiction. She likes to find a subject or a few characters, often with a basis in culture, about which little is known, or which have some mystery surrounding them, and then she writes a story around this. So her novels which I have read, apart from The Virgin Blue, are all about real people. The Virgin Blue is still historical, but I think the characters and the plot are completely fictional, and there is some present-day action as well. To me, it is her weakest novel that I have read. I have read all of her books bar one: Falling Angels, and I don’t know anything about that. She writes very well, but for me Remarkable Creatures was fairly slow-moving, and not very interesting. It was made slightly more interesting, strangely, after I finished it, and found out from the notes in the back that both the main characters had really lived and performed most of the action in the book itself. It is set in 19th Century Lyme Regis, and follows the pursuits of two female fossil collectors from very different backgrounds who struggle to get their extraordinary finds credited to them and get the acclaim they deserve. It’s fairly good, but I feel an author shouldn’t really rely on historical accuracy to lend her books more interest than her writing does. I would suggest people read Girl with a Pearl Earring, or The Lady and the Unicorn, or possibly Burning Bright, (which is about the poet William Blake), instead.
The second part of this entry is a brief craft update on something new. I have been doing cross-stitch, but the project is a present, and so I won’t post it here just yet. This is about a different project that I laid aside for a while and which is moving into its second phase. The plan was to make a satchel-type bag covered in train tickets, those uniform orange and black tickets that rail services across Britain give out and print. I made the bag several months ago, hand-sewn, and then set about collecting train tickets. I soon realised that I would need an awful lot of them to cover it, so I enlisted the help of my friends. Many of them obliged very generously, and I now have several hundred tickets to use, so I decided to make a start.
Since the bag would need to be at least partially waterproof, I laminated the tickets. Of course, then I couldn’t sew them directly onto the fabric, being too thick. So I holepunched the corners and attached them there with buttons, so that the tickets overlapped. I’ve also been collecting interesting buttons to use, and I have quite a collection now. I’ve only done a few tickets on the satchel’s flap, which I’m doing so that the white back of the tickets shows, to contrast with the orange for the rest, but it seems to be holding up well. It’s not at all flexible, though, so I’m leaving a space above what I’ve done so that the flap can fold over. I might use this to my advantage later, when I do the body of the bag, to give it some shape at the sides, which it doesn’t have at the moment, because I didn’t line it. We shall see. It’s a fairly slow process, but I hope to finish it satisfactorily and then show it off everywhere!
Train-Ticket Satchel
Sherlockiana and other Victorian Musings 