Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Symbolic buttons - Jumping to the 12th century

Symbols

Today I sewed buttons onto fabric heart for a display at No 2 Things. I had to choose them and decide where to sew them on. I had no idea at first. Why buttons on hearts? Given this constraint I picked pairs of buttons to symbolise various relationships.

One person was into cooking, their button reminded me of a pestle and mortar, their button partner was clearly into glass and things that are see through, a photographer?

Two square buttons must have had similar attitudes to travelling, all arrangements fixed before starting.

A tiny triangle button seemed to want to be sewn beneath the hands of a medieval couple dancing round a maypole. I hadn't seen the other woman to one side of the picture on the fabric, but someone else pointed out that there might have been a love triangle there...

It is a lovely feeling to stitch with a needle by hand, cup of tea relatively safely over to one side. A wonderful knitter came in with the wild wind, so then we all talked about the Holocaust programmes, night-time burglaries and my difficult back door.

12th century manuscript

This one is also from the Wellcome collection. Have a look for the words in red ink. Some say 'al-bab something' which means 'chapter something'. There are several different words which come after al-bab, but not that many it seems. I can't work them out, are they meant to be numbers or subject headings? A grammatical term comes in as well, or am I getting all confused?

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