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Embroidered Sculptures Recreate Lifelike Mushrooms, Lichen, and Fungi in Thread

by Grace Ebert - Colossal, February 25, 2022

Amanda Cobbett suspends a singular moment in the fleeting lives of fungi by stitching their likeness in thread. The textile artist photographs and gathers specimens that she brings back to her Surrey Hills-based studio, where she finds fibers to match pale green lichens and golden chanterelles. Using a free-motion embroidery technique on a sewing machine, she then stitches multiple layers onto a piece of dissolvable fabric that, once the organism is complete, is washed away to leave just the mushroom or mossy bark intact. As a scroll through her Instagram reveals, the resulting sculptures are so realistic in color, shape, and size that it’s difficult to distinguish the artist’s iterations from their counterparts.

Currently, Cobbett is preparing a collection that will head to the Artful Craft exhibition at Make Southwest, which opens on April 2.

(also for some reason despite loving it since first hearing it I've been terrified of leading this one? maybe I'll try it at the regular singing this week)

This link should go directly to its original debut on the Saturday of the United Convention -- it's easier to hear clearly in the UK recording, but I love seeing the joyful sea of singers meeting it for the first time, too.

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

(1) a superb choice

(2) impossible to chop up into little shape note verses.

It feels like you could maaaybe pull out a few segments of six or eight lines, but you'd lose the whole lovely effect of how the poem just strains upwards and upwards with no end to the sentence.

It turns out, you are supposed to sing A-B, and to draw out a certain syllable over the whole measure filled with eighth-notes that are connected with a ligature. After that, several people told me that they were equally baffled by this, and always sang it incorrectly, because they tried to adjust to what other trebles around them were singing, and those were all over the place.

Slow 564 is specifically a Portland thing, but it's been picked up by some other people as well. (There are also definitely people who hate it.) Here it is being led (in Germany) by the person originally responsible:

(you can actually see when the tenor and treble front benches catch the unexpected tempo and have to slow the class down.) I think taking this song slowly gives it -- especially the treble/alto duet in the fuguing section -- a plaintive, mournful, relentless quality that (1) is really moving and (2) suits the text. Which might be why it gets called almost every week here (by several different people) (not me, I like singing the alto line); I gather it's not an every-week song in other places.

By contrast, here it is at the more typical pace. It's still a great song! I love a fast minor fuguing tune! But ... Slow Zion is better.

(For me personally, 220 Mount Zion is best at a fast marching clip, slower than the fastest 6/8 tunes, but a hair faster than that Chattahoochee Convention recording takes it. It's a bouncy tune and benefits from the speed! But the tenor line is too complex to go super fast; bad when messy.

Heck I think most High Protestants have some sort of doctrine of the Real Presence - Anglicans sure do at least.

preserving the tag because oooooooooo boyyy it is both correct and important. saying "nobody really believes that" makes it sound -- intentionally or not -- like you think it's a stupid thing to believe and everyone with that sincere belief is either stupid or self-deceptive. so maybe don't be an asshole! if you sincerely think that a piece of theological doctrine is less relevant or less literally interpreted than it used to be in the same faith ... say that instead!!

also, I counted ~sixty singing school attendees, which bodes pretty dang well for tomorrow's class