The Elixir of Praise

Time flies by so fast on these glorious spring days, when there are more chores than daylight!  The garden is calling, our boat needs attention before it splashes into the Chesapeake for another sailing season, and like the maple trees, my sap is rising so that I’m drawn to work longer during the longer hours of light!

I finished the loose-fitting, comfy sweater in time to wear it on several occasions before it gets too unseasonal.  Soon I will put it away until fall….or perhaps bring it along to Maine for the chilly nights when I want to sit on deck looking at the stars. (Turns out is it a Martin Storey design from Classic Knits for Real Women)

Here is the medieval spinner.  I’m really on the home stretch now.  A little praise goes a long way, doesn’t it? Yesterday I got some wonderful praise from Archie.  I wonder if teachers ever truly realize how much their comments mean to us students.  His comments thrilled me so much that hours later, at midnight, I found I could not get to sleep due to the warm glow I still felt.  There’s a famous quote I used to know about how our words to others carry far more weight than we realize.  Archie can’t possibly know how much I will cherish his input from yesterday!

I’m also carrying wonderful images in my head from yesterday’s gathering of the Wednesday Group.  We were quite a large group, crowded in spite of Susan’s generous studio space.  The diversity of the work was incredible!  Everything from a young beginner’s strikingly good re-interpretation of some Coptic designs, to a moving piece of autumn leaves floating behind the Robert Frost quote, “Nothing gold can stay.”  There was a vibrantly happy scene of frogs on lily pads, a very graphic interpretation of a bridge deck from an engineer’s drawing, a delicate (although large!) interpretation of a pencil drawing of a loved one’s head. 

There was such a wide range of emotional content, creative vision, and wealth of weaving techniques to convey these images, that I left feeling powerfully stimulated!  That’s the real strength of weaving in community.  Most of us weave in solitude, and I relish these moments with others!

Unfortunately I have no photos to share of these amazing works in progress.  So, instead, a shot of new growth in the greenhouse and the endless parade of amaryllii!

Albutilon (flowering maple) in the greenhouse. This is our most prolific amaryllis with four flower stalks! To springify the house I’ve brought in cut branches of forsythia, quince and pussy willow.  Outside the first daffodils have opened, surrounded by their earlier pals, the crocus and winter aconite.  Hoping for new growth and full blossoms myself this spring!

The Energy of Our Best Days

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the energy of our best days everyday!  I can’t seem to manage that.

I’ve made good progress on my current sweater, a design that I cannot give proper credit since I’m working from a photo-copy given to me by a friend.  It’s a cute design that has been fairly boring to knit.  Lots of stockinette that luckily I churn out quickly, but also lots of fiddly small items that had to be knitted separately and sewn to the sweater.  I’m almost there!

The button bands are knitted separately and sewn to the body (a task I detest). After I sewed on the first band, I sewed on the buttons. Then I made button holes in the 2nd band by

buttoning on to the first band as I knit in order to get the spacing just right.

Also, I’m up into the headdress of my medieval spinner.  I’ve been looking forward to weaving the intricate shapes of her headdress!

My friend Willa had an art opening this week, and her energy inspired me!  She is part of a group of women exploring their cultural heritage through their line of female relatives, all of whom immigrated here from other parts of the world.  The exhibit is called “Ah, Motherland!” 

Willa’s heritage is Japanese, and she found inspiration from the many noren (entrance curtains) on display at the Serizawa exhibition that we visited together back in early February.  She made her own set of noren and painted images significant to her grandmother in her unique, painterly style. 

My own head is full of ideas I’d like to pursue that were generated by seeing the Serizawa exhibit.  I wish I could work as quickly as Willa does!

March

The second amaryllis to bloom this year is ‘Apple Blossom.’  It’s almost my favorite!  I cannot remember the name of the one that opened first this year.  It was a variety that I had to search out at the Philly Flower Show a couple of years ago, and now I’ve forgotten it’s name (no label in the pot either!)…

A few signs of spring in the greenhouse! 

 

 

More amaryllis in bud

 

 

Color in the greenhouse:
peach dragon wing begonia in foreground with peach blooming albutilon (flowering maple) just behind it. A few magenta geranium flowers in background, and a purple flowering bromeliad in the upper left. 

March!

It’s St. David’s Day, soon to be followed by St. Patrick’s Day! My English friend sent me photos of yellow aconite blooming in a church yard near her village in Cambridgeshire.

We are currently buried in snow with damaged trees all over our yard, but the house is unscathed.  Right now I’d relish the chore of cleaning up all our broken trees just to get outside, but that chore will have to wait until the snow melts. Our new view of the neighbors:

I saw my first robin this morning, in spite of the fact there is no ground showing for him to find food! He was hopping about on the snow!

May there always be work for your hands to do.
May your purse always hold a coin or two.
May the sun always shine upon your window pane.
May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near to you and
May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.

Minnesota? No, New Jersey!

I have to interrupt my weaving and knitting updates to comment on the weather.  What a lot of snow we have gotten this month!  Supposedly it is going to snow here for  three days straight.  I’m not sure that has happened in my lifetime!  It snowed heavily all day yesterday, and is snowing lightly this morning.  Will it really continue through tomorrow?

When my husband uses the snow blower, he loves to make a wall of snow.  Can you tell he is quite proud of his creation?

I’m looking forward to staying home today, nestled in to weave! Meanwhile, spring arrives in the house with the first of the amaryllis in bloom!

Tapestry Weaving

I cannot count the times I’ve heard or read a reference to tapestry that has annoyed me because it is obvious that the author of the statement has no idea what tapestry is.  Ugh.

But now I think I need to put pettiness aside and relish every reference to this ancient technique because it is not a given that it will stay in our vocabulary, which might mean the real activity might also, someday, disappear.

A couple of years ago on public radio I was listening to the program that Patricia O’Connor hosts about language. Someone called in to ask her what ‘tow head’ means.  They had been called this as a child, and the caller had always presumed it to be an insult. He wondered if it had something to do with tow trucks.

Ms. O’Connor actually didn’t know what the term meant.  I remember I was driving in my car and had to find a place to pull over so I could call in to set the record straight.  My call was taken, unfortunately after the show had ended, so the man never heard from me what the term meant.  I hope he knows by now.  Ms. O’Connor and I had a lovely conversation about phrases that go out of use. Interestingly, she noted that if an idiom is based on political or social situations it stays in use longer than if the phrase is domestic or agricultural.  Our domestic situation has changed so drastically in the last hundred years, and here in the US, very few of us have any notion of farm terms.  Idioms from these areas have passed into the forgotten. Personally, I didn’t know that ‘tow head’ was out of use.  I don’t hear it often, but I still do sometimes, as well as corn silk, to describe blonde hair.  My husband is a tow head, and I briefly had corn silk hair when I was young…

So, while the word tapestry is being misused a lot in recent times, at least it is a word that continues to pop up in descriptions and conversations.  I am thankful for that!

Here is what’s happening on the tapestry front in my studio this week:

Yesterday I had my monthly visit to Archie Brennan and Susan Martin Maffei.  That always gets my creative juices flowing, and here is the result of my work today:

Slow, but steady, work on Rob:

Weaving, ancient archaeology, puppy rescue and American Idol

Crazy mix of stuff, but that’s the week I’m having.  I’m stuck on my medieval spinner’s face and have walked away from it for a couple of days.  Actually, I had something I had to knit.  That happens to me every now and then.  Like a good book I just have to read cover to cover, skipping meals and sleep, sometimes I just have to knit.  I’ve churned out a lot of knitted fabric over the past week.  The second ‘Shadow Baby’ sweater has been mailed and received.  I have knitted the entire back and half of one front on the ‘Scallop Trim Jacket’ from Classic Knits for Real Women. (it’s the first of the thumb nails)

And in the midst of all this knitting and thinking about tapestry, I have been listening to the BBC’s production of “A History of the World in 100 Objects from the British Museum.”  It’s a wonderful podcast!  I’ve always felt a kinship to the ancient world through my weaving.  I can’t say why.  Maybe because I learned to weave just when I decided that I would pursue a degree in Latin (which I’d studied every year since 7th grade) along with a degree in Greek which I was just learning as I learned to weave.  Maybe it’s that language and weaving are literally connected, coming from the same IE root, text. 

For whatever reason, I find listening to this podcast about wondrous artifacts, that not only come from the ancient world but from the dawn of human history, to be rather an act of reverence while I am knitting or weaving.  I am participating in what human hands have been doing for countless millennia, and I am experiencing how connected we all are.

Here is the carved
mammoth tusk depicting swimming reindeer, from 10,000 BCE, that I learned about today.  A beautifully delicate carving, found in France. Curiously, the narrator mentions another carved piece from another part of Europe, same time period, that depicts a mammoth and is carved on deer antler.  He also mentions that from this time period objects convey realism, abstraction, perspective, ie, many different ways of expressing oneself.  The same area might yield finds of realism and abstraction, so it is believed that each artist was expressing his sense of his surroundings, incorporating his emotions into this expression. Every episode of this series has been mesmerizing.  I will be sad when it ends.

And in other news this week, our new daughter in law was featured in local news and newspapers in southern Connecticut for her work rescuing dogs.  She and my son have a houseful of pitbull mix dogs that all live happily together, some available for adoption….but not Chili who is shown here! The next photo is Lauren with Chili and Rupert.

  

Lastly, when I’m not listening to the podcast from the British Museum, I’ve been watching and following online my first season of American Idol!  Talk about extremes!  The son of some good friends was picked up at the Boston audition and made it through the first cut in Hollywood.  He was eliminated tonight during the group singing.  I thought he had wonderful stage presence, but the group as a whole did not perform well.  They picked a song with really challenging lyrics! The Sweet Escape by Gwen Stefani.

Bryce is second from the right. He is already making quite a name for himself in the NY metro area as a solo artist and with his band “Stealing Jane,” so the Idol experience should only help!