Artful Quilters Web Ring & new project

I've been doing a lot of things, poetry and museums, reading, cleaning, writing, etc. But I parcel my time and I touch on quilting most days. This is a picture of the current project; It looks in this picture like a star quartet but I've fallen in love with the blues and the sparse rather elegant star [which is quick and easy to sew] and decided to make it into a full sized bed quilt with light batting to have on the bed in the summer. I'll need either 15 or, preferably 20 stars, plus border to make it the right size. I beleive I have sufficient fabric for 20 stars. So that's in the works, approxiimately a star a day.

I've been reading this book slowly. It's a fat book with hundreds of pictures of journal quilt pictures with detailed notes on how they were constructed -- it's from shows at Houston, by no means the total that have been shown, let alone made -- these are monthly quilts. The variety is amazing ... and inspiring. But the brain can only process a few at a time. So it's a slow book.

The other day I was surfing the Artful Quilters Web Ring and realized I hadn't read Notes from Cairojacp38 Jenny Bowker's wonderful blog, for a while. She is a talented Australian quilter whose husband is a diplomat stationed in Cairo. She often writes about visiting various places in Middle East and I was not disappointed, there was a fascinating post about attenting an event at a Coptic museum.

Then I surfed some more and don't remember what I was reading but came across a link to a UK sitejacp38 of an art quilters organization with wonderful pictures of their work which I really loved looking through. There was one or two ideas I thought I'd really like to attempt in my own way ... sigh .. I'm beginning to have vivid day dreams of having a studio to work in some time instead of about six square feet.

Quilting history

A fair part of today has been spent writing my quilting history -- this is in preparation for having to talk about it at next week's guild meeting when I am to be "Quilter of the Month" and show some of my work. I knew the story well because I spent a couple of my insomniac nights going over it in detail -- too much detail. Just as what i wrote today was in much too much detail. But I can extrapolate from it a few points onto an index card as I learned long ago in Public Speaking my freshman year in college. During the course of the week I have to decide which quilts I'll take to show. The talk needs to be minimal, ten minutes max as it will be the last event of the meeting and people will want to go home. I don't want to see people getting up and going out as I talk -- hate that! So brevity is the key ... and, in truth, I could write a decent sized book if it had pictures ... which is necessary in any book about visual creations.

I thought I'd just mention today a part of the story that will be very briefly elided next week. I did not grow up in a sewing/ quilting household. My mother was not a good seamstress and didn't enjoy sewing -- I'm thinking of my mother since writing about her yesterday. She had, first a treadle sewing machine [we didn't have electricity until I was four]. This was on a farm. Did I mention that? The telephone came the year after electricity. Indoor plumbing didn't happen for another four or five years when Dad built a new house on a bigger farm -- this was just after WWI when prosperity was even touching poor farmers.

My mother probably should have been a journalist. But she married at the end of the depression and fate was against any ambitions and hopes she had. But she wanted to be a good mother and she wanted to teacher her daughter all the important feminine skills. So she bought an old upright piano when I was six and sent me for piano lessons. I clearly remember overhearing a conversation when she said to Dad that the children were getting old enough for Sunday School so they needed to decide which local [Protestant] church they would begin attending. It turned out to be Baptist, which was the nearest and had an active young adults social group. Then when I was ten she called other mothers in the general area and got together enough girls to start a 4-H club. That meant projects in cooking, baking, canning, sewing, room decorating -- all of which came with brochures and sometimes local days with a country home extension agent teaching skills.

I took to all those projects very happily -- sewing was especially satisfying because Mom also had subscriptions to Ladies Home Journal and got a subscription for me to American Girl and then Seventeen. No one in my school had a lot of money or dressed much better than anyone else -- although there was a banker's daughter who had 4 or 5 sweater sets in pastel colors and I had only a blue set. Still there really wasn't much fashion sense that I was aware of. But I learned to sew my own skirts and blouses, and even, by junior in high school, I made a tailored wool suit. I learned from the 4-H experirence that I could learn to sew anything from written material. Later that came to include quilts.

People had quilts. I only remember one awful quilt from when I was about four. Made of scraps of wool pants or jackets sewn crazy quilt style, probably directly onto an old blanket -- purely for warm in the little square house on the little square 40 acre farm. There was a wood/coal burning store in the living room and a wood cook stove, big and black, in the kitchen, but the bedroom could get very chilly. When under that quilt I was warm but totally immobilized by its weight.
That is enough of my sewing and quilting history for tonight; having spent the day writing about it, I'm written out.

[The quilt in the picture at the top of this post is one of my failures -- too bright!! I almost can't fall asleep if I know it's on the bed. So it was there one day to see if it had calmed down since last I looked at it ... it had not. I've got to find somebody to give it to.

Dental chair reveries

Today I spent two full hours in a dental chair, no novacaine, lots of drilling and other manipulations. No, it wasn't awful, but it was wearing and will be expensive, of course. I sort of freaked inwardly when a tooth began crumbling Sunday. Nothing hurt, not even any sensivity, gradually more crumbled until the whole top part came off. Ohmygod! I'm falling apart! First the tooth crumbles, then it'll be the eyes cloud over, then the ears go silent, then th fingers claw up, the nose falls off ... Rationality set in and I thought, if there's no pain it must be one of the root canal-ed teeth with no nerves. It's been dead for years.

My sensible, matter of fact and staright forward dentist told me indeed it was a "dead" tooth that had been root canaled and he could make a crown for it . He showed me his fancy software program that could model it but, on exploration decided that old fashioned crown making was the best option. So I sat in his chair on the 15th floor of the Lincoln Building, across the streeet from Grand Central Station for some 2 hours while he drilled and dug and put in a post and made a temporary crown -- all without novacaine since I theoretically could feel nothing .. well drill "vibrations" are not total comfy but not pain, actually. I'll go back in a couple of weeks when he will make a permanent crown but for now I have a temp that feels quite normal.

What does one think of while "relaxing" with cotton packed around the hole in the mouth, while staring at clouds over tall buildings? Well, at some point a hygenist said, from somewhere behind my head, "He'll be back soon." "Okay," said I -- and i heard my mother's voice. Not the first time I've found I am my mother. I think many, maybe most, women have this experience. Several months ago Leslie said, "you konw that picture of you where ..." I don't remember what now, but I did then. "Well, in the mirror this morning I looked just like you looked in that picture. It was freaky." 'I know," I said, "I've had that experience." And I have -- glance in th mirror and think,"ohmygad! I'm my mother!"

I've read that most women, as they grow older, picture themselves as 35 -- the true prime of life for a great many women. I know that I do. I haven't read but strongly suspect that most women remember how their mothers looked between age 35 and 40. [This is my theory, if it's others' I haven't come across it.] But most girls become acutely aware of appearance in their early teens, at which time most of their mothers are 35-40. So when one reaches 35 or 40, that shock of recognition is likely to hit! I'm my mother!!! The last thing you want to be. But there you are, HER in the mirror. saying "Okay" with her voice.

Looking down the tunnel from the other end, the mothers discover traits of theirs popping up in the daughters -- good or bad. Scary! The shaping is not only genetic, we inhabit our daughter's psyches ... proably more than we or they want to know. However, I am comforted by Dr. H. who assures me I'll never have that sunken smile, more a grimmace, that my mother has in the picture above. She had ill fitting dentures; I will never need dentures -- tho' one cap is going to cost more than her whole set of crappy choppers.

You see, I couldn't help but have painful and scary thoughts in a dentist's chair even when the tooth being drilled and rebuilt was :"dead", it had been a friendly inhabitant of my mouth, it did it's part in chewing. Now it's gone but going to be resurrected -- [today's Good Friday, I don't mean blasphemy] .. where is this metaphor going? Damned if I know.

Chinese mountains, poetry month

It has taken me months -- five! -- to develop the film in my nondigital camera. These are the kids, decked out in traditional Tibetan finery, no doubt well aware they are a photo-op and will possibly get tips and goodies from tourists as they reach the outskirt of "Shangri-la" [so named in the past year by the Chinese tourist & geographical authorities.] They are darling children! The photo was taken, literally less than one minute before I tried to jump up to them and give them some sticky-stars, slipped, fell and displaced/broke my hip. This is a an important picture to me, the last real moment of that vacation.

This being poetry month, I have another picture taken earlier that day part way up into the mountains -- "Shangri-La" is at 14,000 feet -- when we stopped at Tiger Leaping Gorge, the clouds made wonderful patterns. I have a somewhat unusual Mary Oliver poem for today:
THE OLD POETS OR CHINA
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not beleive
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian

When I decide a long book is worth reading, be it fiction or nonfiction, I approach it in short takes. I am a slow reader -- I do not skip, I read every word -- none of this speed reading, first sentences of paragraphs. I am dogged and determined ... IF I beieve the author truly is saying something worthwhile. So it's been for about a month as I chipped away at Gao Xingjian's 50+ pagae SOUL MOUNTAIN. This is not an easy book. It is fiction but has no narrative line, really, and the narrator and main character shifts pronouns frequently.

Essentially it is a journey of a Beijing writer who is out of favor and has decided to wander around southern China, in the mountains -- the eastern edge of the Himalayan range ... approximately where I was last fall, Yunan, Schuzwan, Guilain [mostly misspelled], mountains and rivers. He tells myths, he tells history, he seems to pick up a lot of sexually free and willing young women, he wanders by rivers and into towns with desolate hostels, he mets Daoist priests and stays in a panda sanctuar. He rides a lot of buses and walks a lot, sometimes goes by boat down rivers. But all the while he writes from the perspective of those who have liived through the cultural revolution, often been deported to farms or been "re-educated"

Gao who recently won a Nobel Prize for Literature, left China a good many years ago and settled in France, became a French citizen and lives in Paris. The China he writes about is from about twenty years ago -- it is not the capitalist China that I saw with busloads of tourists -- middle class Chinese who suddenly can afford to be tourists. But one can extrapolate that today's Chinese know of the period in the book vividly from either their own experiences, or if younge, from their parents. The book was worth the time it took to read, the images and impressions are strong and seem true. Now I will turn to some short books for a week or two.

Poetry month

April is Poetry Month - I'm not sure who so declared but for the last two years I've been on the list of persons (25,000 +/-) who receive via email from Knopf, the elegant publisher, a poem a day the whole month of April. Today's poem, my second, was by Marge Piercy, a nice but not exciting poem. Often other goodies are included. Today, this being the second Passover seder, it included Marge's recipe for egg salad. Unlike any egg salad I ever heard of but maybe after listening to the first hour of a the Haggadah reading and watching your family's usual antics, it's a welcome break. Let's just say it consist only of sliced cucumbers, sliced fennel and sliced hard boiled eggs with an oil and lemon juice dressing. [UGH - maybe it's just my taste} I would prefer the sliced fennel plain, or with a nice mayonaise.

The point is that, yes, I am quilting, really rather furiously, my 21st star quartet is turning into a summer bed quilt and will need either 15 or 20 blocks instead of four. Lot-sa sewing! Picture in the near future.

My first salute to Poetry Month is from the wonderful Polish Nobelist, Wislawa Symborska from "Allegro Ma Non Troppo".

Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged and nightingaily
more anthillful or sproutssprouting.
I'm trying to court life's favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims
I'm always the first to bow,
always there when it can see me ...

April also includes Earth Day so I imagine I'll be back to the subject of global warming too. What I'm noticing today is that the great tectonic plates under the Pacific are in a period of great activity. Another quake, another tsumani, thougth mercifully smaller -- unless you're a Solomon Islander. This has nothing to do with global warming, it's the natural shifting and settling and streteching of the body of the earth and we specks on its surface are simply sometimes in the wrong place.

Ice skating and global warming

Why a picture by Pieter Breugel II? Because it reminds me of that probably forgotten children's classic HANS BRINKER AND THE SILVER SKATES. And why that? Because in favorite discovery from surfing the Artful Quilters Web Ring is a blog not by a quilter at all but by Konchog who is an American Buddhist monk living in UlanBaator, Mongolia. It was a link I found and those who read my blog know I loved visiting Mongolia several months ago. Anyway, Konchog wrote recently that a major ice skating event was held on Lake Khovsol which is on the border with Siberia -- it's where I saw the reindear herders. and hte handsome woman shaman. He observed than many of the skaters in the competition were Dutch ... See? That'sthe connection with the picture.

It seems the European skating events are now very iffy, due to global warming the usual outdooor venues, rivers, lakes, no long freeze solidly enough for the competitions. So the Dutch skaters - and many others from Europe -- went to Mongolia to compete. This may be good for world friendship even if it is telling more people that the world climate is in trouble. Konchog says the older Mongolians say the winters aren't as cold there as they used to be. As an American, he thoughtahat's happening this summer [now!] in Australia and New Zealand, and the variety of climates and events across the US. And for people's opinions about many, many matters.