Drive-by shooting: M40

Favourite things - another cup

One of a pair of coffee cups brought to Pitt Meadows from her local coffee shop by German cousin Sylvia, when she came to visit. I claim it as "my cup" when I visit family.

Christmas moon

As we drove to the airport last week, the moon was high in the sky, tossed among Vancouver's clouds. A perigee moon - closer to the earth than it will be for the next 15 years, which made it 14% larger and 30% brighter than usual. I didn't know that then, just enjoyed being able to see it through the clouds.

Another Canadian moon experience, for which I have no photo but the memory, was driving east along a straight stretch of road in the early evening last February, and seeing the moon straight ahead, looking rather red and dim. A full eclipse, which we didn't know about till we saw it. Miraculously, no rain clouds to obscure it. A wonderful sight.

Favourite flavour

Oh, if only you could get this here in UK ..... maybe one day ....

Down by the riverside

Memories of BC: the Fraser river, on a wet wintery day.

The Albion ferry goes across to Fort Langley every quarter of an hour. There are two ferries, and they're busy - cars usually have to wait two or three sailings to get on. But the bridges are far away, so it's worth the wait. Foot passengers have no problem getting on the next sailing.

When the nearby Golden Ears bridge is finished in mid-2009, the ferries will stop.

Wordless Wednesday

The concept of "wordless Wednesdays" comes via Dawn's blog. From now on, there will be just a photo on Wednesdays, no words. Writing - and especially adding links - can get to be very time consuming, if you're as easily sidetracked as I am! So a "day off" is a very good idea, imho...

2 A's and 2 E's

The "7 things my blog readers don't know about me" meme has been round the houses. A while ago Lisa Call tagged anyone with 2 A's and 2 E's in their name - and, uh, that's me... I'll keep it short:

1. The green stone in the ring I always wear is seaglass.

2. Yesterday I lost my favourite brooch - a brass dog with silvery soldered-on spots. Oh well, it's only a "thing".

3. There are well over a dozen books on learning Chinese on the shelf above the computer - and I haven't opened any of them for over a year.

4. I made my first quilt in 1973, in Cambridge - 5" squares, recycled; double bed size, quilted in the ditch.

5. When it comes to ice cream, my favourite flavour is Nuttin' Butter -- and they don't make that flavour in the UK. It's chocolate flakes and peanut butter ripple in vanilla ice cream.

6. Other than in ice cream, I'm not very keen on chocolate.

7. In 1982, as a project in library school, I indexed a cookbook - but first had to compile it (my favourite recipes) and type it - on those Gestetner stencils. I did a small production run, carefully costed; sold enough copies to break even; had enough left over for Christmas presents, and got a decent mark in the course.

Following Lisa's method, if anyone with an H and 2 R's in their name wants to consider themselves tagged, please do.

The photo at the top is a print by Hilary Tranter on chinese paper - you can just about see the thin, mysterious lines of green and red on the left edge of the paper. Hilary did the gorgeous layout on the book of poems my colleagues compiled for me.

Fitzwilliam Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge holds many happy memories for me. Way back when, I worked just about next door and spent many a lunchtime in the museum, especially for lunchtime concerts in the big room at the top of the grand stairs, with 18th century portraits of large country squires in silk waistcoats staring down, and persian rugs underfoot.

Now the museum has a website with 124,000 images from its collection and a plethora of online exhibitions and podcasts. Exhibitions of prints by Yoshitoshi, for instance -

and photographs of medieval and chained libraries as they were in the 1890s -
This cupboard was in use in Bolton Grammar School, 1902 -

The listing of objects in the museum's applied art collection includes 508 embroideries and 67 woven textiles - with extensive catalogue details but not all photographed.

Museum sketchbooks

A Greek bowl in the British Museum - fused glass, broken and repaired -

Modern glass in the V&A -

One day they might morph into quilts, or ...?

Plenty more sketchbooks to get ideas from -

Favourite things

Some favourite things, every one with a story of course! The wooden bird brought from Russia in 1996 dangles from a lampshade, trapped in flight - The shelf with painted doors, bought at auction in Durham, 1971, for £4, holds the green-stemmed Rosenthal glasses that were a 50th birthday present, as well as the Carlton Ware blackberry jampot found in Pinner just when I was buying this flat, and two netsuke, one from the V&A and the other "real" -

The real one has lovely patterns on his clothing - Also on the shelf, a carved Chinese box that once held a cricket (apparently) - a present found in Bruges one cold February day; a carved stamp brought back from Xian by Min, which reminds me of his help with my faltering Chinese conversation; and the mug was found in the market in Cambridge in 1974 - even though it was priced at £3 and I was the wife of a student, I went ahead and bought it. Marks on the bottom show it was made in Denmark in 1869.

In another part of the room, this cardboard clock, which has been ticking since 1993 or so, with a few battery replacements; a sunny house-warming present from 1994; an owl made of curls of paper slotted into each other, brought from Thailand by Vicky. The basket under the neglected spider plant has held old-fashioned wooden clothespegs for at least 20 years.

None of these items are strictly "necessary" to everyday life, but it would be less rich without them.

Sampling

This started out as an exercise in ... what - transparency? FMQ? It's become a book cover.

Seasonal reminder to self: use some of the paper stash to make little notebooks, and use some of the drawerful of stitched samples to cover them. Instant presents.

Gemutliche Weihnachten

Handmade Christmas decorations at the home of a German family friend.

The guinea-fowl sisters

Snow scenes

Must be time to send out those seasonal cards...

Library books

How delightful to browse in a library with fresh, shiny books - a whole new world of possibilities. These have to go back to Pitt Meadows library today.BC's best known artist, Emily Carr, painter of monumental forests - seeing so many of her paintings in one place (admittedly at a small scale), I started looking differently at the trees around me.

What we think about when we look at art. Fascinating. Might have to buy that one.

Interviews with contemporary cartoonists - a genre, names, and approach new to me. Interesting to see the vignettes of cartoon history that lie behind the contemporary work. And there's something about that grid layout of comic strips ...

The history of foods - salt yes, but who knew lettuce had a history?

As these were found in a library in Canada, here are the Canadian connections. Emily Carr is a Canadian icon; Alberto Manguel lived in Toronto from 1982 to 2000; Seth is a cartoonist "obsessed with the past" living in Montreal; Margaret Visser taught Greek and Latin at York University, near Toronto, for 18 years.

Artists among the forests of BC

Emily Carr looks very fierce in the photo on the cover of my library book about her, but here she is happily among her menagerie -And here are some of her wonderful paintings of trees in the great BC rain forest -

These make you look at the trees around you with different eyes -What attracted me to the book was these rugs that Emily hooked -
based on West Coast Indian motifs -She spent time in the Queen Charlotte Islands, drawing and painting the Indian villages there -as did other artists, setting up studios in tents -
Walter Phillips worked in the Japanese woodcut style -
These subjects were given a tremendous boost by the exhibition of West Coast Indian art in Ottawa in 1927. Here's work by A Y Jackson -

PJs again

The PJ pants turned out so cosy - and were so quick to make - I had to go back and get some more of that flannelette in the dotty print. Found the red on in the "buy one metre, get two metres free" section - it and one of the blues are for hospital gowns, and the darks and green are for quilt backs (someday) -
Here's the next pair of pj bottoms in progress. This time I prewashed the fabric - it shrank 8%, which is going to be significant in the ones already made, but those cuffs will let down, and they're plenty roomy width-wise.

The pattern was made by transferring the dimensions of some existing pj-bottoms onto newspaper - one sheet for the front and one for the back, as it turned out. These can be overlapped at where the side seam would be to make a larger or smaller size, as needed. The waist rises at the back, and I'll put a label or some stitches there to help with putting them on right way round.As these are hardly couture garments, I've bent the rules on using grainlines and cut across the fabric, to get maximum length. The legs go right to the other selvedge, and hems will be faced with strips of the spotty green fabric. The waist will be faced with the red fabric, to make a casing for the elastic. Pockets offer too many possibilities - not just on the shape and number, but whether to use red or green (or both?) for the pocket facings.

PJs with attitude

Just couldn't resist this zingy flannelette at the fabric store. These PJ pants are very quick and easy to make, with no side seam and an elastic waist (pattern taken from existing garment). Had to add cuffs because 1.5m wasn't quite enough fabric - impatient to make these, I didn't prewash the fabric, and it's bound to shrink a bit, isn't it?They fit loosely are are soooo cosy. And even now, could be that bit longer.

Wine labels

One fine day in Pitt Meadows

I'm enjoying the wintery colours here. On a rainy day (which is just about every day) the greens, reds, golds of twigs and grasses glow against the darkness of evergreens and greyness of road and sky.