Beads with large holes

A small excuse took me to the bead shop - one big bead was needed for the ribbon fastening of a Binders Keeper. For future reference, here's the selection of beads with holes big enough to thread a ribbon through -

 Needless to say, I came out of the shop with more than just one bead!

Poetry Thursday - An Old Malediction by Anthony Hecht

"the saline latitudes of incontinent grief"? (...perhaps not...) (via)

Ode 1.5 imitated by Anthony Hecht (1980)

An Old Malediction

What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex
Hairstylist and bathed in "Russian Leather,"
Dallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha,
In your expensive sublet? For whom do you
Slip into something simple by, say, Gucci?
The more fool he who has mapped out for himself
The saline latitudes of incontinent grief.
Dazzled though he be, poor dope, by the golden looks
Your locks fetched up out of a bottle of Clairol,
He will know that the wind changes, the smooth sailing
Is done for, when the breakers wallop him broadside,
When he's rudderless, dismasted, thoroughly swamped
In that mindless rip-tide that got the best of me
Once, when I ventured on your deeps, Piranha.

(from vroma.org/~bmcmanus/hecht.html; analysed here)

In 101 Sonnets, edited by Don Paterson, in which I first encountered this poem, the subtitle is: (freely from Horace). The rather ranting style reminded me of Ginsberg (who, admittedly, I haven't read since the 60s) and the cynicism brought to mind Edna St Vincent Millay's "I, being born a woman" poem. But how does it imitate an ode by Horace? Reading ode 1.5 reveals much - it's been translated in time as well as in language, using Horace's images wryly. (Milton's translation appeared in 1673, and it seems to be a popular exercise in Latin studies.)

The story of Pyrrha is part of a Greek creation myth, and she herself is described as red-haired - whereas we all know that a piranha is an omnivorous fish with big teeth.

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was extraordinarily euridite.  It's been said that: "Hecht's voice is his own, but his language, more amply than that of any living poet writing in English, derives from, adds to, is part of the great tradition." 

Born in New York City, he was drafted into WW2 and his division helped liberate a concentration camp, an experience used in break-through volume, The Hard Hours (1967): "The often unsettling and horrific insights into the darkness of human nature told in limpid, flowing verse that characterize the poems in the collection would become Hecht’s trademark." He was professor of poetry at Rochester University and taught elsewhere, won many of America's most prestigious poetry awards, and was a critic as well as a poet.

Rescuing fabric

My latest finds in the charity shop consist of 4 metres of a very orange cotton (£4.50 the piece), a dress in a sort of jungle print (includes a lot of blue) that will look good in smaller pieces, and some cotton-linen trousers with lovely finishing and details -

Seems a shame to cut them up, but the finely striped fabric will be so useful.

My unofficial rule is that fabric found in charity shops has to be put away within 3 days. Often that simple process includes a lot of unpicking and cutting up, and deciding just how small a piece has to be before it gets binned rather than stored.

A misty morning, up and down the street

I do love a misty morning, and in my long stroll through the still-sleepy back streets, using the excuse (if an excuse for a walk is ever needed) of needing to go get some milk, I tried to figure out why.

Perhaps it's nostalgia from a childhood of morning fogs in the Lower Fraser Valley, fogs generated by the sawdust burners at the sawmills along the river in those heedless times. Waking under a white blanket of fog; leaving the warm bright shell of home, then walking to the bus stop to wait for the school bus, and again a warm shell to carry us through the indistinct but well known landscape.

Or, something about places you know well that are now partly obscured - having only the nearest things visible. Hmm, that's rather like walking around without glasses on - only without the glasses, for me, even the near things are blurry. Blur is different than mist - it doesn't lift, for one thing. (Thank heavens for corrective lenses!)

Again, it could be to do with the secretiveness of distance, lost in the mist ... what surprises might be lurking, or waiting, in the familiar environment once we reach that farther place and can see it clearly?

Perhaps it's the way mist makes things quieter - not as quiet as snow does, but a damping down of All That Noise. In the mist, we're focusing on the altered visual, the distant impenetrable ... and it's the subliminal aural muffling that gives the air of mystery.

Printing our own wrapping paper, stage 1

... but first try it out on smaller pieces of paper - especially when there are quite a few people around a not-all-that-large table -

We cut up carrots, turnips and potatoes, discovering that the centre of the potato doesn't give a very good print - or rather, that the results are unexpected and convey a charming hand-made quality. 

And we used rubber stamps, wooden stamp blocks, paint, foam brushes, paintbrushes, bits of foam soaked in (acrylic) paint and laid on small plates. Exciting results, I thought, these among them -

Wendy's tags

Sabi's brown paper transformed

Hard work by Tony and Lisa

I acted as Conceptual Facilitator (and made tea) - there came a point when we simply removed the top layer of newspapers and set to work on the almond-and-raspberry cake that Tony had prepared earlier -

Stage 2, lengths of wrapping paper, will have to take place in the participants' own homes, should they wish to continue this process. 

We thought it would be possible - and time-saving - to wrap the prezzies first (in brown paper or tissue paper) and print just the bits that are visible. 

Monday miscellany

Recycled paper bag - the paper is tyvek, "hand dyed with acrylic colours".
By Dana Poles; available here

More on the theme of "Christmas presents you didn't know you wanted or needed" - 10 of the world's best maps (here), starting with this waterproof, crumplable one -

But why stop at a map? A trip to Barcelona would be an even better present! (The metro map of Moscow is appealing - available via lineposters.com)

Design principles are explained in Molly Bang's "Picture This: How Pictures Work" - available as a book, or if you need it now, various manifestations are available as a powerpoint (via bookcandy.typepad.com/files/engl-3840-bang-principles.ppt, for instance) or pdf (via http://www.nhsdesigns.com/pdfs/graphic_ss_picture-this.pdf; the principles start on p14; take the quiz on p34) - why not try the assignment?

Do try this at home

At the craft fair

Starting to set up

The doors open before I'm ready

Friends, visitors, customers

My display included a tablecloth (mis)printed with Travel Lines

Thanks, first of all, to blog readers who sent good wishes - and to friends for coming along. Although it was only six hours, the fair was fairly quiet and time passed slowly. I did ok in terms of sales and the day produced a profit of (let's not be coy) of about £200 - which of course is risible in terms of hourly rate, given all the work involved not just in the making but in all the peripherals, an hourly rate in pence rather than pounds. Anyone who has ever gone the "handmade" sales route will recognise the situation, it's a common problem.

This was definitely a learning curve, so what have I learned? It was a question of "sight unseen" both in terms of previous craft fairs at this venue and the venue itself, so Lesson 1 is: be prepared for anything, be flexible - and make sure you have a setting-up toolkit with you. (I'll be adding those to my product range!)

Nothing could be done about the lighting level, and it was chilly. Lesson 2: wear warm clothes, bring extras, keep moving.

Nor could anything be done about the position of the table - the pillar at least was useful for displaying the price list! There was space behind the table for one or other of the sellers with tables on either side of the pillar, and on balance it was better to have the chair at the end of the table - fortunately I was at the end of the row, not in the middle. Lesson 3: if possible, request "table next to wall" or "table at end of row".

The display itself gives you lots of options. To get some "vertical impact" I used small wooden cabinets, opening the drawers for display - with storage in the closed drawers. For a screen that gave hiding places for untidy items like a coffee cup or notebook, I used A3 pieces of foam core, cutting them carefully so the backing would act as a hinge, and mounting examples of the Travel Lines, as well as a few short paragraphs giving "the story". This elicited no interest whatsoever - hey ho! 

I was able to use the Lines printed on the tablecloth as a talking point, but feel that the pattern made the tabletop look too cluttered. it could be "reconfigured" to go around the sides only, to be pinned in place.

As for talking points - I was taking this opportunity to practise telling people about the Travel Lines, what they are and how they came about and all that, but haven't got it right yet. It's an ongoing project… I did get to write some "soundscape lines" during a bout of singing - the young ladies in the barbershop quartet were really good, but their words were lost in the hubbub of general conversation.

Lesson 4, then, is along the lines of "less is more" - things will be more eye-catching if they have space around them. (The table alongside me was piled high and spilling in both directions…)

All in all, it was a good atmosphere at the fair, with mulled cider and tasty cakes and freshly-made sandwiches, and sellers with a range of goods. Very child-friendly too. I hope that next year there will be more publicity and more people will come!

To end, the seasonal decorations of the house across the street from the venue (photos by Tony Wallis) -

Art I like - Paula Kovarik

Among Paula Kovarik's graphic yet subtle quilts is this repurposed pillow sham, inspired by her "rampant cogitations prior to falling asleep" -

See details here.

Would that all insomnia yielded such striking results!

Matters postal

Ever get one of these? "Postage owing" - only 9p postage actually owing, and it costs the receiver a further £1.00 penalty.

One payment option is to put stamps on the card and mail it to the PO. This is easier than going to the depot to collect, a journey that would take about an hour there and back.

For the record, a first class UK stamp is currently 60p, second class 50p; first class large is 90p, second class large 69p.

It arrived - and glad I was to see it. Something I'd forgotten about, so it turned out to be a pleasant surprise after all -

The final needlebooks

Fused covers and woolly pages - ready to sew

Sewn - the red threads need tying off, concealing, and snipping

Colourful hidden pages!

This is the final batch for now - these will debut at the craft fair tomorrow, sotime has just about run out and there seem to be a million little things to do so that all is ready.

Poetry Thursday - haiku by Philip Whalen

Waiting for ... spring?

Early Spring

The dog writes on the window
with his nose

From a 2008 essay, The Haiku of Philip Whalen by Miriam Sagan, which says of this poem:

"As a poet Whalen [one of the original Beat poets] was not a self-conscious practitioner of haiku. Indeed, Kerouac [another Beat] was more devoted to his understanding of the form, and consciously practiced it. Allen Ginsberg [another] is credited with developing his "American sentence," a sort of one-line haiku in English. For Whalen some of the impulse to short poetry was similarly epigrammatic, or aphoristic, in the tradition of Western wisdom literature. His work is also often humorous or quirky in the senryu tradition. Whalen did note, however, perhaps with some surprise, that his most anthologized poem, written in 1964, was one he thought of as a haiku:

Early Spring 

The dog writes on the window
with his nose

"This poem is indeed emblematic of Whalen's work in the form. To begin with, he titled his haiku. Yet in many cases his titles might serve as conventional first lines in a haiku. If the title "Early Spring" is considered as the first line of the poem, we have a very fine haiku—the dog impatient to get out into warm weather, the window maybe a little steamy, the humor of a poet seeing "writing" in an unusual spot."

Paper-and-paint discovery

A rummage through file folders turned up the papers in the centre of the photo - photocopies of travel-lines that had been painted with transfer paints. Many possibilities open up ... but the fabrics onto which they are transferred must be synthetic. My stash doesn't contain a lot of synthetics ... yet ...

The sheets to left and right were screen-printed a couple of years back; the coloured ones are printed on both sides and will be used for covers for floppy little (A6) books. They are texturally exciting to hold - a subtle effect, but different from the smooth pages inside. 

The prototype leaves me unhappy with the quality of the print of the travel-lines that will go inside. The smaller books, though cute (and easy to print on one sheet of paper), are simply too small.

Small business Saturday, 7 December

Small Business Saturday is all about encouraging everyone in the UK to support small businesses, both on the day and beyond.

This year will see the first Small Business Saturday in the UK, held on one of the busiest shopping days of the year - the first Saturday in December.

(from the website)

This is a movement to rally people to shop at local businesses - an entirely laudable aim. (I'll be taking part in a small, even tangential, way by setting up my stall at the Christmas Fair at St Johns Notting Hill on that day, even though I don't consider myself a business. But hey - it's good to be part of things, isn't it?)

Interesting to see the eligibility criteria (do any of your local businesses have a turnover approaching £10m?) -

ELIGIBILITY
We founded the Campaign to promote and support small businesses; accordingly, you should only download and use the Marketing Materials if you fall within these criteria:
 Your turnover (for all outlets and other business locations within the UK) for the 2012 calendar year must have been ten million pounds (£10,000,000) or less
 You must not be:
o involved as a principal course of business in the manufacture, promotion or sale of pornography, sexual aids, firearms or other weapons
o involved with the promotion or advocacy of any sensitive or controversial topic, or otherwise participate in activities that we determine to be inconsistent with our values.

Aide memoire, Oct-Nov exhibitions

Stage Curtain by Makiko Kudo (seen at Saatchi Gallery)

Even though my thoughts and doings have been mainly home-based recently, there have been a certain number of visits to cultural events, mainly art and/or museums. The good intentions of sitting down the next morning to revisit them via putting up pictures on the blog, chasing up things noted in the ubiquitous black notebook, thinking about the experience, writing some sort of critical analysis ... all too often come to nought ....

It's the exhibitions or encounters that have been most interesting, raised the most questions, called up links to other things, that don't get written about - it would take "too long" to do them justice ... and they don't get started ....

So I've set the timer for 15 minutes and am whizzing through the notebook to make a list of the missing exhibitions from the past couple of months, in reverse chronological order, with hope of revisiting at least some through my photos and notes.
-Peter Dormer lecture, Royal College of Art - Martina Margetts on "History in the Making"
-Paul Klee at Tate Modern
-Body Language and New Order: British Art Today at Saatchi Gallery (click the links to see installation views, ie the entire show)
-new rotunda at Tate Britain

Tessa Farmer's strange little insects - a prize winner at Discerning Eye

-Discerning Eye at Mall Galleries
-Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall
-Society of Wildlife Artists, Mall Galleries (the sorts of pictures people like to buy)
-Ana Mendieta at Hayward Gallery (disturbing)
-Dayanita Singh at Hayward Gallery (ah those gorgeous "portable museums" for photos)
-Adrian Vilar Rojos at the new Serpentine (loose bricks to walk on, lovely sound)

Portrait busts by Jacob Epstein

-Epstein busts at National Portrait Gallery (a 3D view of the famous)
-Stanley Spencer's murals for Sandham Chapel at Somerset House (based on his WWI experiences)
-Australia at Royal Academy (big!)

Not that I'm frantically trying to catch up. The blog is what it is, there is no pressure to include everything (in fact, some things are best left out). "You are not behind." But the timer has pinged some time ago, it's time to stop.

Book du jour - Some Embroidery Stitches

A pamphlet ("secret book" format) showing 42 stitches and their names. It's almost possible to figure out how to do the stitches from looking at the diagrams, but in case this isn't enough, websites are given.

The cover looks a bit plain, so I'm planning to add a stitch or two to it.

Update: here they are with stitches added -

Monday miscellany

Winter windows, Peter Jones, Sloane Square.
Turkeys made of towels! Rabbits made of vacuum cleaners!

Have you heard of Cicada3301? It's a tale of embedded codes and false clues. Read about this internet mystery here ... marvel at the amazing contents of people's brains, both decoders and encoders ... and wonder "Why?".


Cottoning up is part of London cabbies' learning "the knowledge" - pins are stuck in a map at random and a thread put between them, to test knowledge of the route from one to the other.


UCL (University College London) has its own museums, including some I'd not heard of till checking the website (ucl.ac.uk/museums) - and there's a general UCL museums blog -

First there was dark matter, now there's the "darknet” – the vast, murky portion of the internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the "surface" web, it’s in these recesses where you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks.

Is this the museum/gallery of the future?

Interesting to see that Tate Britain, among all its recent refurbishment, renovation, remodelling, has provided not just a shelf with books related to the exhibition for browsing, but also a row of screens with selected videos. And chairs - there are precious few places to sit in the galleries.

The rest of the sewing kits

The final one is having some stitching added to the ribbon - after which I'll have a good selection for the craft fair next week.

The week's tasks include making larger needlebooks (lots of small ones are ready), finishing and printing and folding the little pamphlet showing embroidery stitches, and getting together all the things that are needed for the table. Not to mention ... figuring out how to display it all.

And the week after - research towards the next session of the museums course - that'll make a welcome change!