I googled macrame...

... and found this

in this article. Pretty weird stuff and religiose, but not just owls and plant holders. I always wanted a macrame hammock myself.

Also these

via Pinterest, though I can't find an original source. And a lot of owls and plant holders.

Internet mon amour, how I have missed you.

Speakers, 'phones, swifts and winders: in praise of stuff

In Jan Krul's Werel-Hatende Nootsaackelijke (On the Necessity of Other Worldliness) the poet wrote that "an overflow of treasures afflicts the heart and buries the soul in the deepest travail"... The playwright Vondel, no Calvinist, warned in similar terms that Amsterdam was "smothered and softened from such an overflow of goods [stof]"

The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama.

I've been thinking about stuff. Interesting that almost the same word was used the Dutch at that time (early 17th century) with much the same sense as it is now: things you didn't need, worldly clutter, unnecessary material overload. And people had the same ambivalent relationship with it, seeking to acquire it and feeling guilty about it, or claiming to. Sometimes the guilt is about it being to one's spiritual detriment, sometimes that it will get in the way of our human relationships, or that it will soften up our collective moral fibre. It was ever thus, as the above quotes, and many more, way back to scripture and the Roman Empire at least, show; dualism may have been condemned as heresy but there has always been a tension for human beings between matter and spirit, it seems to me, with a fear that the former is the enemy of the latter.

I tend to think I'm someone who neither has, needs or wants too much stuff, but then don't we all? Yet I'm always somewhat wary when I hear tirades about the rampant materialism and consumerism the world is apparently sinking under, partly because I can't quite believe it, though I dare say it's true, that people are really so obsessively greedy and materialist and wastefully acquisitive, spending (like all the Athenians and strangers which were there) their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear - or to acquire - some new thing. Also though, I often feel such tirades to be a rather knee-jerk, glib unsatisfactory reaction to our relationship with stuff. 

One of the most frequent truisms, and good money has been spent, I've heard, on studies to establish it, is that happiness is not to be found in the acquisition of goods, of the latest toy or piece of technology, but in joyful interaction with our fellow humans, and in enjoyable experiences. I'm a bit sceptical about the two things being necessarily related, but that aside, what's most of the stuff people acquire for, in fact? Communication, contact, furthering their relations with their friends and relations - indeed the problem often seems to be not that people are becoming remote and alienated from each other that they have too much unremitting connection and availability demanded of them. Otherwise, though, the stuff we acquire serves to help us enjoy the experience of music, film, reading etc, or to research and get closer to all the obscure and wonderful and fascinating things the world contains. Surely these things can be food for the soul? I know there are people who love and hoard useless trinklements, but I think mostly, as we get older anyway, that what we want is to pursue, experience and hold in the mind or the hand for a moment, our idea of beauty, whatever form that takes. I know this is the ideal, and that technology can also be used to further hatred and abuse and all things toxic and ugly, but either way, matter is no more or less than the means to the spirit. 

So I'm quite in favour of stuff I think, within reason. Among that which I personally acquired this Christmas (I order it then give the parcels to Tom to give to me at the appropriate time), was a small Bluetooth speaker - (it's only taken me about fifteen years to know what Bluetooth means)

(black object on the left)

This was in order to listen to podcasts, music and other audio from the small computer anywhere, usually while sitting on my backside making more stuff to fill the world, as can be seen. It's rather bothersome, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I find now that simply reading alone is becoming quite difficult; I grow restless and find it hard to concentrate, I need something in my hands, knitting of course, but it's not really so easy to do both. I don't know why this is, I fear too much knitting is quite literally scattering my wits (if wits can be literal, being an abstract concept...); I've grown too used to sitting and allowing my thoughts to wander. On the other hand, knitting alone, long tracts of time with just wool and my meandering, often repetitive and inconsequential, sometimes troubling, thoughts, can become heavy or just boring; improving listening is the answer, mind and hands being put to work at once.

The speaker was OK, good to be without the wires so I didn't end up tangled up in yarn and cable like a woolly-minded suicide bomber, or a knitting version of those telepathic people the Shadows put in their space ships in Babylon 5, or something, though the range isn't great. However, part of the point was for Tom and I to be able to retire to our own little bubbles of conciousness sometimes without disturbing each other, and having the speaker chuntering away didn't really serve this end. I found I could stick the cabled headphones into it, but that rather defeated the purpose, and anyway, doing so caused the speaker itself to pack up altogether, so I sent it all back and replaced it with a set of wireless headphones, which are so far so good, and a very cheap, supposedly waterproof, speaker for the odd occasion when it might be useful.

Our on-line retail haul of electronic-related stuff

In fact it seems to me that technology, rather than increasing it, is tending towards reducing the physical stuff, simplifying and minimising the volume of the hardware, aiming towards smaller and smaller units performing more and more functions, and more of these taking place directly on-line. I don't go in for very much of this myself; my 'phone is a 'phone, with an extra mobile one to be mobile, my camera is a camera, with a card which I stick in the big computer to download and edit the photos there, my e-reader is pale grey with buttons. This is because I don't care to replace things till I have to, am rather lazy about learning new operating skills till I have to, and while all these things are getting cheaper all the time too, I think I can still save more money by making do and mending and bolting on extra bits if I have to, which was how I saw the Bluetooth stuff. After all the excitement with that, as a gesture of frugality, I thought it would be a good idea to prolong the life of our fourteen year old dumbphones, which were needing to be kept almost continually on charge, so that I frequently forgot to take mine out with me, by getting them new batteries. Unfortunately, while the batteries were apparently unused, with their stickers still in place, I imagine they may be nearly as old as the mobiles, and don't seem to hold the charge much better than the old ones. Never mind, they cost little, and it puts off decisions about replacement a little longer. 

In fact I am wilfully reluctant about phones, or about vocal telephonic interaction anyway, as I may have said before, though I know a smartphone would allow me to avoid it by being able to text and e-mail anywhere, as well as other benefits. It turns out the main use of the wireless speaker is to use it in conjunction with one's 'phone, so one needn't can't under any pretext curtail a 'phone conversation. Awful idea, a kind of telephonic Sartrian huit clos, IMO. 

Or else people use them for Skype. 

'Skype's marvellous!', asserts my 80+ year old friend J, 'I can be on it with so-and-so for an hour, it's free, and you can see the person!'.

'I'm sure,' I reply 'but I don't want anything to do with it'. 

I've been dragged into Skype conversations with her family, I feel horribly trapped, self-conscious, intruding and intruded on, and everyone looks weird. I'm sure it's just me, and I'd probably get used to it if I had to. Most of the people I know who really love it are grandmothers. Pace Skype users, I know you're the normal sensible ones and I'm not.

~

Stuff, of course also has the old sense of fabric, cloth, which I suppose has always been one of the ways in which conspicuous consumption could manifest itself. I like stuff like that, too; though I really don't trouble with or spend much on clothes per se, I certainly accumulate more than I can ever use of the stuff that makes stuff. Some of this comes in skeins (or hanks, maybe there's a Brit/US divergence there), which are lovely and solid and feel like something very ancient in their design. Problem is you can't knit from wool in the skein, so it needs to be wound. Tom has always been very good about taking on the traditional tamed man's role of holding and moving the skein for me to wind, but he's not always available, and also, hand wound balls are round, the wool being pulled from the outside, so they bounce around and get dirty, and are a nuisance, even if you don't have a kitten around to do the archetypal kitten thing.

So, I treated myself to a swift and a winder.

The swift is the thing you stretch the wool onto, which takes the place of Tom. This one is an Amish design, very simple with just a stand, arms and moveable pegs, but remarkably smooth and fast in its action, and I do believe a thing of beauty.

The winder, well it winds. But it does it in such a way that instead of a bouncy round ball you have a delightful little cylindrical cake of wool, which remains stable while you draw the thread from the centre. This is formed in such a way that the wool is layered in a kind of honeycomb construction:

Boxing Day afternoon was spent in a blissful whirl, swift and winder spinning in hypnotic wise, winter sun through the window, colour and feel of yarn through my fingers. It took me back to childhood Christmases, when one had toys and things to make things with to set up and play with and put to work; till one put away childish things and only had books and records and such like, things where the interaction was, if not more passive, more within the mind. I had forgotten the pleasure. 

Sadly, I very quickly wound up most of the yarn I have in skeins, even resorting to turning the tapestry wool into tiny cakes, and have no more to play with. It's tempting to go out and buy more, or go internet shopping for it, just for the fun of winding it, but I'll have to knit some up to make room for it first. 

Enough's enough when it comes to stuff.

'Turn it off and KNIT something!'

~

Not too much yoga; fragment; fritters

E has a lot to do, and must walk her dogs afterwards, and yoga only lasts about half an hour, about the same as pre-yoga coffee. Her older dog Moos, having lately acquired an adopted younger brother, is expressing rather puppyish behaviour and pointedly steals one of her wellington boots to play with.

~

The corners of my blue room, it being at something of a dead end of the house, are beginning to smell slightly musty. I set about clearing them out a bit in the afternoon - my sister quoted once a much respected elderly lady, who had cleaned for other people for much of her working life, who said that if you take care of the corners of a room, the middle will take care of itself. Along with a number of boxes of things no longer under guarantee which can be thrown out, I displace my old tapestry frame. I'm loathe to get rid of this, Tom bought it for me during a fairly short phase when needlepoint was a hobby, before we even came here, and I feel it may one day acquire a new usefulness, even if not for needlepoint or not for me. I unrolled the stretchers and found the last thing I began on it, again before we came here.

A very large self-designed canvas of some hyacinths, along with the full sized background cartoon and the original design it was scaled up from (together with a short list of vegetables and some figures, which seem to me more possibly more interesting, being inexplicable).

I no longer, for now at least, have any time or motivation for activities whose outcome is purely decorative; I'm not sure or rigid about what might be included in this category*, but I think I can say needlepoint is, unless I suppose one was a mediaeval person with enough of it to hang on a wall as draught exclusion. I know you can make it into cushions, but that's about it, and they aren't particularly useful cushions. Anyway, the wool for this has long since mostly been knitted up into other, more useful, enjoyable and visible things. Needlepoint can be a pleasant and satisfying activity and can be extremely beautiful, but I'm not sure, looking at this, about trying to translate a style of visual art - those kind of closely observed, highly shaded still-life and botanical drawings I've been fond of doing in the past - into the medium of wool and canvas, though there are artists, like Kaffe Fassett, who have done it to good effect. 

The main problem with it though, is something that has been the bane of my life forever, starting something hugely ambitious, insisting on it being entirely original, and never finishing it. I have had too many beautiful, and even more not so beautiful, fragments of unfinished things lying around, making the corners musty. Yes, I guess I am talking figuratively as well. Taking stock though, I have think I have fewer than I used to. I embark on things I have no hope of completing less often, I think, and have the staying power (and the time, when I set about these kind of projects I was considerably more busy with working life etc) to finish more. On the other hand I suppose, if no time is wasted, process can count for something even if the product never happens, if one enjoyed it at the time.

Not quite sure what I'll do with it, I can't quite bring myself to throw it out yet, but that's what needs to be done in the end.

~

Not just spinach curry, but also rounds of aubergine dipped in egg and a mixture of breadcrumbs, polenta and seasonings and fried. Delicious.

~

* and I'm not imposing it as a rule for living on anyone else.

Quilts, among other things

Well, I had meant to be around again rather sooner than this, spring weather notwithstanding, but that plan was put at naught by a bout of food poisoning over the weekend which laid us both waste; more violent and total-systems but somewhat shorter-lived in my case, somewhat more limited in its effects but of longer duration in Tom's. Good old-fashioned norovirus I think (you aren't obliged to follow the link, though the transmission electron micrograph photos are actually rather pretty, like a detail from a Chagall painting or something). 

This was doubly galling, since it was brought about by a batch of Cancale oysters, the first I had dared to buy, open, dress and serve from scratch, We don't indulge very often really, but it has been a treat we have discovered since we've lived here, sometimes a sociable one, and friends procured for us the special silicone glove for the job, showed us how to wield the knife, and we had promised to save ourselves restaurant prices and return the favour of all the oyster lunches they'd treated us to, so this was the practice run for that. Now, however, they'll be off the menu anywhere for the foreseeable I fear. It's as much as I can do to mention them really. The worst is over but weakness and discomfort and some symptoms linger: I've not been able to apply myself to looking at a screen, or doing anything much, for long at a time, and to be prone and incapacitated does seem a chronic waste of springtime. Tant pis, nothing to be done but wait it out and replace lost fluids, sip ginger tea and nibble cream crackers, this too shall pass, horrid though it has been, and not eating oysters again, if that's what happens, is hardly a serious deprivation in a human lifetime.

Anyway, moving on, here are a batch of photos of my sister's quilts, which happily I prepared earlier. Despite trimming and fiddling with contrast and white balances etc, it really is difficult to do justice to the rich liveliness of colour and pattern and texture in them, but perhaps just a stream of images might convey something of the kaleidoscopic show they make as she unfolded and shook them out one after another.

The one immediately above, an African inspired design, in fact one of her least favourite ones, contains no patterned fabric, the patterning is made exclusively by intricate piecing together of plain materials. She used to make rather more figurative designs, turning the geometric shapes into forms of birds and animals and plants, like this one I posted about some years ago, but these later ones are more in the way of traditional quilts, using squares and rectangles and triangles, sometimes in pinwheels or other configurations, but more abstract. She has slightly more sophisticated machinery now, a quilting frame and special sewing machine feet, but the squiggly quilting patterns across the overall design are done freehand, not using any template or other pre-programmed thing, and though she may buy new material sometimes,  never those purpose-made, itsy-bitsy, dainty 'patchwork' fabrics ones sees in craft shops, and she mainly uses a large amount of second-hand, thrifted, salvaged stuff. 

The backs are nearly as beautiful as the fronts,

and the pompoms and other trims are also all hand made. 

In addition, there are bags and cushions and tea cosies (the latter sometimes in the shape of chickens)

and cotton bags, which also have patchwork motifs on, them for putting the quilts in

when someone buys them, which I hope lots of people do.

The perils of creative mending and rather too appropriately named slipper socks

With thanks for all the good wishes and concern extended to Tom regarding the eye surgery; he is seeing better than for many a long year and drove the car the other day. He has in fact detailed his experience at his place here, with a few sometimes eye-watering photos taken, at his request, by me, of which I shall only feature this one,

~

to illustrate how seriously the medical services take the matter of healthy eating. In fact quick and simple sucrose and fructose and plenty of caffeine are really just what you want after hours of fasting and minutes of minor anaesthetic, but I munched on my oatcakes and apple and felt virtuous.

Unfortunately the new lease of life afforded him by his new vision rather came a cropper and ended in tears, or at least groans of agony, and this was in part my fault, owing to my particular current preoccupation with creative mending. 

This has led me of late to the embellishment of an old blue lambswool sweater gone into holes (perhaps moth, but then it was 30% nylon so I doubt it, probably just a cheap sweater in the first place) with small flowers,

which remind me a little of tattoos, but without the commitment, and also, would you believe, to this rather kitsch patching which has rendered new tea towels for old:

Yes, I know, you're asking what kind of bored do you have to be to patch tea-towels? It's not like I don't have any new ones, I frequently come across and buy very tasteful ones in discount stores for next to nothing, grey ones with red embroidery, ochre coloured waffle ones, black gingham ones... trouble is they're all so pretty I can't quite bring myself to wipe up with them but instead use them as alternatives to wrapping paper at Christmas or just leave them in the cupboard. But I actually like these old towelling ones, they are efficient, and yes, I know my hygienically evolved transatlantic friends and anyone else with a dishwasher, ( ie mostly everyone) shudder at the thought of wiping up at all, but I'm very particular about rinsing and draining and changing the towels, and glasses are so much better wiped immediately very hot with a clean cloth.... and it's so annoying when your fingers go through them, and anyway I felt like doing something idle and whimsical one Sunday. I was somewhat inspired by Tom of Holland's visible mending programme, and the double thickness parts are actually rather good for purpose.

So, anyway, when the house socks which I made Tom for his last birthday from thick old short staple vintage wool

got sloppier and sloppier, and he asked me if I could perhaps shrink them a bit in the machine, and I did so rather too zealously so they turned into stiff little felt bootees which I can barely get on and he certainly can't,

I sought to make it up to him by converting the his Irish wool hiking socks which had already been darned more than once, and, New Testament style, gone into holes around the darns, into slipper socks, by sewing on soles cut from an old felted sweater, my go-to material for many creative projects. He liked them very much.

Thus slickly shod, full of enthusiastic, newly re-visioned zest for life, and taking it at a run, he misjudged something crucial and slithered down the last several stairs, whacking his foot on a wooden post so that a middle toe stuck out bizarrely and was clearly broken. 

Now Tom breaks toes about as often as I smash up cars, it's less expensive but more painful (maybe, though psychologically perhaps not...), we know what it looks like by now. No hope of medical attention on a Saturday evening and not much to be done anyway, so I slathered bruise gel everywhere possible, strapped the wonky toe to its neighbours, dosed him with tea, sugar, aspirin and whiskey, and there he is, still fairly cheerful but stopped in his newly refurbished tracks. I'm looking into bathroom silicone as a means of making non-slip soles.

Mending

I used to sew a lot as a youngster. I wasn't brilliant at it, too slapdash, and school needlework was a nightmare; a 'waist petticoat' consisting of a rectangle of white poplin with one French seam (what? Who'd want to be bothered with a thing like that, seaming twice when once would do fine... Come to that who the hell wants a poplin waist petticoat anyway?) and elastic round the top took me all of a school year, since the (possibly clinically insane) needlework teacher sent me back to unpick it time and again until it was frayed with wear, grey with fingermarks and brown with rust from the pins. However, I really did learn to sew at my mother's and my sisters' knees, it was a source of enjoyment and challenge, and if making something myself was an option I'd usually give it a try; bras and jeans could never quite match the bought versions for fit, but most other things could be attempted, and in those days home made really was often cheaper, especially when you had a mother whose idea of a good Saturday afternoon out was market stalls selling fabrics. 

Nowadays though, I've come to realise that sewing isn't really a great pleasure for me any more; it seems to be one of the many things I'm letting go with relief and without regret*.  I will make the odd curtain or cushion cover or other item for the house if called for, but I don't really enjoy it that much, and getting the machine out feels like a chore, it's strictly about the product not the process. I have a small pile of interesting fabrics, for which I had a few plans, but lately I became aware that looking at them made me feel tired and weighed down and guilty. The awareness came to me because of the difference between that feeling and the one engendered by the prospect of my stash of knitting wool, which is always one of exciting possibility and tingling in the fingers at the projects it represents, even though they may not ever come to fruition. 

However, there is one area where I regard a bit of sewing quite cheerfully, and that's in the area of mending. I know a lot of more gifted and serious needlepersons regard mending as a dreary horror, but I'm genuinely quite happy to do it, and always have been, in fact.  A patch represents a manageable morsel of sewing for me, and darning a rather charming little symbiotic flowering of weaving or embroidery. The work brings the item back into commission, but its existence isn't dependent on it. And more recently I've become quite taken with the possibilities of more creative mending, using it to embellish and make things unique.  It helps of course that I now live in such a way that eccentrically mended and tatterdemalion clothing can be worn as no one much sees it anyway. Though I've always been rather drawn to motley; there used to be an urban tribe of dreadlocked anarcho-feminists who hung out somewhere in north London when I lived in the city in the eighties who wore jeans and leather jackets entirely composed of shreds and patches, and I often looked at them rather enviously. I doubt that I would have qualified to join, my half-hearted reading of Bakunin and Malatesta and occasional purchase of 'Green Anarchist' weekly (their recipe for chickpeas with apricots was a blow-out, green anarchists must have had hearty appetites) probably wouldn't have been enough.

Anyway, here are some examples. Tom's favourite Black Watch M&S shirt, worn at the collar then torn on the sleeve on a nail, I really actually no kidding turned the collar! I have never before done this, it looked a bit odd and I had to stitch it down a bit or it stuck up but it's wearable. Then I patched the tear with a piece of green cloth table napkin someone gave me, and I decided we were never going to use leaf green cloth table napkins:

Whimsically I made it leaf shaped. And I was very pleased with my patience because I didn't tell him but put it away in the wardrobe at the end of the summer so he didn't find it done till he got it out in the spring (it's a quite thin cotton shirt).

I decided I liked the leaf motif, so when I found I had spilled something nasty on my old plummy-browny-purply yoga pants which caused a kind of stained and wrinkled splodge, I used it again:

We both wear rather a lot of polar fleece. Sometimes I feel a bit conflicted about this, it's rather nasty cheap synthetic stuff really, and contrary to some belief is almost never made from recycled plastic water bottles. It is however lighter than wool and warmer than cotton, doesn't itch, comes in nice colours, is economical and dries from the wash in the blink of an eye. If it ever scorches, though, which is an occupational hazard with a wood fire, or even from leaning over the stove, it melts in an instant, which was what happened to this purple one, of which I really was very fond because it's a very good colour.

Oh, and another thing about it is it doesn't felt, unlike wool. I have a number of old felted sweaters in my piles of stuff, and sometimes I chop them up with a view to doing something creative with them. So I made a big pocket from the bottom of one and used it to cover up the scorch mark, and as it didn't have a pocket this was quite useful. Then I put more whimsical leaves on the elbows which were a bit thin and worn, and some other totally unnecessary bits in other places too.

At this point it becomes clear how much dark reddish, brownish and purplish clothes we have in our wardrobes. Like my best linen trousers, which I thought I took good care of but then splashed some bleach on them through the laundry basket. The resulting white spot had to be covered up. Spiders' webs inspired the repair this time. 

They're really redder than the above one, the camera tends to a bluish cast, this one's more like:

I still don't mind wearing them for best, it's quite a small mend and doesn't stand out.

Sometimes mending and knitting can be comined, Tom's old Shetland jumper, which has been in his life longer than I have, went through at the elbows, so I knitted some elbow patches:

In fact the jumper's so thin now that I think it may not really have been worth the effort, but not to worry.

I like this red and purple stripe so much that I started knitting myself a hat with the same wool, but then I needed the needles for something else.

There are quite a few other half-completed mending projects in the bag: woolly walking socks with soles cut from felted sweaters waiting to be slippers, other old sweaters with their sleeves cut off to be made into waistcoats, the sleeves perhaps into boot toppers.  They may not all get finished, and it's all quite unnecessary, inexpensive and perfectly adequate new clothes can be bought, but it's fun, and satisfying, and no one else has got them.

*Many of these - drawing, painting, writing poems... - are quite possibly just on hold, and I'll come back to them later, for the moment I simply don't feel I need to be doing them.