Embroidery is growing on me—it’s like drawing, just with yarn. This one captures my longstanding love/hate relationship with autumn: season of the most beautiful pale yellows and golds, of lovely watery sunshine, and of the most godawful hayfever…
hayfever season
Did I know something when I posted that sketchy last entry? The sidewise, frowny look? I’ve lost more than a month out of my life since then.
Late Feb/early March, I was busy with life-y things, and then, so busy with life-y things I got sideswiped by a flu-y thing, and then KO’d by a viral thing that took advantage of the flu-y thing to set up house in my knees, ankles and finger joints. This makes it hard to do pretty much anything I should or would like to do, from driving to knitting. Conveeeeenient!
I admit, that first day off work was pretty nice. Despite a roaring sore throat et al., I enjoyed having total control of the television and indulged in endless episodes of 30 Rock, endless cups of tea, and a day to myself at home.
But that was in early April. And guess what? I’m still home. And I’ve watched every episode of 30 Rock and several other shows, not to mention read pretty much the entire Internet (or at least the crafty bits). And to quote something I uncovered online during my convalescence: Blow this virus hence to hell! Had enough of it.
The enforced downtime has not been a total loss, however. I’ve been doing some very gentle cutty/pasty artwork, and finally found a tiny canvas stretcher for this ‘yarn drawing’, done in healthier days. Just looking at the sweet, tiny little stitches made me feel quite a bit better, actually.
Sampler sample
Recently I needed to find an old sketch, and it took me a while. Here’s 20+ years worth of sketchbooks. Which makes me sound either very old or very experienced, or both. And neither is really the case. In my opinion. Moderately aged and experienced will do.
20+ years of journals
I waver between drawing and writing but the majority of my blank books are unlined, and contain drawings. The earliest journals I’ve kept are written; I didn’t start keeping a sketchbook until I was at art school in the late 80s. Some of my dip pen nibs date back that far.
Her nibs
In my early years of editorial assistantship in the magazine industry in New York, I wrote and wrote, probably to keep myself sane. The odd sketch pops up. I think I liked to reassure myself that I could still draw.
I stopped writing and drawing altogether when my kids were babies. Recently I found a journal that went from written entries entirely to a list of daily entries recording my premature son’s feeding schedule. This actually shows exactly where my head was.
Now I have too many blank books on the go. There’s some moleskines, both blank and lined pages (and one with watercolour paper) and a couple of generic blank books. And of course the online writing…
But here’s a fair selection of what I use on the desk at home. The tech pens are mostly a nostalgic throwback. I love the idea of them (and used pens like this contantly in high school) but they’re buggers for clogging and leaking. Soluble graphite is something newer — the giant crayon-looking things are lovely new additions to the drawing arsenal.
Drawing gear
I decided that for my daughter’s first day of school, I’d make her the much-coveted school uniform dress. I’m not a terribly experienced sewer, but I can follow a pattern, and armed with a couple of good books and friends to pester with questions, I’ll muddle through.
As I stood at the counter in Potslight yesterday, reading the back of the envelope, the questions began to well up. “This pattern starts at size 7″, I noted, more to myself than to saleswoman. (My daughter is a tall and skinny little 5). And then I wondered out loud: Would it be hard to alter this pattern? I knew I could shorten it, and take it in, but what about the shoulders? The sleeve caps?
The saleswoman raised an eyebrow, assured me I could adjust the pattern, and suggested I go and choose some fabric. When I presented with my cotton gingham and assorted other bits, the eyebrow was up again. “This fabric is only 90 cm wide.”
There was a long pause. Did she want me to go pick another bolt or what? She wasn’t telling.
“So…do you think I need more than 2m for the smallest size, if I’m making the dress shorter, and narrower?”
There was another pause. “Are you sure you want to make this dress?” she asked.
I blinked. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, you can buy school dresses at Target.”
My turn to raise the eyebrows. Honey, why would you bake lamingtons when you can buy them at Coles? Why knit socks when you can get three pairs to a pack at Big W? Why would I bother to own a sewing machine when there are so many sweatshops around the world with bigger ones?
I wish I could say I asked her any of these questions, but I am terribly slow on the retort time. I just mumbled something about preferring 100% cotton fabric, over poly/cotton blends, for kids with eczema. That’s fully true, but it’s just one short answer—hardly the whole story.
I suspect the long answer would have been wasted on her anyway. I just gathered up my bits and bobs and bustled the kids out of the store—although I was sorely tempted to let them rampage their way through the ribbons and buttons aisle as we went.
Happy holidays and all that jazz! I know it’s a holiday cause I woke up late this morning—after a dream in which I’d decided to make a movie called Clutter.
I didn’t—don’t—know the first thing about making movies, but I had an enormous video camera with a back panel like a Boeing’s, all dials and buttons. Surely I could work something out?
My housemates were sceptical as I described a critical scene to them: you sit there, on the couch, and you sit there, on the chair, and you read or whatever, and the girl character dashes back and forth, on and off the screen, and while you stay utterly the same through the scene, she changes clothes with each pass across the camera. ‘Because that’s how it is, right? The women are always running around madly, constantly changing, doing something all the time, while the blokes are a constant…’
At this point one of the housemates, Daniel Radcliffe, smiles kindly and indulgently, and wanders off to the kitchen to make some tea. ‘Don’t worry’, I call after him, ‘yours can be an uncredited guest performance!’
A real-life friend once told me he rarely remembers his dreams, and when he does, they don’t have ‘snappy dialogue’ like mine do. But who’s the one working as a professional writer, eh? Not I.
After tea and toast for breakfast, I thought I would write a little bit. I have a novel tucked up safe in my Mac. (Who doesn’t?) Maybe I should work on it. Clutter is definitely a theme I could work with.
But some creative people derail themselves on teev. Me, it’s the internet. There’s always something. And today it was an email from my brother in law to my husband, to the ‘family’ email addy. (I am many things, but not a spy.)
They’re batting some family tree research back and forth, and from the email I bounced to my brother in law’s blog, an extremely entertaining and occasionally unsettling insight into the Coddington family gene pool.
From there, on to other blogs, and so here I sit some hours later, at my desk, on my ever-widening suburban butt, reading about other people’s adventures, wondering how I’d ever come up with material to equal it for intrigue—certainly not through experience, and probably not in my dreams, either.
What’s a gal to do? The writer in me gets restless sometimes, directing me via my dreams, but in waking hours, she doesn’t want to write. She keeps crocheting granny squares and listening to Harry Potter audiobooks, and dreaming dreams of clutter.
I woke up this morning, the 11th morning in a row that I have woken up sick, and found I was feeling a bit better at last.
For one thing, I could swallow without wincing. For another, my brain, which has lately felt about as animated as a large wet sponge, was turning over and over with ideas. (Normally, a lot of my unspoken sentences start with, “Hey, I have a good idea…!”)
Because I’m still pretty sick, The Doctor* intercepted incoming sprogs, quarantining them from their germy mother, and went to make pancakes for breakfast. So I had a few minutes to lie in bed, enjoy the ability to swallow and to think quietly to myself, anticipating food already on the table when I did finally get up. (And hey, it’s not even Mother’s Day.)
My old boss, Rolling Stone honcho Jann Wenner, is going to be on Enough Rope (Andrew Denton’s brilliant Q&A show on the ABC) tonight. This prompted some thinking about working life, and how I’ve been influenced by my work (Yarn was inspired in part by my time at Rolling Stone after all).
But I’ve spent my career thus far in supporting roles, crossing paths with characters living a lot larger than I am, and basically giving it up for marriage and motherhood.
So as I was lying there, I was reviewing things in my head. What a long, strange trip it’s been, sort of. I thought of the time one of the editors went into Jann’s office to meet Hunter S Thompson and returned wearing a slightly dazed expression and a peculiar sparkle in her pale blue eyes.
So? we asked her. ‘I said hello’, she said, offering us her hand as if to shake, as she must have done to Hunter.
And? ‘He slapped me!’
And?! ‘I slapped him back!’
There are so many little stories. It’s way too long for a blog post. I just found myself wondering whether there’s a memoir in an ordinary life lived on the fringes of interesting stuff, of being an observer and not so much a participant.
I used to write fiction and won a couple of prizes at uni for it. But over time I’ve become more interested in writing non-fiction, although not in reporting, which has never been a talent of mine. I do, however, have kind of an elephantine memory—not photographic, but encompassing, and accurate enough. So there’s a lot of junk in the attic, and personally, I enjoy rummaging in a good attic.
Anyway, I’m better enough for the idea to flicker onto my mental screen, nowhere near better enough to contemplate actually tackling such a project. Just thinking out loud.
* I think I will call Husband ‘The Doctor’ en blogge henceforth. I have the good fortune to be married to a Very Clever Man (although he is far too modest to say so and prefers to refer to himself as gormless) and I bet he could run a Tardis well enough if he ever encountered one. Although at times like this I wish he were more the sort of Doctor who could prescribe high-powered antibiotics and not so much the sort who understands things like string theory. He does make a fine cup of tea, regardless.
Installation is such a mechanical word. It makes me think of having to update things on my computer when everything was working fine — which is fixing what ain’t broke.
Maybe this is one of my little problems with art installations. They fix what’s not broken. Gilding the lily, you know. I went to see a little ‘installation’ at a place called Seedling Art Space in the Adelaide Hills last weekend. Or, um, the weekend before? (Already?) It was a bit hard to find, but it was a pretty neat little spot at the corner of a lovely old property in Hawthorndene. The art was a bit ordinary, made special by the place.
Is that the nature of an art installation? Turn something ordinary into art by putting it in a special place? (Like those fridges from way back?)
I’m not sure that’s all, actually. Sometimes, apparently, you have to add a lot of language to make it so. Like in this invitation I got this morning, to an installation in (coincidentally?) the Seedling Art Space.
‘During October, Seedling Art Space will experience a series of “provocative artefacts” installed by the artist (a [uni deleted] doctoral candidate who shall go unnamed).’
Of the installation, the degree candidate states: “…Inside hang pelts and hybrid artefacts that allude to a discordant and ambivalent relationship with nature. The sense of phobic interiority in Hideout serves to reveal through the agency of materials and artefacts these slippages and blindspots in our unsettled relationship with nature.”
You know what all this says to me? Let me translate:
“…Seedling Art Space will experience…” = “I will hang some stuff at Seedling”
“…a series of provocative artefacts” = “a few wicked cool thingos if I do say so myself”
” …installed by [the artist]…” = “DIY”
“…Inside hang pelts and hybrid artefacts … ” = “didn’t I tell you this stuff is wicked cool?”
“…that allude to a discordant and ambivalent relationship with nature…” = “I spend a lot of time indoors”
“The sense of phobic interiority in Hideout …” = “by the way, it’s a very small gallery”
“…serves to reveal through the agency of materials and artefacts these slippages and blindspots in our unsettled relationship with nature.” = “No, really, I spend a lot of time indoors”
A nice thing about Seedling Art Space is that there’s a lovely little trail wending its way through the long grass up the hill away from the installation area and into the woods, so you can give the art a passing glance if you choose — and then you can spend your day considering (and building) your own relationship with nature instead of gazing into the ‘phobic interiority’ of someone else’s navel.
Hi there to visitors from Sticks & String! I have long been a fan of David’s podcasting style (and I have a soft spot for physicists anyway, being married to one) so it was truly my pleasure to be one of David’s interviewees at the Bendigo Sheep & Wool Show a few weeks back.
I imagine it took him a while to whip that particular Q&A into shape—my brain tends to go a bit extra squirrely at the sight of a camera or microphone pointed my way (fortunately it doesn’t happen very often!). But with Sticks & String, you know you’re in good hands, whether you’re a listener or an interviewee, so I was able to listen back without worry.
I’m actually painting today. I love wooden furniture, but there’s something very special about painted wood. There was quite a bit of painted stuff dotted around the house I grew up in, and thinking of it, I finally painted up a few plain little frames from Ikea.
(O Ikea, how I missed you when I moved overseas! But since you have come to Adelaide, my supply of cheap, plentiful wooden things for decorating is undiminished.)
I had a few colour schemes in mind, and a rough picture in my head of a simple graphic. So, yesterday I painted the frames, and today I cut a little flower stamp and applied some design. Much nicer than plain, doncha think? Next step is to rub them with beeswax to deepen the colours and bring out the grain.
Altered frames
Getting rid of stuff in the house where I grew up was a funny thing. We were four women, three generations, living in a largeish house with ample storage space, but there was never enough room for stuff. We were always needing to make more room for new stuff.
Of stuff, there was ‘your stuff’, ‘my stuff’ and some loosely communal stuff, which often had a known owner but was always in circulation. Jewelry was communal stuff, Barbie clothes (though not Barbies) were communal stuff, and some items of clothing were communal too, like certain sweaters, LL Bean hunting boots and a ski jacket which still bore the remnant of a pink 1965 Sun Valley lift ticket on its left hood string and was only ever worn for going outside to feed the dog.
My grandmother was well-known (and feared) for throwing away other people’s stuff to make room for her stuff. (From my stuff two things went missing which I still mourn: a friend’s great-grandfather’s WW1 pilot’s jacket—which had a hideous hole in the elbow but was still beautiful and, more to the point, not mine to throw away—and a photocopied lyric sheet from a 10,000 Maniacs album which had been drawn on and autographed by Natalie Merchant herself.)
The rest of us had a few choices: you could give your stuff away, throw it away, or foist it on someone else in the house, and if you were me, usually it was the latter. This meant it was no longer my stuff but it was still close by, and yet I had room for more more stuff. Brilliant!
Books, too, were communal, more or less. They sort of belonged to the house, which had large built-in-shelves covering a living room wall. A lot of the books had come with the house, like classics, old textbooks, and oddities including a whole set of World Books from the 1950s, beautifully typeset in Futura and woefully outdated (though this did not stop my sister or me from referencing them for school reports and probably explains a lot about my teenage worldview).
We were all good readers and the house library did get used. Like a lot of people, my grandmother became a compulsive reader of mysteries and crime novels, and she also would re-read a favourite classic from time to time. These would often be bookmarked with Kleenex, or with an old, folded magazine subscription blow-in card (one of those mailback postcards that snow out of an American magazine the minute you pick it up).
On my last visit home, in 2005 for Gram’s memorial service, I spent two weeks in the house with my mom and my daughter (still three generations, just one woman down, since my sister was living in the UK and was too pregnant to travel). I enjoyed this time at my home in its everyday state, knowing it would be the last time I could be home. I enjoyed walking around outside, visiting with some high school friends, seeing lots of cousins, and I spent a lot of time sorting out ‘my stuff’, which had dwindled over the years, subject to my periodic culling as well as my grandmother’s and later my mother’s.
I wanted to take the whole house back to Australia with me, just fold it down like closing a pop-up book, and take it all away with me, because it contained so much of my memory in it—stuff I’m foisting on you now—but in the end I had to be realistic.
I recognised my useless stuff for what it was and threw it out. The things I could not bear to chuck out (a couple of LPs, Barbie clothes which were communal and could not legally travel home with me, some books) I foisted on my mother. And I had collected new stuff which I needed to make room for in my suitcase: a small stuffed animal for my daughter, a marble game for my son, two duck prints for my husband—note none of them seems to particularly like or appreciate these things but oh well—plus a large teapot, a copper jelly mould, four pretty rice bowls, a little Portuguese cream jug, and a book for me.
The book was a funny thing. The Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang (fourteenth printing, 1938), was tucked onto (another) bookshelf in the den, where my grandmother’s stuff had piled up due to the time she spent there watching TV, reading, napping, having meals—so although it wasn’t something I would have expected her to read, I I knew she must have been reading it (and the subscription-card bookmark inside was a giveaway). But the endpaper bears a sticker with my great-grandmother’s name and address in it so I don’t know who was pencilling lines under certain passages and folding down the odd page.
I picked the book up again recently (admittedly to use as a prop in a photo shoot) and in flicking through it and noting the particular marked phrases, realised again that I have a treasure on my hands here. The book itself, and also, the book as a window into the minds of two women who’ve shaped me just by virtue of being alive, passing along their thoughts, their ways of doing things, handing them along through generations (for better or for worse). Here’s a bit that helps explain what I mean, and why I might want to blog about it anyway:
“There is a method of appealing to one’s own intuitive judgment, of thinking out one’s own ideas and forming one’s own independent judgments, and confessing them in public with a childish impudence, and sure enough, some kindred souls in another corner of the world will agree with you. A person forming his ideas in this manner will often be astounded to discover how another writer said exactly the same things and felt exactly the same way, but perhaps expressed the ideas more easily and more gracefully. It is then that he discovers the ancient author and the ancient author bears him witness, and they become forever friends in spirit.”
Good stuff. Stuff to keep.
I have a rubbish bin full of tissues that needs emptying, and I had two job offers last week. I’m still pinching myself over that. I haven’t had a job offer in, like, forever, because in Adelaide, job offers don’t happen to normal people. Well, maybe that do, but they don’t to me. (Maybe I’m not normal.)
One was a communications job in an arts and crafts capacity, the other a long-term project editing a knitting book for a designer. And I had to pick ONE.
It wasn’t an easy, relaxed weekend. I sneezed a lot, moped around and also whinged at length to husband and to a very wise friend who pointed out: ‘You’re always sick.’
I started to say, Now, I’m sure I’m not always sick, but because she’s one of those people who is usually right, I stopped to think about whether I am always sick. I do tend to talk to her a lot more in times of stress, and come to think of it, I’m usually sick at those times. Do I get sick because I’m stressed, or does stress prey on illness? I’m pretty sure it’s a downward spiral.
Anyway, I have been sick a lot in the last few years. I stay up too late trying to have free time because I chase after family and work all the rest of the time. Something has got to make way for me.
So I have just said no to the communications job. I was almost twisting my own arm to force myself to do it, but I did it. The book job it is. Which scares the beejeezus out of me, but in a good way. It will fit in amongst other freelance jobs and allow me to…
…to go to bed, actually. When I’m sick.
Update: The wool scour is staying open!
