Dreams

This weekend, Nicki, a friend in Maine, is realising a dream that she and her family have been working towards for a while. They're having the grand opening of a shop in Winthrop, called Freckle Salvage Company. They've been selling vintage items at fairs and on ebay and now they'll have their own brick and mortar space on Main St as well. They'll be offering vintage items and will be supporting other local small businesses by having their products and art/craft items available. The grand opening will be Saturday.

I'm always thrilled when people can follow their dreams and if I could be there in person on Saturday, I would be, but since that's not possible, I sent some stitching to wish them well.

I needle felted the base using off cuts of roving and did some 'quilting' to add texture. The words were cross-stitched on scraps of aida cloth and sewed on. Then I embellished with beads and bits, mostly from deconstructed necklaces I've picked up at charity shops. The hanging loop is a brass ring from a loaf of barm brack, a raisin bread that is available here during the few weeks around Halloween. The 'kid with the freckle,' after which the shop is named, was born near Halloween and it's one of Nicki's favourite times of year, so I wanted to include a small seasonal bit.

I am so happy for these wonderful people and I wish them great happiness and success as they begin this chapter of their lives.

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Wee Pottery Jug

We were in Donegal Town today, so we called in at the Animals in Need charity shop. The volunteer woman was almost buried under bags of donations so we were happy enough to make some space. Bill found a pair of pants--they have lots of pockets, which he likes. I picked up a couple of books. Oddly, one of the books I picked up was one I had reserved in e-audiobook format. I try to not have too many audiobooks checked out at one time and I have one downloaded already. I have others reserved, but they are not due to be available for weeks. One came in early, though, so that gave me two, plus one that was going to be coming in tomorrow. I decided to cancel that reserve and look for it again some other time. When I saw that very book in the charity shop, I bought that. Weird timing.

Bill spotted this wee jug and I told him we'd take it. I love it.

It's a handmade piece--potter's mark is on the bottom. I find some pottery videos weirdly relaxing, so sometimes I sort of zone out and watch someone create a cool bowl, vase, cup, or whatever. As we were waiting for the bus and I was looking at this, I thought about how I have some idea about how it was made because of those videos and this makes me love it even more.

The first thing I picked up was the yarn--it was a good day for yarn. These are all wool. I've thanked a sheep, although this is probably old enough that whatever sheep created it is now no longer with us.

I never leave that charity shop without checking the necklaces to see if there are any to deconstruct for beads. I was not disappointed today.

The middle one was in the free basket--love that shell and all those tiny wooden beads. The tubular beads in the necklace on the left feel like bamboo and the round ones are wood. The necklace on the right is hard to see, but there are three large glass beads and a bunch of smaller ones.

I also like those little metal separators--they come in handy as embellishments in their own right.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I took my new upcycled bag for a test run today. As I was stuffing wool into it at the charity shop, the woman commented, 'That's a nice bag.' 'Thank you,' I replied. I told her it was a cushion cover that I'd turned into a bag. 'No way!' she said and asked me if I made the handle. I nodded and an older woman craned her neck to look. 'Sure it was a cushion cover! I have those very cushions at home!' she said. They commented on how clever it was and were still talking about it as we walked outside. Made my day.

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Upcycling: Cushion Cover to Tote Bag

Last month, Bill picked up a set of 6 cushion covers from the local charity shop, because he thought I'd like the fabric. I do like it and might end up cutting one or two up. But the first thing I did was to get a couple of blanket wraps that I am not using right now--one is in Christmas colours, so I only use it for a month or so out of the year--and put one in each of two cushion covers. They fit perfectly! I like sitting in bed looking out the window at the treetops, the water and the hills beyond while I listen to stuff and stitch in the evenings/nights. I am much more comfortable with my 'pillow' behind my back.

When he first brought them home, I thought that they'd make good bags. The fabric is sturdy and the zipper is at the top. I plunked the idea into my mind and let it simmer. The main thing was deciding how I wanted the straps to be. By this afternoon, it had simmered enough and I rummaged around in my yarn scrap collection to find some black and some grey. I grabbed my 10mm crochet hook and got started. Holding two strands together, I chained a lot. I think I stopped at 270ish. I made a triple crochet (US terms) in each chain, starting in the 4th one from the hook. Then, I turned and did surface crochet slip stitches back to the other end, then turned again and did the same thing back again. I find that the surface crochet chains provide some extra sturdiness and the handle is less stretchy. Then it was just a matter of sewing the straps to the bag. To do that, I used 4 strands of size 30 crochet cotton, just to make sure it was very strong, since I was sewing by hand. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out and I think the bag will be handy. I'll do a test run with it tomorrow.

it actually does lie flat, I took the pic before I noticed the waviness--the grey stripes on the strap are the two rows of surface slip stitches

I hope it's a nice day in your neck of the woods.

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Quiet Interlude

I stopped what I was doing for a few minutes this afternoon to stand in the doorway and enjoy the rain, fresh air, and the view. What a beautiful, peaceful, and refreshing interlude it was.

colours dazzle

through curtain of rain

view from the doorway

I hope you have moments of quiet beauty in your day, too.

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Nonfiction and Deconstruction

In addition to the short story collections, haiku, and fiction that I read and listened to in July, I had a few excellent nonfiction titles in the mix as well. Here they are:

Walking: One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge

Reflections on walking, whether it’s to work on a weekday morning or across Antarctica. The author draws on his own experiences as a walker to consider how walking improves his life and his ability to see things in a different way. Bill and I, both walkers ourselves, could relate to a lot of what he was saying.

Constellations: Reflections from Life by Sinead Gleeson

I used to listen to Sinead Gleeson when she was host of The Book Show on RTE Radio 1. A few years ago, she edited a collection of short stories written by Irish women, many of whom had been forgotten. Bill bought me that book, called The Long Gaze Back, and it’s a great book—definitely a keeper. Shortly after that one, she edited a collection of short stories by women from the north of Ireland (if I recall correctly both Northern Ireland and the northern part of the Republic of Ireland) which was also good. When I read an excerpt of this book, I went right to the library website and added my name to the queue. I waited a while, but it was worth the wait.

The book is an essay collection that adds up to a sort of memoir. It is structured around the author’s experiences inhabiting a female body in Ireland at a particular period of time. As a child, she was diagnosed with an uncommon problem that required many operations and caused her to be in a lot of pain. She missed a lot of school and spend a good deal of time alone in bed, recovering. Books, she tells us, were her friends. As an adult, she had other health issues that have shaped her life. While she organises the book around these physical traumas, she also connects them, as stars are connected in our minds to form constellations, with books, art, religion, memory, relationships, and more. Great book!

 Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

I first became aware of this book when Lit Hub published an excerpt. I looked at the library, but it wasn’t in the system. I kept checking back until a few weeks later, there it was. I placed my hold. The central question of the book is there in the subtitle. McKibben discusses this question in relation to the climate emergency currently underway, as well as the ongoing development of AI. He’s been sounding the alarm about climate change for 30+ years now, so that part of the book is a continuation of that work. He points out that we have a narrow window of opportunity to minimise the damage, but that time is running out. He lays out some of the structural obstacles to meaningful change put in place by various governments and he wonders whether there is really a will on the part of people, especially in wealthy nations, to make the necessary changes. He tells the reader about a collaboration between poets, one from the Marshall Islands, which is already contaminated due to US nuclear testing and one from Greenland, which is melting (with the highest level of glacial melt in one day just a few days ago). he provided excerpts from the poem they wrote together and it is powerful. We would all do well to listen to what they have to say. I went in search of the entire poem, and found this video of the poets themselves speaking it. 

When he moves into the AI segment of the book, he gives an overview of what is going on with that technology and shares the views of some of the people working in and funding this area of research and experimentation (and some of them are pretty out there). He does all of this to then ask the question, ‘Is this really a good idea?’ From there he proceeds to tell readers what some of the dangers are, including the possibility that the technology will eventually evolve into something beyond human control. This wasn’t a fun, fluffy read, but it was a very interesting and thought-provoking book, which poses questions that we should all be considering. I’m glad I read it. 

I deconstructed my newly acquired charity shop necklaces yesterday and got the beads and other pieces into containers, so now they're ready to go whenever inspiration strikes.

You can just see one tiny metal bead by itself off to the right of the chains. I had a whole pile of those, but I'd put them in a container before I took the picture. 

I thought the colourful pile of wooden beads--all from one necklace--looked pretty cool as it sat there in an abstract sort of way.

It's the summer bank holiday weekend here, so of course it rained. This made me very happy, of course, and I hope there's plenty more where that came from, but I did experience a twinge of feeling for the firefighters down the hill, who are doing a car wash fundraiser. Yesterday, when it was sunny, warm, and dry might have been a better day for them. Anyway, I enjoyed the rain shower, finished a book, and might cast on a sock shortly. I hope your day brings plenty of simple pleasures, too.

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Cosy, Comic, Creative

There were times in July when I was so tired that I felt like I couldn't really focus on much of anything. At times like that, it's nice to have comfort reading. For me, that usually means Golden Age or cosy mysteries and short stories. I posted about the short story collections I read yesterday and here's the mystery portion of my July reading.

Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh

As part of my July ‘comfort reading’ I turned once again to Golden Age detective fiction, continuing on with Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series. In this novel, a community theatrical performance does not go as planned when, as soon as the prelude beings, the piano player winds up dead. Alleyn is called in, since (of course) the local force is stretched thin and the case is complicated.

A Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh

Luke Watchman, a well-known barrister, is off on a holiday to the Devon coast. He is looking forward to the annual meet-up with his cousin and a friend. Sadly for Luke, his holiday doesn’t last long, because he is hit in the finger with a dart during a bet and succumbs to potassium cyanide poisoning. Roderick Alleyn is called in to investigate.

A Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh (published in the US as Death of a Peer)

The large Lamprey family, back in London from New Zealand, is short of money—a usual state of affairs for them. They’ve decided that the only way to get out of the current mess they’re in is to call on the father’s brother, who has the family money, home, and title, and ask him for help. This guy does not think well of his brother or the rest of the family and when he arrives at the Lamprey flat, things do not go well. He angrily storms into the lift to leave, but by the time he makes it to the ground floor, he has suffered a gruesome injury. He hangs on a little longer, but in the end, Roderick Alleyn is called in to investigate the murder.

I'm frequently torn between spending time stitching or reading. I know some people do both at once, but I've never been able to do that. Happily, the library has an e-audiobook section that allows me to download audiobooks at any time of the day or night. This is a good solution, as long as the reader is good. I've returned books without listening beyond the beginning when I found the reader annoying, but I've also listened to several good books, including this one:

 Amy Wingate’s Journal by Marcia Willett (audiobook read by Phyllida Nash)

I wasn’t sure about this book when I saw it. I decided to give it a try, since I could easily delete it if I didn’t like the story or the reader. Turns out, I quite enjoyed both and I was soon into the story and, on more than one occasion, unable to stop laughing. I am not familiar with this author’s work beyond this book, so I don’t know whether the humour is usual. Phyllida Nash was an excellent reader, too, and she might have had something to do with why I thought parts of the book were extremely funny. That’s not to say it was a comedy, though. I’d be laughing one minute and then feeling a bit of heartache a few minutes later. I also smiled when the main character mentioned at one point that she was listening to Allegri’s Miserere, which is one of my favourite pieces of music.

The story is written in the form of a journal, as you can tell from the title. Amy Wingate is a middle-aged former teacher who has taken early retirement. She lives in a ‘tall, thin, house by the sea’ and has bursts of rage that she finds inexplicable. She seeks advice for this and it is suggested that she keep a journal. She decides to give this a try at the same time that events in her life begin to demand more of her time and attention. The journal is a way for her to process what is happening and her thoughts and feelings about these events. This process naturally leads her to consider how events from her past have impacted her life. She attempts to keep things buried, but as she keeps writing, more comes to the surface.

I enjoyed this book a lot and I’m glad I gave it a chance.

 I'm definitely a listener and not a watcher--I don't have a TV or go to the cinema. I subscribe to a bunch of  podcasts and regularly check for new audiobooks to download so I'll always have something to listen to while I stitch. I also keep my eyes open for stitching supplies, and I had some great luck in that regard this week.

The other day, we called in at the Animals in Need charity shop in Donegal Town. I always check their 1 euro board that has necklaces pinned to it--it's where stuff goes that has not been selling. I chose a couple of necklaces for the beads.

As I was paying, I noticed a basket on the counter. It was full and had a sign on it saying 'free to good home.' 'Well,' I thought, 'I have a good home and I quite like this metal bit.'

I pulled it out and discovered this:

the beads that look like a copper colour are really more pink

I don't want the fabric flower bit, so will take that off and keep the metal piece it's glued to. As I was pulling this piece out, more beads caught my eye, so I took those as well. There was more there than I thought, having only seen the wooden beads while it was in the basket.

Yesterday, we walked down to our local charity shop. We go every couple of weeks to see if they have any plant pots that aren't too small, since the number of houseplants we have keeps growing. We were lucky and found one. I also scored a couple of necklaces there.

the necklace on the left is all metal and the blue flowers have round metal pieces and jump rings on the back

I'll deconstruct all of these, saving the findings, chains, and all other usable parts as well as the beads and other bits. I've got a couple of things in progress that I was stalled on and some of these parts will be perfect for embellishing those. I was going back and forth about how to finish them and now I know. I'm really pleased--I found some great stuff to work with, supported community projects and animals, kept stuff out of the landfill, and none of this came with any packaging, as it would have if I'd bought beads or findings online, so no packaging for the landfill, either. Wins all around!

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Short Forms

I did a lot of  'comfort reading' last month, much of which was short form work--short story collections and haiku.

Turbulence by David Szalay

I came across this collection of linked short stories when scrolling through the e-book section of the library website and it sounded intriguing, so I borrowed it. I’m glad I did! All of the stories involve journeys by plane, beginning in London and moving around the world to Madrid, South America, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, the Middle East, Budapest, and back to London, to the same flat in which the book opens.

Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang

This was a new addition to the short story offerings in the e-book section of the library website. The author was born in China and moved to the US as a small child. The stories are about the immigrant experience, how people navigate that, and the struggles to adapt. Some of the stories were a bit weird, but I really enjoyed the book.

The Matisse Stories by A.S, Byatt

I came across this book while checking the e-book section of the library website. Each story was inspired by a Matisse painting. I was particularly partial to the one involving a textile artist.

Between the Leaves: New Haiku Writing from Ireland, edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky

I’ve always been interested, in a general sort of way, in haiku. I was looking up something related at the library, which I didn’t find, but I did come across this book and the fact of it intrigued me—a Japanese art form, written by Irish people, and edited by a guy with a name that seems like it could be Russian. It’s so cross-cultural. A few of the poems in the book took my breath away. I enjoyed it a lot.

Haiku Inspirations: Poems and Meditations on Nature and Beauty by Tom Lowenstein

Bill came across this book when he was looking for something else and bought it for me as a surprise. What a lovely book it is! It contains examples of haiku, along with lots of contextual information. The book does not get bogged down in a deep discussion of every aspect of the form, but rather gives general overviews of the historical context in which haiku developed and the cultures in which it evolved. There are brief biographies of a few well-known haiku practitioners and examples of their work. There is a section on Zen Buddhism and how that influenced the form. There is also a lot of beautiful artwork. I love this book—so glad he found it!

Happy August!

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