Raven and Sparrow

Wax on

I have finished transferring the pattern to my tablecloth and have started to wax. I forgot how rough it is to wax on linen....literally rough, it snags and grabs the tjanting and makes my lines wobble. I never get through a waxing without blobs and wobbles, and usually it doesn't matter by the time the cloth is done, unless it does. I can never tell ahead of time. I've already made the linen too dark for the light springy look I was hoping for, but usually the best thing, barring huge errors, is to just keep forging ahead.

Patterns on paper

    My need for more springy tablecloths started me thinking about what I might like to make to fill the gap. This sort of idea is usually just the platform I dive from and the finished product may not be spring-like at all, but everything starts somewhere, and here we are at the beginning. What looks like spring? Spring is fresh and new...young leaves in golden green and clean lines like checkerboards...how about some vines running over a green and white checkerboard? Okay! Should the vine switch from dark to light depending on what color square it is crossing? No, too flickery, but the vine stems should be barely suggested and the checkerboard should be broken. I make these decisions as I draw and scribble on a small preliminary pattern, not very neatly executed. When I get the proportions of things working together, the vines moving across the space in a reasonable way, and the dark squares placed, I move to the proper scale for a tablecloth.     

    The linen I have chosen is 54" square, so I can make a cloth that is 48" square, leaving room for hemming and weirdness around the edges. This is actually kind of close, I usually make a smaller pattern and then add a border. There won't be much of a border on this one. I make sixteen separate 12" squares on tracing paper, each one further broken down into 3" squares which correspond to the grid on my little pattern. Using the squares as a guide I approximate the paths of the vine stems in each square foot, mark which little squares will be dark, and tape them together to make the larger, true sized pattern. Once they are set together and any stray stems have been joined or corrected, I use the little pattern as a suggestion about where to put the leaf shapes. As I was fiddling with the preliminary pattern I had decided that the leaves should all be the exact (well sort of exact) same shape and size, playing a little game between naturalistic plant growth and simple graphic shapes. This might not work, but I probably won't know until it is done. Anyway, I now cut out a plain leaf shape from stencil plastic and draw around it over and over until the big pattern looks something like the small one, with vines and leaves and grids.

    The last step is to copy the taped paper conglomeration onto polyester pattern material. This makes the pattern into something more stable, and easier to handle. I can pin or baste it onto the linen to keep it from moving around as I trace it onto the cloth. There is a lot of tracing involved in all of this, but now the pattern is re-usable. I hope it will be something I will want to re-use.

Spring Stars

Another spring table, and I'm rummaging through my stuff for something different. I don't have very many tablecloths that say spring to me, and now that I'm entertaining more often I feel like I need more. I did find a cloth I made years ago by doing fold and clamp on a rough hand-woven runner from India. I dyed the cloth with osage orange and then clamped star-shaped wooden cut-outs from the craft store on the folded cloth and dipped it in indigo. I got a soft springy sort of green with yellow stars where the clamped wood resisted the indigo. Some of the stars were less well-defined than others, so I used embroidery to outline and enhance them. The blues of the embroidery thread made the runner look best with my blue undercloth. Once that combination came together the table took off and became something different than I expected. The green that first attracted me to the runner became less important than the yellow and blue, Yellow plates, and a blue pitcher with daffodils moved in and made a stronger, funkier statement than I first envisioned. My Mexican glassware and the huge, ziggy stainless worked the best with the rough, casual textiles and the square plates. I don't know how springy this table is....maybe it's energy has something to do with the green fuse that drives the flower....but it was fun to do.

Lake in the woods

Spring has been iffy for a couple of years now, so we were delighted with the gift of a lovely day in April. We celebrated by walking around a woodland lake. All of the woods in the center of our island have been saved from logging and development, including this pretty pond called Little Cranberry. When Mike was young this was his playground. It is ecologically interesting because it has two floating islands. One even has trees on it. There is a trail that goes all the way around the lake, threading its way between the trees, the rocks and cliffs of this very rocky place, and the water. In a couple of places it is  narrow indeed, but we managed to keep our feet dry.

Spring is budding up and blooming everywhere you look.

Easter Zen

It seemed like a laid-back weekend was in store...Saturday at home, and Easter dinner with my family at my parents' house. Then, Saturday morning we got a call from some friends we hadn't seen in a long time who were in the area for the day. Of course we asked them to dinner and when they accepted the weekend went from laid back to highly active. With time so short I was tempted to re-use the table setting from a couple of weeks ago, but it was the day before Easter, the weather was finally sunny and the setting just didn't seem appropriate any more.

So...an Easter table, chop chop. None of my pieces were right in color or theme, but I did have a peach colored undercloth. I thought I'd use it with green, yellow and pink dishes and pink glassware, as I had the last time I gave a dinner at Easter. I have some glittery eggs somewhere that might add some interest.I ironed the peach cloth and added a vintage white linen embroidered runner. Lacking flowers I got a small house plant in a white basket and put it in the middle. The basket immediately made the whole thing more low key, less sparkly. Now the glittery eggs didn't seem right. I already had a basket of china eggs as a seasonal decoration in the hall, so I robbed it for duller, more realistic eggs and that seemed good. I had little soft green leaf dishes as a gift from my friend Marie, and they also seemed good. I used the same candle holders, and the same green ribbon from my last table. The center now was almost entirely green and white, very quiet and more naturalistic than I first envisioned...sort of Zen-like, I thought; The pink glasses and dishes were too much so I went back to clear. I really liked the unflashy solidity of it, but worried that it lacked spirit. So, using the exception that proves the rule, I got out the chartreuse crystal dealy-bobber decorations from Christmas and stuck them in the plant. They echoed the leaf shapes of the real plant and both blended in and added zest to the centerpiece.

Its funny how my ideas get short-circuited by the settings as they unfold. It so often seems that my work starts out with a plan and then becomes what it damn well pleases. Its usually better when that happens, but it is like wandering in the wilderness. This time it came out okay...at least I found the table satisfying. The meal also came out well. I spent more time on the table than on planning the menu, but the food, though simple, tasted pretty good. We spent a very pleasant evening reconnecting with our friends on the day before Easter. 

Note: I kept wondering as I made this table why I kept thinking of Zen as I fiddled with eggs and pastel colors. Later I found out that some Buddhist traditions consider April 8 to be the birthday of Buddha, so this really was a Zen Easter. Perhaps I was receiving unconscious vibes from the universe.

Sundown

Sunny, our corgi, died yesterday. She was old, fourteen and a half years, and we have been bracing ourselves for over a year as her health and energy failed. Still, the fact of her absence is shocking. I wonder why death is so hard to prepare for. All the things that have happened in the last fourteen years have included Sunny's companionable presence and unquenchable cheerfulness. In her youth and even into her mature years she was ready for anything and surprisingly athletic, given her short corgi build. Comical and beautiful all in one, she was quintessentially cute, and always a good dog. We will miss her so much.

Winter into Spring

I read once that in the Imperial days of Japan, the layered kimonos worn by the court were judged by how well they mirrored the season and cycles of the natural world, Every five days or so (I'm not sure of the exact time period) some element of color or pattern in their exquisite dress was supposed to change in response to what was happening outside. I don't work in such subtle gradations, but I do feel more satisfied if my table settings are appropriate to the season.

This table started out with a gray/lavender cloth I dyed myself with logwood gray. When I spread it out on the table, I immediately thought of a wool scarf I bought at Christmastime from Asian Eye and had never worn. When I put them together it was like they were made for each other. However,even though the motif on the scarf was sun and flowers, the colors were sort of somber for springtime, or at least for the springtime I wished we were having. This is the second exceptionally cold and cloudy spring we have had in a row. Last week it was freezing every night and we even had some snow, although the trees and shrubs are budding out anyway and the woods are showing the gauzy green of new growth. By introducing green to my wintry color scheme, I thought I could make my table very appropriate to our current weather. 

I used my green plates, and the various blue and green bottles, glassware and floats I have collected for the center. It came together when I wound a translucent green ribbon saved from a recent birthday gift between the glassy things, and put aging (they turn green when they get older) hellebore blossoms about. From my now extensive silverware selection, I chose my mother-in-law's very simple everyday stainless and also used her Fostoria water glasses for texture. When I was finished I felt like our inside reflected the outside pretty well.Our neighbors joined us for a dinner of Cornish game hens and helped us usher winter into spring. 

 

Patterning

    Slowly, painfully, painfully slowly I've been turning the living room of the old house into my studio. All of the contents of our storage unit got dumped there when we moved to the new house last June, and little by little I've sorted, tossed, and placed all of that stuff into semi-permanent places. Then I transferred all of my dyes, cloth, plastic bins and paraphenalia into the newly emptied spaces. We hooked up my old top-loading washer. Last week Mike made a rough but extremely useable worktable out of an old dresser and a sheet of plywood and hung a light fixture over it. This week I started to use it. It's great!

    My first chore is to trace some of my patterns onto spun polyester for safekeeping. It takes a lot of effort to make the patterns...I use rolls and rolls of tracing flimsy and lots of tape, going over and over my drawings until they seem good, and then transferring them onto cloth. Once the cloth is marked, I find that my paper patterns get tossed aside rather rudely. I found four of them on the floor, seriously creased and nearly unusable. I'm trying to make them more stable and easier to store, so I spread them out on my new table and got to work.

    This is my circling swans pattern. I've only made it once, in a fairly straightforward way. I'd like to try again using different colors and maybe more underpattern. (This picture was also taken by Jesse at Asian Eye.)

Silver cascade

For most of my adult life we had one set of silverware. When Mike and I married, his mother gave us a twelve setting set of Reed and Barton stainless in a simple traditional pattern. I loved it... it was really nice quality and we have used it ever since. When we were young we didn't even think of asking for silver...plate or sterling. It was so expensive and so impractical for impoverished newlyweds. I was really grateful to have a complete set of nice stainless and I think of my dear mother-in-law so often when I use it.

After she died (a huge loss for our family) Mike's dad gave me the sterling she had received from her grandmother. Her last name was Woodhouse, so when Mary (Mike's mom) married Jack Webb, Grandmother gave her the sterling because it was monogrammed with a W. The knives are pearl handled, and the spoons and forks don''t match each other. There aren't any salad forks or soup spoons or any serving pieces....just twelve knives, twelve spoons and twelve forks with very long tines. It is so old and so pretty I have used it to set my special tables with pleasure for over twenty years now.

Suddenly, lately, silverware has appeared in droves...and boxes. Last year some friends gave us a very contemporary set of stainless which added a new dimension to my tablesetting vocabulary. It is way bigger than the other patterns, but it is very well balanced and comfortable in the hand.  It's great for more casual settings and occasions.

Last week, Mike's brother brought two more boxes of silverware.... the stainless that was used every day in his mother's house (also contemporary...kind of Danish) and the silverplate that was her "good" silverware before she inherited her grandmother's sterling. Both are kept in boxes and include many serving pieces. Both have salad forks,and soup spoons. The silverplate is also engraved with W's. All of it has been used and used and used. The plate is honeycombed with the scratches that accumulated over many years of holiday meals. The stainless is the same set we always used when we visited Mike's parents. I have set many tables with it.

So now I am swimming in silverware. Most of it carries a load of family history and memories.and won't be shed lightly. In this time of my life though, I don't need to keep things I don't use. We shall see.

It's funny how stuff accumulates, often laden with obligation and history. Also, for me, possibilities.Again, we shall see.

New stuff

    After I posted my Christmas tablesetting I got an email from my Aunt Myrt complimenting me (thanks Aunt Myrt!) and mentioning how great it would be to have access to all the plates and stuff in a big store. I've been daydreaming in china departments for a long time and would indeed love to play with unlimited resources, but her comment reminded me that mostly people have to work with what they have. The dishes, tablecloths and other accessories needed to continually and totally reinvent the table are beyond the reach of most people, both financially and in time and effort expended. I've always reached for every new book on tablesettings, but usually feel disappointed because they are always (well, usually) gorgeous, but have nothing to do with anything I own or could put together without buying lots of expensive things. Most of the time when I am setting the table I must respond to the season and the occasion by drawing from what I have. At this stage of my life I have a lot more than I used to ...a personal vocabulary of items selected from stores both fancy and thrifty, inherited, given to me as gifts, and made by me. My collection makes tablesetting more fun and satisfying, but the process is the same as when I only had the cheap set of dishes I bought at Sears. It is always limited by something.

    Paradoxically, limits can be freeing, and in these days endless new stuff is excessive, not to mention impersonal. However, its amazing how some little new thing can reinvigorate my thinking and bring out new possibilities in the stuff I have. I now rarely add to my dish collection, but I am always thinking of new linens I would like to make. In the meantime, occasionally buying new decorative accessories can be as inspiring as a whole new set of plates. Just a little bit of new can keep the old fresh and flexible.