Raven and Sparrow

A kettle full of Halloween

This little kettle was the starting spark for the table I have been working on for a month. I bought it over two years ago after passing it by several times. I wasn't setting tables at the time and it seemed silly to buy it and store it, but in the end I just couldn't resist it's promise of a really fun Halloween table. When I ran across it in September, I started to envision how to use it and that's when I knew I needed a Halloween textile to set it off, leaping into the production of the spider web runner I've been showing so much of lately. So, that done, what next? Using my chestnut-dyed pique square underneath was easy, since the runner was too dark to stand out from the wood of the table.(I love the chestnut square, it is sooo useful!) Gray plates with off white napkins also followed as a matter of course, with the zig zaggy big contemporary silverware and plain glassware. I was thinking of adding something to the napkins as I usually do, but they were quite satisfying as plain yellowish shapes against the gray, so I left them that way. Candles? I found some tiny but real pumpkins and carved them into jack o'lanterns. Perfect! except....I forgot how slimy the innards of a pumpkin are, and how hard it is to carve them really neatly. Its okay when they are outside being viewed from a distance in the dark but on the table they seemed a little - messy. When I lit one up, though, it just charged the whole setting with true Halloween spirit, so I held my nose (literally, because of the burnt pumpkin smell) and moved on. I had thought I would put flowers in the kettle, but the jack o'lanterns called for something more eerie, so I got some dry ice for a true witch's brew. With pumpkins and the kettle in place there were a bunch of round ball shapes scattered down the table. I needed some height. I found some half-burnt square candles from other tables that formed strange, cool points as they burned, almost like the shape of the flame itself, and that felt like enough.

When the evening came, we turned off the lights, lit the candles and dropped dry ice into the kettle. Yay! Halloween! The promise of the kettle was fulfilled. The table was really fun and great entertainment as the "potion" burbled and bubbled over the table in properly evil fashion. The effects of dry ice don't last too long and some lights were needed for food identification, but the effect was achieved and the mood set by the table setting, which is what I was hoping for. We had a very pleasant evening with charming friends. and what could be better as the season drops off towards winter?

Making special

     After some intense embroidery, I have finished my spider web runner in time for Halloween.Yay! I used a chain stitch to "bring up" the web shapes and found it difficult to keep the stitches even as I embroidered the long lines across the cloth. However, as a relative "quickie", I'm reasonably satisfied with the way it turned out. It is simple, but fairly interesting as an object, and more importantly, I think it will work well with other objects in its setting. The thing about this runner that has been most surprising to me is its insistence from start to finish. I have talked before about the projects taking on their own lives as they evolve from idea to actuality and perhaps this sounds a little precious, but that is how it feels to me and this time it was marked. I started with the idea to do a Halloween table, and as soon as I identified the need for a runner, I started to make it. If you have been reading here, you've seen the steps I took. I didn't spend very much time worrying about the design, or even about the process, I just grabbed what I had and began. From the first moment, I felt like I was being dictated to by the need for this thing to come into being. I'm not a particularly energetic person, so it was not a given that, having thought of this, I would really make it happen. Its always easier not to do something. This time, though, I never felt like I had to struggle against myself or the process. I just did it.

     As I worked with the spider web runner, I kept thinking that the impetus I was feeling had to come from something basic and I remembered a book I read entitled What Is Art For? by Ellen Dissanayake (University of Washington Press, 1988, ISBN 0-295-97017-0), in which she says that "making special" is an innate human need and the foundation of art. "Making Special" is such a perfect nutshell for what I feel called upon to do. I'm not claiming that my runner or the tablesetting it will anchor is art as we think of it these days, but it certainly rises up out of the same place inside. I want to make special the gatherings I host. I want to acknowledge and mark the turnings of the seasons, and the occasions that stud the arc of our lives as human beings. By setting these events apart from the daily scramble, by taking formal note of the time and season in which they occur, and by celebrating them together, I think we elevate our appreciation of all of life. This has power to me.

Seasonal web design

The spider web runner design that knocked on my brain a couple weeks ago has been moving forward apace. After screening the loose little abstract shapes in different tannin based dyes, I overpainted them with logwood gray. Log gray has iron in it, so I thought it would darken the tannins, plus add its own silvery presence. It didn't darken the tannins much at all, and threw a lavender cast over the warmish colors that were already there. It was kind of interesting, but not what I had in mind, so I stepped up the attack and brushed on straight iron water. That did it. The tannins turned black. At first they all looked the same, but when they dried there were slight color variations between them. However, the overall cast of the cloth was harsh and cold and when I removed the freezer paper pattern, the contrast between the spider webs and the background was stark. I almost always prefer low contrast to high and kept wanting to smudge the webs back into the black a little bit. Instead I poured the tannins together into a dye pot and tossed the runner in. The immersion step softened and muddied the blacks and took away the differences between the dyed shapes. It definitely took the white out of the web patterns. Its less interesting now in a way, but I feel more comfortable with it. I much prefer the warm cast it acquired in the dyepot. The trouble is, now the webs need to come back up a little, and that means embroidery. Sigh. We'll see if I can get this thing done in time to use it this fall.

Wine glasses - new and blue

One of the great things about my family is the support it provides to its numerous members, by thought,  action and sometimes by things. About a month ago we all gathered in Portland, Oregon (about five hours away) for the wedding of my niece, Amy. It was a perfect day and a lovely wedding, offering a chance for us to celebrate together and see some relatives that don't live close enough for frequent interaction. My Aunt Holly, knowing from my mother about my interest in tablesettings, brought five blue wineglasses that she didn't need anymore and gave them to me. Thank you, thank you, Aunt Holly! This thoughtful gift nicely extended my vocabulary of glassware. This week they made their first appearance as I set the table for a birthday dinner for Mike's brother. The starting piece for the setting was a runner I made last year by discharging dye in a branchy pattern from a cloth dyed with madder. Madder, the ancient red of oriental carpets, is a tough dye that doesn't discharge easily, so I ended up embroidering the edges of my design with purply-red, bright blue and yellow - a sort of primary embellishment - to distinguish them more clearly. Thus, the blue glasses were an enriching element in a pretty simple setting.

Home sweet home

In this month's issue of The Atlantic Sandra Tsing Loh has written an article about breadwinning women and how the old male/female roles are being turned around. I thought it was kind of brittle and elitist...and only mildly interesting.... until, describing a friend's meltdown over a burnt out lightbulb, she writes "Yet under what seem like such trivial technical mishaps in our domestic lives lies a surprising, real emotional volatility - a volatility engendered by a deep sense of loss......On the one hand, these are simple technical malfunctions; on the other, they are another small but precise omen pointing to a world without the deep domestic comforts- and care - and arts - not of our mothers (many of whom were in a transitional leaving home-to-go-to-work generation) but of our grandmothers, who still ruled the home with absolute power. No one is taking care of us! No one! And that is no small thing."

This really resonated. I've been thinking about home a lot lately. I am living in a new house, the house of my dreams, but not spending a lot of time in it due to full-time work. The ideal of home as a calm, welcoming sanctuary with flowers on the polished table and cookies about to come out of the oven illuminates my daydreams. I see myself sitting in a pillowy armchair with a cup of tea and a good book, while the sun pours through the window and the cat purrs beneath my hand. Everywhere my eye wanders there is order and comfort. Everything I see belongs to me. I am at home. This scene draws from the elements that mean home to me; beauty, safety, comfort and control. Its about making space in the world and drawing it up around myself, making it fit me so that I feel more welcome in the larger field of life.

Of course, this ideal is never achievable in real life without serious, unrelenting effort. Making a clean, organized, beautiful home is more than a full-time job. It takes a number of specific skills, exemplary time management and still the myriad tasks are always undoing themselves and need to be done again. Housework has mostly been the responsibility of women, but now that women have broken through the old limits and gone to work, what has happened to home? Who is cooking the meals, washing the clothes and sweeping up the dust bunnies? More importantly, where is the sanctuary? Home is now a storage place for all the stuff we buy to console ourselves for the loss of our time and energy. Its where we root around for something no-iron and reasonably clean to wear to work, and then rush away from, leaving the cartons from last night's take-out on the counter to greet us when we return at night with another round. 

Would I choose to return to the old male/female patterns, searching for home as sanctuary? NO! Restricting women to the home concentrated a lot of energy there, but also soured and devalued it. Home can't be a true sanctuary when it is also a prison. The genie of feminism has been released from its bottle and won't...shouldn't....be returned. Women are right to pursue the expansion of their abilities into the public sphere and to feel the sense of power and personal agency that a career can offer, along with the undeniable security symbolized by a paycheck. Still....what kind of future will it be if no one is home? Surely the small daily acts of caring and love embodied in a tangible place are valuable to everyone. We all need the physical and emotional recharge of home base. Men, women, children..... people.... all have a stake in domestic life. How can we enhance and preserve it in the future?