Raven and Sparrow

Gratitude

Last night the moon was shining through the trees....including the Christmas tree. It reminded me that all is well. My wish upon the moon is for a new year shining with love. Thank you to everyone who comes here. You mean a lot to me.

Quiet Christmas

Well.....you just never know. A couple of weeks ago I was in high gear getting ready for Christmas, buying presents, cleaning house, planning menus. One week before the big day I felt a little tickle in my throat and within two hours I had a full-fledged cold. None of my tried and true mitigations made any difference and so all my plans crumbled. Decoration stopped, cooking absolutely stopped (everything tasted terrible) and Christmas was cancelled. I am rarely ill, but this was a doozy. I improved enough to have the boys come up on Christmas Day, but there was no beautiful table, no fancy dinner. In fact, the boys did the cooking. That was nice. 

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday free from illness. I'm looking forward to the New Year.

Post mortem

In the week since I set and photographed Lynne's seasonal tables in her dining room I have had time to think a little about what I made.

I was tired of viewing endless pictures of people's tables that were often beautiful, but unreproduceable. It seemed like the dishes were the stumbling block...too expensive to purchase willy nilly, too cumbersome to store in large quantities, and either plain to the point of dullness or highly dictatorial in style and color. I wondered: if I were restricted to one pattern, how would I use it to express the individuality of gatherings I wanted to make special? What could anyone wishing to use what they have make table settings that set the stage for specific occasions and made them memorable? I decided to reach outside my own collection of dishes and address the question with unfamiliar patterns. I am fortunate to have friends and family who support my experiments and so I planned to show how the very different plate styles of three willing participants could be adapted to reflect the seasons, which are exemplars of change. Lynne, my sister-in-law, was my first guinea pig; I used her Royal Doulton china as the common denominator in the four settings shown.

If you can't change your dishes, textiles are the obvious way to carry and vary color and pattern on your table, but full scale tablecloths have their own problems of fit, availibility and maintenance. Try shopping for affordable tablecloths of the right color, the right size and the right material to elicit the moods you want your table to express. I am always looking in person and on line and have despaired of reliably finding any but the most basic colors. My solution is to make or find a couple of plain colors that work well with the dishes as a base, and then design or purchase a series of smaller, more variable runners or squares to layer on top and set the tone of color or pattern, sort of like a scarf can change the tone of a simple dress or blazer. The accent cloths are easier to handle and wash, cheaper (unless you count time) and highly flexible. 

Using the base cloth/accent cloth theory, I chose two colors of linen that I thought looked good with Lynne's dishes and made full size tablecloths that fit her specific oval table. (Ovals are all different.) They will always be useful with these dishes, no matter what Lynne chooses to layer on top of them. I know she already has some lace and eyelet pieces that will look great with either. Then, I made or collected the accents whose history and progress I have shown throughout the year.

So (...finally, what's with all the exposition?) how did it go? Overall, I feel like I succeeded in evoking the four seasons for Lynne. I liked all of the tables when I finally saw them put together and felt like my accent pieces worked the way I envisioned. Whew.

However....I am always looking for the visual combinations that open a space within my heart...the feeling hard to describe but so definite that invites a deeper response, a wider, more intuitive relationship with all of the threads and elements that underlie the scene. I think evoking this feeling works upon the hearts of everyone who gathers in the space, confirming their value in the group and encouraging the flow and interactions of the occasion. Of the four settings I made for Lynne I think only winter comes close. 

Its a little ironic that the best table required the least work, in that the runner that set the tone was a purchased wool scarf. (Smaller cloths can be drawn from a much wider field than regular tablecloths.) It was a matter of luck, I guess, but the color was right, and the concentric circles of the pattern immediately evoked ice on puddles and the swirling of winter winds in my mind and those associations carried through clearly. The centerpiece was also very important. It took quite a while to find twigs with the right shape and fineness to make the transparent cloud of naked branches. In fact, it wasn't until the leaves fell this autumn that I recognized that the snowberry bushes on the path to the beach would work. I spray painted them gray and originally intended to add evergreens and maybe white roses, but once the lights were on it was clear that austerity would be more powerful. The other thing that I didn't really control was the size of the thing. I worried about the proportions of the vase (had to be white and opaque to hide the battery case for the little lights) but found no other good options and so it just became what it was and I think it worked better than any of the others.

So, now I know what I need to work on as I turn to Becky's table:

Better photography (depth of field, white balance, other photographic blah blah)

Better centerpieces (not sure what this means, but hopefully clarity will emerge)

Better control of proportion and detail (how much or how little of the various elements)

More storytelling.  

Thank you so much for the kind comments and encouragement. I really appreciate having a supportive forum in which to work these projects out.

Lynne's table - Winter

Sticking with the blue undercloth, and layering with a wool scarf as a runner, this is the winter table.

Lynne's table - Autumn

Here is Lynne's table set for fall, using the maple leaf square and the blue undercloth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lynne's table - Summer

For Lynne's summer table I used the same soft green undercloth as for spring, layering it with the butterfly runner I took so long to make. The butterflies add most of the interest, so the flowers and candles are pretty simple.

Lynne's table - Spring

About a year ago my sister-in-law Lynne graciously allowed me to use her dishes as the touchstone for four table designs based on the seasons. The pattern she uses for company is Royal Doulton Princeton, a white based porcelain with navy blue and gold edging. One of the issues I kept in mind with Lynne's dishes was their formal, finished quality. My usual work is pretty loose and I was afraid it might be too casual for Lynne's pretty dishes and her preferred traditional style. 

For spring I found a machine embroidered sheer polyester at our local fabric store. I'm not a fan of polyester, but this white on white pattern caught my eye.  It reminded me of the gauzy film of green that spring throws across the hillsides. I used fabric paint to color the leaves on the pattern gray blue to echo the color on the dishes, and embroidered the leaves and vine edges with sharpening colors of regular sewing thread (dark green and blue inside the leaves, chartreuse along the vines and outsides of the leaves). Then I layered it over a soft green undercloth, with matching napkins.

The following pictures were taken in Lynne's dining room, with her dishes, as they might look in springtime. 
 

 

 

 

 

Brass and glass

This week my sisters and I took our mom out to celebrate her 82nd birthday. We went to the Chihuly Glass Museum at the Seattle Center, and then out to lunch at the Pike Place Market. Lisa took this picture of Erin, Mom and me outside the restaurant (Etta's Seafood....absolutely great).

She also took this picture of the glass ceiling in the Chihuly Museum...can you believe I didn't take my camera? I've never been a huge fan of Dale Chihuly's glass, but the museum is a distinctive experience, and very enjoyable. The best part, of course, was spending time with my mother and sisters. I am very lucky to be part of a large (Mom, Dad, and seven siblings), close, intact family. 

A big family can be quite a resource and this was proven rather casually by an outpouring of brass candleholders. I was lamenting a couple of posts ago that I couldn't find what I needed for Lynne's table, and that was all it took. Lisa and Mom between them came up with all of these choices.

Brass candleholders anyone? More fruit from the spreading rootlets of love and family.

 

Beyond decoration

As I procrastinate on finishing Lynne's tables, I am moving on to Becky's. I have started with the natural linen undercloth and napkins that work best with the grayish tones of her dishes. This is part of what I consider the infrastructure of my settings and therefore not too exciting to look at or make. Lots of wrestling with big lengths of cloth and continuing frustrations with wonky corners and edges...not my favorite part. As I was working through this set of cloth and napkins it occurred to me that I could add a secret element to the backside that would invest them with a little more personality and add to the gift that I am going to offer. I could embroider some words in matching linen thread that would refer just to these pieces...an inside joke, sort of literally. Because they are gray and because it has been raining heavily here in the cloudy Pacific Northwest, I chose phrases that refer to rain. I tried to keep them cheerful and relevant to our local phraseology. You may be able to click on the picture and see them more clearly, but the napkins say things like: partly cloudy, umbrella weather, chance of showers, cats and dogs, rain shadow, and rain on the roof, with added raindrops. The tablecloth says: Above the clouds the sun is always shining. 

The embroidery is rough because it took me a while to really commit to this and work out what looks best, but now that it is done I'm glad I did it. These pieces have become more than anonymous background, although they will still do that job. They have hidden energy. 

I have been thinking a lot about how to take my table settings beyond decoration. The whole seasonal emphasis is part of that, and Jude's recent posts about storytelling (and weather!) have inspired this little experiment. I think the table is more than valid as a canvas for self-expression, although certain practicalities will always be in play. The layers of cloth can draw in all sorts of allusions to add depth to the experience the table makes a place for and heighten the engagement of the setting with the prospective event. This shower of words is simple and playful, but reflects the endless and often unacknowledged connections always present in our lives. The mundane yet beautiful association of gray cloth and cloudy skies will now always be a part of any table with these textiles upon it.