Facebook Ate My Blog

I went looking for my old blog, my place where I put all the things, the beautiful, imaginative, repetitive things, the sort of naughty things, the things I used to rock my soul gently into writing.

Yes, Facebook, with its promise of connection and it's addiction to accumulating "likes' and "views" -- it ate my blog.  Hi blog.  I'm back.  I know you are now old fashioned.  I know people go one place to get everything these days (and these days aren't even a full generation away from those days), but being ever proudly a step out of sync with the world, hello blog.  I'm back.  Let's be friends again?  What do you say?

Rose Meditations

Rose Meditations

These Photos: 1) Making a rose throw pillow; 2&3) The throw pillows, finished; 4) An end table in the lady's restroom of a place I frequent; 5) A tile from a home show booth

The "recovering the chairs" project lead into the "making of throw pillows" project, which brought me back to something I've been writing in my notebook for a while.  I have different notebooks for different works in progress, one of which is for items I am designed to make with my own hands, household items or living items.  It's an obsession, something I do in addition to teaching and writing, to satisfy the ideas and images which come to me when I examine everyday objects and the way we live with them.

Depictions of roses interest me because they rely on repetition to build the flower motif in your mind.  Wether it is done in metal, clay, fabric, wood or frosting on a cake, the repetition of a certain shape, and the repetition of a certain action, adds up to the image of a flower.  The nature of a flower is to unfold, be it with two petals or a hundred, therefore repetition is also a design of nature.

When I had a bunch of leftover strips from making the chair covers, I knew I could use them to build a rose design.  I did not overly plan the design.  I started doing it, and as I did it, I lengthened the strips, let them overlap, let them be off-centered, until they filled out a square.  I suspect a real rose has more order to it.

This is a page from my creative ideas journal.  I keep this journal to jot down fabric and wood ideas, that is, things I think I can physically make.  This is an old page.  Roses have been on my mind for quite some time.

Reclamation Satisfaction II

Reclamation Satisfaction II

The chairs both turned out nice.  The very last piece to be sewed was the bottom band.  The journey though, was a tough conglomeration of solving problems, dealing with angles, and correcting mistakes.

I shouldn't sew when I'm tired.  That is when mistakes happen, like this one.  Can you see it?

Sometimes, when involved with a project like this, I have to learn to work with a mistake instead of starting over, or tossing the piece.  In this case, tossing was not an option: I didn't have enough fabric to recut both seat bottoms.  I measured every piece of this project by hand, marked it with tailor's chalk and a yard stick, and cut each one in duplicate, to do each chair.  When it came to the seat pads, I thought I was being very careful, but I actually miscalculated, and cut each about 8 inches too wide.

To correct this error, I decided to add two pleats, right at the where the seat seam joins.  As it turned out, the pleat detail added interest to the monotony of the pattern, so I'm not disappointed with the detail.

I also had a lot of scraps left over so I decided to piece together some throw pillows.

Now, here is where it started to get interesting, and go a little bit wrong.

Here is where I have to acknowledge my obsessive behavior.  It happens when I'm editing manuscripts too.  It's like getting on a train, thinking you're going about twelve stops, realizing the train goes all the way across the country, then deciding to ride it to the end, just to get to the completion.  I don't know what type of compulsion that is, but I know I have it.  Sometimes I can plan for it.  I can not start a project which I think is a moderate-sized endeavor (usually, the projects I think are an hour end up being four, and the things I think take half a day end up taking two days, so, I've learned, through many late nights of having to meet my outer-world due dates, to double my estimates and check my available time) until I have an entire weekend.  There is a tug-of-war here though, because I also know that multiple attempts are needed at some projects, attempts which must be spaced over a week or a month, before a task, which might only take 8 hours, can be completed.  Students take note here: this is why you are given long dates to finish major assignments.  You can't just sit down the night before and knock it out.  

So, the next step was to finish the throw pillows, and some other seat covers, and that took an extra day, and it also lead me into an area I've been gathering in my notebook for a while: rose meditations.

Reclamation Satisfaction

An old chair.  In this chair I have sat and watched sunsets, had good conversations with friends and loved ones, read many a book, cried some, and also had a good laugh or two.  It is a good chair, the perfect height for the bend of my knee, sturdy in frame, but tired at the seams.

I had a friend tell me once of all the things writers could do instead of writing.  He noted to me that a particular writer knew exactly how long it took to get a suit fitted, and that it was a favorite distraction.  Perhaps deciding to recover the chair is a distraction.  I don't know.  I can't do it all at once, at least not now.  I know how to cover a chair, knowledge not truly valued in the world of work and students, and because I know how to cover a chair, my mind can make all the architectural leaps necessary to adapt the craft of seaming, to the science of geometry and angles.  I just can't make them all at once, all those calculations and executions.  I can't dive in.  I'm also in the middle of writing something, and I can't do that from dawn to dusk either.  Why?  I can only stay inside the writing hut in my mind for so long, and then it becomes a prison.  I start to lose sense.  I look at the chair, know already the pattern piece required to uniformly cut the curve of each arm, and I know I must break down each task in covering the chair into chunks, and engage the process a chunk at a time.  If I stayed too long inside the world of covering the chair, it would be a prison too.  I would start to lose sense and make mistakes.  So, either recovering the chair is a necessary distraction from writing, or writing is a necessary distraction from covering the chair (two chairs actually--they're a set).

Why would one even want to attempt such a task?   Why not buy new chairs?  You would have to know me to understand why I don't give up on things, just because they show a little wear.  Perhaps it was being raised by two depression-era survivors, my aunt and uncle (maybe).  Perhaps it is because I'm too attached to objects (doubt it).  Perhaps it is that I enjoy puzzles and the challenge of walking into the unknown, and creating a bridge back to the known (my, my, we are rather proud, aren't we?).

Well, whatever the reason, I can't give up on an item with good bones.  How do I know it has good bones?  The chairs don't give in the frame when I move them, even after 30 years of being moved about.  This is something I learned from my uncle, who was skilled enough in carpentry to make his own cabinets.  A chair of this design, with the ledge of the seat protruding from the front (the armrest and the leg do not comprise one, straight piece), has a sturdy frame.  There's more wood in the frame, and more angles and braces supporting the entire structure of the chair, than there is in a chair of simpler design.  The fabric may give out on this chair, but the frame won't.

So, aside from liking the chairs, I've decided they are serviceable pieces of furniture that I will keep, and that will keep me.

First up, making room for a zipper in my slip-covers, so I can remove them and wash them when necessary.

The zipper will hit the back of the chair, center.

What is already apparent to me is that I have an idea about piping and the general look of the finished cover, even though I don't have a sketch of that idea.

And, this is where I am stopping for today.  Curves, ellipses, details, all floating in my mind, are left for the next day, the next session.

Dear Rosaly

 

Rosaly,

 

I wanted to call you today many times, but I let myself be busy taking care of all the odds and ends, and of the dog.  I did get out and walk to the post office.  One of the blessings of being in this little, little town.  The post office is only a block away.

 

Tim continues to trooper on.  He has his second round of chemo next week.  He seems to be enduring them with only a few side effects, mostly fatigue.  He has a detached attitude about the body.  He shows me the hair leaving his body with a scientist's musing.  He might just have the right attitude about all of this to make it through.

 

We went to a chanting/meditation for New Year's Eve.  I don't know what was being chanted, but it was nice to slip into the rhythm of the syllables and just be with it.  It was a sanskrit text.  Then, a meditation until midnight.  It was clear, dark, and cold when we left.  It was like a midnight adventure.  Fortunately, it's only a few minutes from the apartment.

 

Tim's little white dog hurt her paw jumping off the bed last night, so today I was her nurse while Tim went to work.  Poor little puppy.  I had to carry her outside to go potty.  She just sort of looked at me with her little cloudy eyes and asked without saying.  I don't want to own any pets after this.  I don't like the constant reminder of what waits behind every green leaf.

 

It would be good to hear your voice.  I will call you Thursday or Friday.

 

I wish it were a short car ride to where you are.  I could come over for tea.

 

Much love,

 

Luisa

 

ps.  Have you seen this book "The pH Miracle" by Dr. Robert Young?  I'm wondering if alkalizing might help with the blood pressure. 

The Persistence of Hand Made Objects

I inherited this bag after my Aunt Mimi passed away.  No one understood the significance of it, and it was probably going to go to Goodwill, however, I asked if I could take it, as a token of remembrance.

This is a shoulder bag which my aunt hand crocheted herself, during the 1970s.  It is chocolate brown and I believe it matched a pair of brown espadrilles she had purchased at J.J. Newberry's on Foothill Blvd., across from Sunland Park.  I am almost certain that she purchased this brown cotton crocheting thread from there, and probably the fabric for the liner, and the zipper, because I remember many times going with her to the fabric and notions department of Newberry's, which was located in the "basement" of the store.  (The store was actually split level, with an escalator in the middle, and the basement door on the back side of the store faced the daylight, and the cement roller skating rink at Sunland Park.)

My aunt was a champion crocheter, and knitter, as was my godmother, Elsie, and most of the Italian women on my father's side of the family.  When we visited my godmother at holiday times (Christmas and Easter) her furniture was covered with hand-made scarves and antimacassars.  Sometimes I thought there was a competition between these female relatives to see who could doll up their habitats, and themselves, the most.  This is why I remember this bag.

When my aunt slung it over her shoulder and took it with her to one of our "gone-a-calling" visits, one of our female relatives oo-ed and awed over it, commenting on how it resembled something she'd seen in a fashion magazine.  In my aunt's mind, I'm sure she thought "mission accomplished."

Beyond that though, during that period when fashion was very much out of reach to the middle class, and when a spirit of self-sufficiency prevailed (through the gas crisis, the unemployment crisis, soon to be followed by an international crisis in Iran), I'm sure, to my aunt, the fact that she could create of her own hand and within her own budget, the means to garner a type of respect from other women, was empowering.  I won't comment on capitalism and desire, and the way they tend to devour at the same time they seem to empower, because my aunt lived and died in a time before feminism really had its most meaningful impact on the lives of middle class women, whether those middle class women wanted to acknowledge it or not  (I believe this happened during the Reagan era, and even the post-Reagan era, when the acknowledgement of "the glass ceiling" occurred).

As a post-script to this post, I noted that in a recent issue of Vogue Magazine, a crocheted, Ralph Lauren bag was listed at retail for $995.  Definitely out of my reach.  I wonder if seeing this bag in a fashion magazine today would have inspired my aunt to update her creation, or begin again, in ecru.

The Terror of Going Within

            I used to hear writers talk about sitting down and “opening up a vein” and it used to fill me with a certain disdain.  I rejected that statement because it seemed self-indulgent, self-pitying, and melodramatic.  I wanted writing to be a joyous activity where I “brought forth” what was within me and it soared to artistic heights my body could not achieve.  I do still hold that aspiration, sometimes.

            There has been a terror for me though, a type of avoidance that is not like the productive avoidance I do when I busy myself with things which I bargain for internally.  (Things that I tell myself lead to writing, or need to be done so I can write, but which are not actually writing.)  These activities usually make me chuckle at myself, then I go to my desk like a petulant child (oops, I got caught) and I get to work.  The avoidance I feel lately though is different, darker, and it brings a different recrimination inside before I get to my writing. 

            It has to do with wasted time, or a distasteful chore.

            It’s not that what I’m writing at the moment is distasteful.  It is in fact something I signed up to do, volunteered for, suggested, pushed for, campaigned for, even at one point felt a great rush of adrenalin for.  It is my doctoral dissertation on poetry, drama, and opera.  I like the project.  I like the writing.  I like what I’ve written so far, and what I am now editing.  What I don’t like: the other eyes I feel over my shoulder while doing the work; the self-recrimination at not having finished sooner, for having invested my time in a collaborative project which didn’t pan out, the self-blame for having mismanaged my most valuable resources, my time and my talent.  It’s the litany of “should haves” repeating like a mantra in my head that terrorize me, panic me, and which I must overcome in order to finish this one particular project.

            As my significant other likes to say, “There’s nothing else for it.”

The Farewell Drive in Pittsburgh

It began behind Maggie Mo at Carnegie Mellon.  Sitting in the car, waiting to pick up a tuba and a grad student, I realized it was going to be one of the last times I was going to drive through Schenley Park at the height of summer, with all the trees fully leafed and all the best things about Pittsburgh fully ready to be appreciated.

The fountain between CMU and the golf course.

Up ahead, Phipps Conservatory.  Turn left at the three-way and head over the Panther Hollow Bridge, passed the playground and Blvd. of the Allies, into Schenley Park proper.

Looping trails and roads.  Green pastures and fireflies.  I've been to a lot of public parks, from Griffith Park in Los Angeles to Central Park in NYC.  Schenley had plenty to please the senses and I never felt "unsafe."

The last leg.

If you recognize this from a certain HBO series, good for you.  On the screen it looped several times, making this section of the park seem endless, but it takes less than 30 seconds to pass the guard rail and trees.

The last leg of the drive home, the entrance to the bridge that went over the parkway and led to my little neighborhood.  Yes, that's a hub cap on the side of the road.  One of those tiny houses on the hillside beyond the bridge was my tiny little home.

I drove this road so many times, taking it for granted, but looking back on it now, I still have the visceral experience of its smell and its feel.

Getting Married Later in Life

June 5, 2010

Self Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine

Pacific Palisades

Everyone began the ceremony by first taking a peaceful walk around the lake.

Jordan liked having her picture taken.

Tim and I sat quietly while everything was prepared for the ceremony.  Brother Vishawananda blessed our rings.  When it was time to begin, the cameras were switched off.

It was a very serene day.

When Tim and I first began planning our wedding, we had a common thought:  How can we get our multitude of relatives to put aside their little squabbles and needs for hijacking family gatherings for just 24 hours?  The answer:  we couldn't.  

We took a very contemplative look at the list of people we were "supposed" to invite, the litany of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, each name also representing an ongoing dispute and entanglement with another name, and we sighed.  Instead of being a day where we solemnized our relationship and invited our loved ones to partake of the love we felt for each other, it was shaping up to be a day of running between camps and putting out fires.  That was not the tone we wanted to set for our marriage.  Both being in our mid-forties, we felt it was time to acknowledge that some things were just not going to change, and it was time to move forward.

There were five wedding guests at out wedding, and seven at our reception lunch.  Two of these people were our grandchildren, both under the age of four.  The monastic who conducted the ceremony encouraged us to enjoy the event, even little Benjamin, who was verbally delighted by the sight of swans outside the window of the windmill chapel.  Brother Vishawananda stated that even the sounds of a child laughing were part of the ceremony, part of the celebration of life.

Bears Read Poetry in Denver: AWP Annual Conference & Panel on Opera

April 2010

The best thing about the annual Associated Writing Programs conference is seeing people I haven't seen in years, and listening to what is new in the world of writing, small and university presses, and creative writing programs across the country.

The big highlight for me this year was not the panel presentation I was part of, but the one I attended on poets who write for opera.  This has been a passion of mine for a while now, and it is the main topic of my doctoral dissertation.

As Kate Gale noted, it is a small world, poets who work on libretti, but I would like to see that change.  As I look forward to the opening of Amelia at the Seattle Opera, with its libretto written by the poet Gardner McFall, and to the Rio de Sangre (Kate Gale & Don Davis) opening this fall at Opera Florentine, I'm encouraged that even in a period when most opera companies are scaling back their productions, these contemporary operas are still making it to the stage.

Adding an Inner Breast Pocket to a J Jill Blazer

I wear a lot of jackets and blazers, and I'm alway upset that 

they don't have breast pockets like a man's jacket or blazer.

I'm a writer.  I need to have a recorder (or a small notepad) 

and my cell phone on me all the time.

Why is that?  I carry an iphone and other gadgets, and I don't always carry a purse.  Why no nifty pocket to reach to inside my jacket?  (I used to think it was always so cool when 007 did that.)

My best guess at why manufacturers don't include this as a regular design feature (other than it adds cost) is that women like a good line to their clothing and we have breasts.  Many clothing manufacturers like to emphasis princess seaming for shape, but only high-end sportswear manufacturers find a way to make a shapely, functional garment with pockets.  Power walking is not the only time I need a reliable pocket.

Usually I check the construction of jackets before I purchase them, to see if I can add my own pocket.  This J Jill jacket was a good candidate because even though it didn't have a lining, it had very nicely finished seams with added binding for strength.  That's a plus if you need something to anchor a cell phone pocket to.

I started by using some gridded quilt backing to trace the design of a pocket and see if it would fit to my jacket.  I put the jacket on wrong-side-out, and pinned the grid to the inside of the lapel, then marked where to cut it.  I wanted it to match the curve of the arm-hole in one corner of the pocket:

If you go back to photo #1, you'll see this shape will result in a pocket that is almost sideways, but which slants over the top of my breast toward my armpit.  I like this design because it keeps things from falling out, and it's easier to work with than a regular vertical pocket when sewing it to the jacket (especially if there's no lining to work with).

Here's the fusing pressed to my pocket fabric along a fold, and the pocket cut to match the fusing.

I sewed the pocket along the curved edge, the short edge, and the edge parallel to the fold, then turned it out and ironed it flat.

While wearing the jacket inside out, I pinned the pocket to the seams, then hand-sewed it to the armpit seam, the side seam, and along the seam of the lapel.  For extra support, I took a ribbon and anchored the pocket from its top to the shoulder seam.  The pocket opening is at the lapel seam and it holds my cell phone nicely.

Calico Shirt, Nonna Luisa Style

After 5 years of graduate school, I have the title of Ph.D. to add after my name, and not much money in my pocket.

So. my first resource for fabric is usually free, or cheap.  I'm very familiar with a certain army.

This blouse was going to be used for a project for my granddaughter, because it had good yardage to work with, and I liked the pattern--nice colors to pull from for trims.

On a lark I tried it on.  It was too big, but it fit in the bust, and being someone who has a hard time finding a proper fit in that area, I decided to try and see what I could do to salvage it for my wardrobe.

There was one princess seam on each side, and I could have added more.  The pattern would have easily disguised it, but I decided to try a series of midriff mini pleats instead.

I liked this effect, the way it condensed the pattern and played against it.

I did go to my trim box and start adding a crocheted trim to the cuffs and collar.  This aqua pops against the print.

And this is my new blouse, Nonna-Luisa style.  It's still loose, but it has some shape.

Repetition and condensing a pattern:  hmm... there's something blooming in my writing mind.