Month: September 2014

The Call of The Poncho

Karen

Ever since I packed up all the handmade sweaters I’ve knitted over the years and put them into permanent storage this spring, I’ve been trying to stick to small knitted items. They sweaters I’ve made have all had a weird fit, or a weird style, or are too small or too itchy now.  The thinking part of my brain knows that if I knit a poncho, it will probably fall into the “weird fit/weird style” category and also won’t get worn. But does that stop me from thinking I need to make one? Of course not.

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I’d blame my inner hippie for this poncho fever, but I’ve been listening to lots of Fleetwood Mac lately–I think my inner Stevie Nicks is responsible for this one. Just add about twelve scarves and some fringe.

“Grandeur and heroism”

Karen

“Anything that lives where it would seem that nothing could live, enduring extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, among burnt rocks and shifting sands, any such creature, beast, bird, or flower, testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent in all forms of life. Including the human. Even in us.”

Edward Abbey

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Doc and I took a weekend trip to Escalante with friends who were exhibiting at the Escalante Canyons Arts Festival. We had some rain on Saturday but that gave us a chance to see the rain make temporary waterfalls over the cliff tops (first photo; something I’d never thought I’d see).  Our friends are also experienced canyoneers so we got to poke our heads into a slot canyon, another first for me (fifth photo). Utah, you are a good place to live.

Friday Unrelated Information

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1.  The quiz “Hemingway or Children’s Book?” is inspired. And also pretty difficult–I only got 10 out of 15.

2. Doc shared this Carl Sagan quote last week (I knew I liked him). It’s always a good time for a Sagan quote:

The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Poems About Music

Karen

I was up on campus of the University of Utah last night to find a building (I’m taking a creative writing class soon) and wow, the memories came flooding back: starting classes in the fall, walking everywhere with my violin case, discovering poems about music. Here’s another one–in my head, the soprano part being practiced is from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

 

We Shall Be Released

by Joseph Stroud

Every afternoon that autumn
walking across campus
past the conservatory
I heard the soprano
practicing
her voice rising
making its way up the scale
straining to claim each note
weeks of work
of days
growing shorter
darker
storms slamming the campus
the semester staggering
to an end
everyone exhausted
drained
heading out and going home
the campus nearly deserted
but the soprano
still working the scales
when I passed under the trees
the liquid ambers on fire
the clouds like great cities
sailing out to sea
and didn’t I ascend
with her
my own weariness
and sorrows
dropping away
didn’t we rise together
her voice straining
wavering
at the top of its range
almost reaching
almost claiming
that high
free-of-the-body
final note

Tuesday Project Planning: Cultural Appropriation Is Fun!

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In the last month or so, I’ve become interested in fabric that’s called “ankara print,” “Dutch wax print,” “Hollandais wax,” “Java wax,” or “African wax print,” depending on whom you talk to.

There is a complicated and murky history to this fabric, but as I understand it, Dutch settlers in the East Indies really liked the local Indonesian batik prints. Dutch settlers used West Africa as a source for their forced labor pool, and some of the Indonesian prints made it back to Africa, where the style was popular but the prints ultimately came to reflect local aesthetics. The fabric came to be machine-made in Belgium, ultimately, adding another layer. There’s good background here and here.

Anyway, the prints are fantastic, and my love for large, loud prints knows no bounds. You can find anything on the Internet these days, so I pushed aside my doubts about the “appropriateness” of a white girl adopting this style and found some on Etsy. (Also check out Middlesex Textiles, AKN Fabrics, and Vilsco.)

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These are destined to be skirts–I think full-length ones to show off the print, like so:

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Because cultural appropriation is fun!

 

 

Equinox

Karen

The autumnal equinox is tonight, a point of balance in the year. You can get the science behind it here and the human rituals behind it here. And, as always, you can get your hippie on with the Mystic Mamma site:

Light and Dark, Life and Death, these are natural states in the continuum of all of Life. We cannot disconnect one from the other, and we can not deny that both are part of the whole of experience. We must see the beauty in both, the beauty in pain, the beauty in the struggle, the beauty in darkness of the night as well as the beauty in the light of day and the birth of the new emerging.

Looking back at the archives here and my life-long dread of the cold and dark, I realize I get mild Seasonal Affective Disorder every winter and the fall equinox marks the start of that. But March this year was also really hard for me, and when I read this post about the equinoxes and mental health, it all clicked. So I’m sharing it here along with the hippie thoughts. Just breathe. We can do this.

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. Locals, the gate to the upper part of Millcreek Canyon will be closing early for the season this Sunday. Get your hikes in tomorrow!

2. The Writer’s Almanac tells me that John Keats wrote his ode “To Autumn” on this day in 1819. Read it here–195 years later we’re currently having weather that makes us think “warm days will never cease.”

3. Anyone else have a difficult week? September has been full of ups and downs for me; let’s hope things settle down after the equinox on the 23rd. Hooray for weekends, too.

More Art

Karen

We ended up at Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake Friday night to look for auroras from the solar flares. We didn’t see any, but I was reminded how cool the lake is yet again. So yesterday when I found out about a Victorian artist who painted the lake and other Utah scenes, I had to share.

Alfred Lambourne came over from England and ended up in Utah with the Mormon pioneers. He painted the lake a lot end even homesteaded on Gunnison Island for a while. (He wrote a book about that.) I’m a sucker for Western landscape paintings in general, but I really like his style:

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Black Rock, Great Salt Lake (1880s)
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Great Salt Lake (no date)
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Castle Gate, Price River Canyon (1889)

You can read more about him here, here, and here. I think maybe a trip down to the Springville Art Museum is in order.