poem

THE SECOND COMING
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A time to rend, a time to sew

So I've been doing loads of hand sewing in lieu of owning a sewing machine. This is one of a pair of cushions I've made. They're (partly) deliberately not too measured or straight which I do quite like. The satin ribbon ended up quite puckered but the green velvet ribbon I added at the top (just seen) was a really nice textured addition. It was also a great learning experience for me as I've never done this much sewing in my life. Next I want to practice hand applique before I move up to using a real life sewing machine. My great-gran and my gran were both wardrobe mistresses in various theatres around Edinburgh and could whip up pretty much any frothy, ruffled and ribboned concoction I dreamed of when I was a wee girl. By comparison my fairly shoddy hand sewn cushion is hardly impressive but I have to admit to feeling a little proud!

On another unrelated note a favourite website of mine is the national fairground archive - it features the most beautiful old photos and designs. I love the idea of people inventing their own rides and just getting out the spanner to create them. The mechanics and design must have taken incredible skill. I also like the articles about the tacky airbrushed illustrations you get on the side of these rides and how they arguably act as contemporary gargoyles or totems.

Anyway here's the website... http://www.nfa.dept.shef.ac.uk/  and here's a picture from it...

Somewhere I have never travelled...

 

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Poem by ee cummings (love the last stanza) and photo 

from Olafur Eliasson who makes it rain indoors and 

dyes rivers green. 

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. ~Charles Simic

I've spent the last day and a half with some knitting - and several firsts - first knitted doll, first time embroidering a face (tricky!). I started the blog as a semi-anonymous way to keep track of craft projects and hopefully to be able to look back and see some sort of progress over time. It's also a nice way to keep track of photos and articles I enjoy over the year.

Here's my little knitted doll before being given a face, posing amongst the rice ...

 I've been re-reading (or reading non-academically for the first time) The Second Sex with its new chapter which I'm thoroughly enjoying. It's encouraged me to read over some feminist articles I've enjoyed over the past few years - this one, about old wives tales, is pretty hard to beat:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/15/germaine-greer-old-wives-tales

It had a great story about a doll that emits golden coins - I could do with some golden coins this month but the doll's a present for my friends wee girl who's coming over for a sleepover in a week or so.

The dolls face didn't turn out too bad for a first time - I definitely think less is more and it could have been much worse!

An odd little poem...

And on the subject of the last post (somewhat) here's an odd little poem from the wonderful Emily Dickinson and a certainly very beautiful but ethically questionable painting/collage from Damian Hirst.

MY cocoon tightens, colours tease,

I ’m feeling for the air;

A dim capacity for wings

Degrades the dress I wear.

A power of butterfly must be

The aptitude to fly,

Meadows of majesty concedes

And easy sweeps of sky.

So I must baffle at the hint

And cipher at the sign,

And make much blunder, if at last

I take the clew divine.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant

Finally after much longing, planning and browsing charity shops, ebay and online catalogues I have my new bookshelves. Of course after all the delusional attempts at individuality I've opted for the simplest, most mass produced bookshelves known to bibliophiles - IKEA Billy in plain and simple white.

I'd worried my already cramped bedroom would have been somewhat overpowered - and I guess it us. But rather than monolithic the shelves are warm and colourful and their additional depth (double that of the books themselves) helps the room feel a little more spacious than it really is.

It was tremendous fun - dragging books from boxes I hadn't opened in years, remembering ideas and imagery from years ago. I've become such a lazy reader in the past few years, reading books from bestseller lists, thrillers and detective novels (I know, I know they have their merits - don't let it be said I underestimated Dashiell Hammett) and avoiding novels with subtler themes. Finding, for example, books from Caribbean writers and remembering the first rush of memories, colour and excitement I got from reading them for the first time was a real blast and rendered the hours of self assembly misfortune somewhat worth it.

I'll end now with another fairly new addition to my room - I'm just back from a wee trip to London and raided the British Museum and Natural History Museums for butterfly inspired postcards - I'm building up quite a collection and decided to stick a few on the wall.

I'm wrestling ethically with buying some framed taxidermy butterflies from Thailand via ebay. They are extremely beautiful and I'm not sure whether they could be mistreated - wouldn't the person using them just pick dead ones from the ground? At the same time I wouldn't kill an insect in my house unless absolutely necessary so framing insect corpses and hanging them on the wall is probably not ok.  I guess I know the answer is no and just need to accept it!

Ok so first ever blog done and dusted - I certainly had more to say than I'd expected (thought none of it particularly interesting). I was really planning to use the blog to publish some of my craft projects - quilting will be my next post  - until then adieu!!