a couple more projects

"Project" was a bad word in Art Ed. It was much like saying "colored" for African-American, and a word I would not use for my own art units. I was encouraged to use the term "problem" instead, as art is creative problem-solving. According to my professors, "project" conjures up images of feathers, beads, and popsicle sticks, and final products indistinguishable from each other, except in the child's ability to glue the pieces together properly. Just picture the snowman collages from Kindergarten, with three cotton balls glued together on light blue construction paper, with cotton balls for the snow on the ground and more cotton balls for the huge "flakes" falling from the sky. Or my favorite project of all time, the Hand Turkey.

In case you didn't grow up in America, the hand turkey is a tracing of your hand, on which you attach feathers or paper cut like feathers on the four fingers, and a little turkey face is drawn on the thumb, with a little red paper or felt wattle (had to look up that term, but was surprised I knew it already!) hanging down. Some folks add feet, others just leave it at that.

The hand turkey is the bane of true art problems, and was a sign of complete desperation for ideas. It was like the white trash cousin wearing a Tweety Bird t-shirt, Daisy Dukes and stiletto heels to your wedding in Martha's Vineyard.

I had a brilliant idea as I graduated from the Art Education program, to send letters to fifty of the most well-known American artists out there, and ask them to each make a hand turkey. I would then compile the turkeys to make a tasteful coffee table book, proceeds going to fund art education programs. It would be released around Thanksgiving, of course, and be dedicated to all my professors, thanking them for changing the way I looked at harmless words like "project."

And here are two projects I just completed, and enjoyed working on: one is the pillow I mentioned in an earlier post, done with shadow knitting and crochet on the back. The other is a necklace and bracelet set with my favorite variegated yarn and carnival beads.
The front of the pillow, knitted with 2 colors: solid brown and then variegated brown to light blue. The "shadows" don't appear head-on, just weird stripes.
Looking at it from the side, you see a subtle band of brown, a band of lighter blue/brown, and then a band of darker brown on the other side. The purl ridges are the dominant stripe color, and the knit stitches recede into the background.The back of the pillow. A lightweight blue pillow stuffs it out (Ikea), and I single crocheted around the knitted piece. Then I made a mesh stitch with the variegate yarn to enclose the pillow. So soft.A choker and bracelet. I got the stitch pattern from a vintage pattern book, which had lace trimmings one could attach to linens or blouses. I added beads to parts of each row. Picots didn't really show up well, though.More of a detail of the bracelet. Single crochet with beads and into the toggle parts, then pairs of puff stitches with chain stitches in between, then single crochets with beads on the chains. Voila.

I can see clearly now...that I have glasses

Wow. I am really dumbfounded here. Yesterday, after a month of putting it off, I went to a glasses store and got a pair prescribed for me. I noticed this summer while working on a landscape that things in the distance didn't get any clearer when I squinted, which is what normally happens. Also, road trips became increasingly frustrating because D would ask me, the faithful copilot, what street was coming up and I couldn't read it. And you know that seeing a street name only 10 feet away doesn't help when you need to turn onto it.

So eventually, the eye doctor took a look, and said I just need a small prescription for driving, movies, and anything else far away (church especially--I can't read the words on the screen unless they're 5 feet tall and contrasty). And yesterday I picked out some very cute rectangular red frames with a pumpkin-colored stripe along the sides, and rushed back to pick them up just as the store was closing.

I put them on, expecting to feel that I had wasted a whole lot of dough on a minimal improvement--I had never worn glasses, except trying on other peoples' and getting dizzy. I looked up to the sign in the back of the store, and there it was in crisp detail! Amazing. Everything seemed so much more vivid, and--well, focused. Duh.

All the way home I looked over the top of the glasses, and then through them, at signs and buildings and everything, and it was just amazing. Without them, everything has a small border of fuzz, like when you haven't slept well the night before and your eye goobers are particularly potent. With them, it's really like magic, like all is right with the world. Or if it isn't, it at least looks clear.

Metaphors abound, and I am sure people have used this very experience in sermon illustrations. "Amazing Grace" comes to mind as well, though maybe not as extreme as blindness. "I was nearsighted, but now I see" doesn't have quite the ring to it. I am just happy that things can be this easily remedied. I do love technology sometimes.

crochet projects, hopefully

Here are some things I have been working on the past few weeks or so. I don't know if the stinkin' pictures will actually show up, since Blogger is quite temperamental about image naming conventions.Rainbow Tweed purse in "Big Prints" yarn and some fuzzy novelty yarn that, providentially, perfectly matches these insane colors. Flower in scrap green cashmere from a hat I made recently. The "Big" yarn really lives up to its name--it's about a half inch thick, worked with a Q hook. The whole bag is in slipstitch, which makes it look like knit instead of crochet. Score!

Hot Pink handbag in "Burly Spun" wool, with some fuzzy novelty yarn I forget the name of. This was before I learned the proper way to decrease, but I like the ripply effect anyhow. This was also before I learned how to mark the rounds, so I was always forgetting which round I was on. The strap is interlocked circles, like the chunky chains of recently fashionable handbags...

Black thread and "carnival" bead necklace with silver toggles. Easier than I thought it would be, and much easier than it looks! Single crochet spiral is the structure, and you slide a bead up to the stitch each time.
Beaded teapot with hand-painted wool (?have to check the wrapper). Don't ask me how I made it, because I just don't know. The handle is much like the above necklace, but the rest was a real challenge. The teapot is about 4 inches wide and a couple inches high, with a removable lid.

C is for Cutie, that's good enough for me

the great war with depression

I have devoured two books this week (yes, more sleep deprivation and I just can't help it), Maisie Dobbs and Birds of a Feather, by Jaqueline Winspear. Maisie Dobbs is a private investigator in London, 1927, and had been a Red Cross Nurse in the Great War. The first book follows her first case as a p.i., but also gives the account of her strange education and horrifying experiences at a casualty clearing station during the war. Events from her past creep up on her as she helps others deal with their own ghosts, mostly the aftereffects of this war that wiped out an entire generation of men. Birds of a Feather is the next book in the series, about several women whose actions during the War made them live in fear years later. Maisie discovers their secret, and a few other things about her own life.

I love history, especially the events and people of the early decades of the 20th century. The art of the time had exploded into abstraction, cubism, and new experiments with psychology. Technology bounded ahead with motorcars, medical advances and architectural accomplishments. Fashion went completely nuts--the long Edwardian skirts of the 10's were hiked ever higher as flappers became the big racy "it" girls. Women got the vote, and started going to college more than ever.

But with all the new technology came new ways of efficiently killing other people. The Russian revolution, the rise of Communism and the Spanish Influenza wiped out millions. And most of all, the Great War, which unfortunately, was not the war to end all wars it was claimed to be. I've studied a few books about the war, and I don't think anybody clearly knows why it started--sure a guy got assassinated in Bosnia (Franz Ferdinand, not the band...) and Germany invaded neutral Belgium, and it was a hot summer, they say, in 1914. Much like Romeo and Juliet, on a colossal scale, it's something I still don't understand even when I have examined the events.

These books have given me a fresh insight on that time, not necessarily the "why" of the war, but how it affected people in their daily lives, and how they lived with those memories afterwards. Some of the events come from Winspear's own family recollections. The mythology behind my favorite book, Lord of the Rings, was begun in the trenches, and all of Tolkein's friends died there. I can sense the evil he must have felt when I read his passages about battles. I am even drawn to Snoopy's stints as a World War I flying Ace, and vividly recall him weeping at the long rows of headstones in France.

I thought a little last night about why I am so drawn to this time period, to this war, and thought about when my interests perk up again to find out a little bit more. I was obsessed with it in my Junior year of high school, in the summer of 2001, and now. All of those times I felt like things in my life were completely out of control, that foundations were crumbling around me, and that people who could control some things decided not to. A sense of absurdity also, a kind of existential crisis came with those previous times.

I don't know if I feel like my own life is absurd now, though I do feel like many people in power are just as clueless as I am about fixing the trench warfare of drugs, crime, and poverty. But I do feel out of control, and afraid of some pending tragedy either in my own life or on a larger scale. There is a lot of fear and sadness and anger, just beneath the surface of my life, only needing a few bad days or weeks to bring out. At the worst times, an exposed nerve is what I feel like. At the best, the nerve has a thin layer protecting it from the swift poke that inevitably comes.

What to do? Get out of the trench first, then to the casualty clearing station. Then they'll give me some morphine and take out the biggest chunks of shrapnel, and send me on my way to hospital. Will my wounds be big enough to keep me from returning to the war? Only God knows.

when are ya gonna have a Baaaaybeee??

I am remembering the scenes in Seinfeld, when Elaine went to a family gathering, and all she heard was the above question from every whiny old lady in the room. Why do I write this here? I spent the last two weekends attending baby showers for good friends, and also had my first physical in about 5 years, where this question was repeatedly asked.

The shortest and rudest answer for why I am not jazzed to have another kid is: because I almost bled to death. There are lots of other reasons but I think this one is the best by far. I know it is merely a conversation-starter for people, like "what do you want to do after college?" but I still feel somewhat sketchy about answering it, like a boundary has been crossed. Not a huge one, but a big one.

Usually the responses to my "no, the birth was very difficult" are followed up with, "Well it's sooo much easier for them to have someone to play with in the house," or "I had a difficult one with my first, but the second birth is always easier!" I then smile and nod and say that I had heard that as well, but inside I am thinking, it will be a whole year before the kid can play with his sibling at all, if I am even there to witness it from this side of heaven. At least with a second kid, I don't have to worry about gall bladder attacks afterward. Maybe I might only lose a third of my blood, instead of half. Maybe my thyroid will start working properly, since the last pregnancy broke it. At least I will know how to breastfeed and expect to have no sense of humor for a year. Fun for D, fun for me!

But these things aren't terribly nice to say to a person who is merely interested in talking about babies. I know most of them mean well, and the rest are just batty, but I can't really say to a casual acquaintance "the idea of having another child scares the bloody hell out of me." Even adopting another child means having to take care of another child. It's another child, ding ding!! Hello! Twice as much work! Four more years of poop!

The logistical nightmare of one child is nothing, I know, compared to the complete quagmire of two or more. It's still a nightmare. I went to get blood work done at a lab the other day, and took A with me, along with a snack, his stroller (to keep him contained during my incapacitation-time with the needle), the diaper bag, all of my papers for the day, a cell phone, and I scanned the waiting room for things he could play with or shouldn't go near. When the nurse told me I needed a signature for my form, and there wasn't anything she could do, I loaded everything back into the car. I called the Dr. from there, and they said I could fax it and get it sent back signed (which I would bet she knew all along, since she did the same thing to another guy later). So, back out of the car with all the crap, into the office. Sure they can fax it, but hey it's 2 minutes till my lunch break so you have to come back. Meanwhile A was playing with the pull cord to the blinds and crying "Want cheese quackquor! Want cheese quackquor!" Back in the car, with a crying child. We went to lunch at a noodle place, where there were no tables except a long family-style one nearly full. It was 400 bloody degrees in there, and he did really well sitting in a big boy chair with all that stuff to look at. We went to a bookstore, he pooped twice, I was also ill, but I had to go back to the lab because they had my lab sheet. Went to the lab with all our crap again, and they hadn't gotten any faxes from anybody. Had to make two phone calls on their phone because "cell phones aren't allowed here," A pooped AGAIN (not a normal day, but maybe once a week he's like an infant again) and I had nowhere to change him. We got the fax, I strapped him in, I didn't pass out with the needle--the one advantage here, since I had to be brave for my son--he got a sticker and we were out. And he stunk up the car all the way home, poor kid.

So after this exhaustively boring and frustrating story, I say this: I love my son more than my own life, and I know if I had another little person in my life I would feel the same. But if I can barely function on a day like that without bursting into tears, and even my boring days are sometimes a mental trial to me, why on earth would I want to compound it with months of nausea and worrying, weight gain and depression, and then end up in another life-threatening situation? Even though we're not in the middle ages anymore, and thank you Jesus for that, it's still a risk every time you give birth. And it's even more terrifying when you've experienced that small percentage of births-gone-wrong.

I dearly love my friends and family who have had more than one kid (in fact, I wouldn't be here if my sister was an only child--think about that one!), and I love their children as well. I believe there are people who just love having babies and have no trouble at all with them, or the way they came into the world. Yay! Just be content for me, and say yes, you really did have a bad time of it, and it's ok to not want that again. Or ask me something other than "when's the next one coming?"

perfect

Here is the most succinct description of my life as a stay-at-home mother, in the childish voice of my son (to the tune of Snow White's "heigh ho" song):
Hi ho, hi ho,
It's home, it's work.
We go.

That sums it up!