Cloth Elephants

A friend asked for elephants. These are preliminary studies... 
The blue elephants are the size of a US dime.
 

Some Circles

I happened to have my camera downtown yesterday and got these circles. (I don't have a cell phone.)
Top right: the sign on the clear glass marble fountain says not to throw rocks in it.

The building with the slender white arches (left side, third from top (or bottom)) is my favorite building in town. It was erected in 1964 as the Northwestern National Life Building, (now VOYA), designed by Minoro Yamasaki, architect of the World Trade Center.

Great quote about it from architecture critic Larry Millett:
he called it "a temple to the gods of underwriting, built by the gods of underwriting and mixing luxury and high camp in way that, say, Liberace would have appreciated."

Help Out (Zayas Art, Puerto Rico)

Puerto Rico is in a pickle, eh?

Life there could use some help.

Art above by David Zayas, Puerto Rico
Sheep from his one-painting-a-day project (2012-2013): Un ZAYAS por Día

Zayas's Instagram-- his murals and paintings feature great animals (even a baby rhino), and it seems he has a pug named Frida?--you can see her here. 

From PBS, a run-down of places you can send money to help hurricane victims in Puerto Rico:
pbs.org/newshour/rundown/can-help-hurricane-victims-puerto-rico

Lin Manuel Miranda wrote a plea, “Let’s use our own winds of change to help Puerto Rico dig out and rise up. Do it for your fellow citizens.” He recommends donating to
 HispanicFederation.org

Giraffe Fabric Collage

Giraffe Fabric Collage (seven vintage fabrics; about 4" x 5")

My sewing is just now starting to look like me, like something I'd make, which makes me happy.

I especially like that flowering plant to the left. 
The barista here at the coffee shop said it reminds her of the Star Trek plant that shoots Spock with spores that make him, that allow him to fall in love, and you know that comparison makes me reeeally happy.
Sometimes you make something and it surprises you and makes you happy like that.

Sewing Makes a Couch Dangerous

I'm sitting on my couch collaging this giraffe cloth...

...and I just spilled the case of pins.

__________________________

I wish I'd find one of these needle books with the monkey repairing the elephant's ear:

Tell Me a Story: Star Trek: Thumb Up, Thumb Down

I. Tell Me a Story

I was worried right away last night when the new Star Trek: Discovery lingered lovingly on a spacesuit, and the crew explained in detail how they had located an object in space. Oh, no, I thought---is this going to be high-tech, low-story?

Yes, it is.

And the storytelling was bad--besides all the time spent on special effects, many minutes are wasted on Klingons giving speeches (everyone knows Klingons mostly harp on one theme: "die with honor"), 
and a lot more time is wasted on developing a character the audience knows is going to die ("guest star [famous person*]" is a tip, folks). 

What there was of the story could hardly advance because it was stuffed with so many ads, the show itself was maybe … 35? minutes.
Maybe the worst thing: OH SO SERIOUS.

Where's the silliness of the original Trek?

Even Klingons have another side...

Behind the scenes shot [via]:
Klingon Worf (Michael Dorn) with "Emmi-Lou, a Russian wild boar that doubled as a Klingon targ".

Still, L&M and I were willing to sign on for the free-week-trial of CBS All Access, to give Discovery's second episode a chance. We couldn't:
the site must have been swamped. 
I don't know how this tech works, but wouldn't you think CBS would have prepared for viewers all trying to sign on at once after the first episode? 

They lost me--I'm not going to bother to try again, and I'm certainly not going to pay $6/month for "limited ad experience. 
When the entire show comes out on DVD, I might watch it then.

II. The Wright Stuff

"We finally got our Star Trek series. It's called The Orville. This is the stuff that sci-fi, at least for me, is all about."
--Reddit.com/r/TheOrville

Disappointed, we decided to risk the new Star Trek-ish spoof, The Orville, by Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy) despite its bad reviews, streaming on Fox TV.
 I LOVED IT!!!

Right away, I was laughing out loud. I don't know how it would strike people who don't know sci-fi television, but it's a loving spoof of that genre, along the lines of Galaxy Quest.  There are oodles of tips o' the pen to Star Trek, but I'd say that like GQ, The Orville stands alone as well.




The Orville is obviously and delightfully the work of the type of fans who are always groaning in frustration, 
"Why didn't they just . . . [fill in the missing obvious thing real people would do]?!?!"
Finally, here are the missing seat belts, a bathroom break (maybe a little too much bathroom humor, but whatever), eavesdropping with the ship's intercom, etc.---but they're not thrown in gratuitously--they're neatly woven into the plot.

OK, some are gratuitous, but they're so fun & satisfying. 
My favorite line was when the new captain, Ed Mercer (MacFarlane), introduces himself to his bridge crew, and the navigator John Lamarr (J Lee) asks:

"Uh, so, our last captain let us have soda on the bridge while we were working, and I just want to make sure that's still okay.

Ed: "Uh, yeah, if you keep it below the equipment and don't spill any, sure." 
[transcript here]

Later we see Lamarr drinking his pop from a straw--for no reason.
 
But as someone who actually quit a volunteer job over the issue of pop, I was deeply gratified. 

Presenting the ship as a real workplace is brilliant: I can relate when crew members are annoyed to encounter aliens because it means they won't get off work on time. 

I felt among my own, as someone who loves SFX that rely on clever handmade and camera-made effects, like in the old Dr Who and Blakes 7 (whose budget was so low, they borrowed Dr Who supplies from the set next door) and 1960s Star Trek with its styrofoam rocks and the like. 
(Or the movie Be Kind, Rewind, a tribute to in-camera effects.)

Ideas move a story along, not gadgets---if the ideas are good, we'll accept that the gadgets are held together with hot glue; 
and we see the Captain Mercer and his first officer (Adrianne Palicki) [they're an unhappily divorced couple] literally hot-glueing the cunning gadget that saves them. 

Speaking of low-tech ingenuity---you can see Orville & Wilbur Wright's Flyer on the captain's desk. Also a Kermit the Frog toy, and a plant. 
A plant. This touches my heart so much--there were always these low-light plants on Captain Kirk's Enterprise too. And Kirk's bookshelf always held a few antique hard-copy books too.

I found this photo ^ on Reddit, whose users seem to agree with me it's a terrific show so far:

"This really does feel like classic TNG or TOS star trek. I'm so glad I decided to give this show a watch. I'm absolutely astounded that critics blasted this show and gave star trek discovery such high marks. "

And it's funny. Reddit says, "The Orville is the perfect foil to the angsty sci-fi that we are getting lately."

Finally, while Discovery took us about ten minutes into one story, the Orville resolved their plot all in one episode. Thank you.

I'm glad to see someone else in the mainstream press agrees with me too. From Forbes: "The Critics Must Be Crazy: Seth MacFarlane's 'The Orville' Captures The Spirit Of 'Star Trek'"

                                  ______________________
* famous person = Michelle Yeoh, I know her from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon:

Here's Yeoh, below right, as captain of the Federation Starship Shenzou; MacFarlane as captain of the Orville, left:

David Attenborough on Vulcans; Star Trek: Discovery

Worlds collide, hilariously. 
After I posted about David Attenborough yesterday, Mortmere sent me this [below] Kirk/Spock fanvid "examining the courtship and mating rituals of Vulcans", with narration by the man himself ("from numerous BBC documentary series"). 
The footage is mostly from the famous Star Trek episode "Amok Time", when Spock goes into Pon Farr, the Vulcan primal urge to mate. 



"Amok Time" aired almost exactly fifty years ago, on September 15, 1967. 
Which reminds me--I'm going to watch the first episode of the new Star Trek series with bink & Maura tonight: Star Trek: Discovery. 
It's on the regular CBS television station tonight at 8:30pm ET--after than you have to sign up for CBS All Access (more info from ars technica).

My expectations are low, but how could I not give this transmission a try?

Nichelle Nichols (left, Lt. Uhura in The Original Series) and Sonequa Martin-Green (First Officer Michael Burnham) 
Star Trek: Discovery  premiere

And I think the trailer looks promising.
I like its use of the song "I'd Love to Change the World [but I don't know what to do]"--by Jetta + remix by Matstubs, used on Sense8 too--oh, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Person of Interest--I guess it fits the mood of the times?
You know the original from 1971:

"World pollution, there's no solution
Institution, electrocution
Just black and white, rich or poor
Them and us, stop the war"

A Fetching Hat for Red Bear

(Suitable for a royal wedding, eh?)

Pincushion

Pincushion with pins & needles in it, as found

 in a sewing basket donated to Steeple People thrift store

Needles and pins are little swords.
At the embroidery class, people talked about how you can use your own spit to remove your wet blood, if a needle stab makes you bleed on your work.

[I looked it up: there's no scientific reason spit would work better than water. But spit is mostly water, and water will rinse out fresh blood, so spit does work. It doesn't have to be your own spit, but whose else would you have to hand?]

Look online at sewing notions, however, and you'll find a world of cutesification, pastel trimmings and perky sayings. "Make it sew!"

I see their heavier mettle.

UPDATE: my first napkins

UPDATE: The second two-sided Star Trek napkin I sewed:

Original post from 9/19:
I couldn't embroider today after all, because I burned my finger on the coffee pot (oh, the drama), so I decided to make two-sided napkins on the sewing machine, pairing some of my cotton scraps (mostly from Steeple People) with the Star Trek fabric Dr H sent me recently.

Here's the first one, which took me for-bloody-ever. (OK, just two hours, but that's more than I expected for something so seemingly [seemingly] simple.)

 I didn't realize how futzy it would be to turn under and iron each edge down and to match the two sides up... But the result makes me happy. I only had enough of this particular backing fabric for one napkin, so the others will all be different.

For a Honey of a Year

Apple & Honey for Rosh Hashanah

I'm not Jewish but have shared prayers for a sweet new year with Jewish friends in the past--this year it's me and my camera . . . my now sticky camera.

 
Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam
Blessed are you, Lord, our God, king of the universe
 
 borei p'ri ha'eitz (Amein).
who creates the fruit of the tree. (Amen) 
 y'hi ratzon mil'fanekha Adonai eloheinu vei'lohei avoteinu
May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors  
sh't'chadeish aleinu shanah tovah um'tukah.
that you renew for us a good and sweet year.

That's better, Captain.

I love the Star Trek fabric from Hannah, but everyone was so serious. It needed a little je ne sais quoi.

Stitchery from my Sicilian Grandmother

I've always wanted to copy the pattern on the dress my Sicilian grandmother Rosaria is wearing in this photo from 1924; she is twenty-three.

She is with her first three (of ten) children, in Milwaukee, where her family had immigrated when she was a little girl.

I assume she made all these clothes herself, coming as she did from a family of tailors and seamstresses.

I always thought it would be complicated, but looking at her dress more closely today, I see the embroidery pattern is fairly simple: 
a curly S and a loopy back-and-forth design. 
(The S's look like one of her SOS cookies [recipe].)

I'm going to embroider the design on the little cell-phone bag I'm making for my Auntie Vi-- Rosaria's forth child, born in 1925. (My father was the seventh child.)

Masa works

Adding a couple cups of veggie broth + masa harina ("dough flour"––the fine corn-flour used for making tortillas) worked wonders for the too-tomatoey chili:

it mellowed the acidity with a slight earthy sweetness and thickened the chili a bit too. 

I will add it to chili again.

bink approved >>>

UPDATE: Terrier Towel

UPDATE: Now bink's 60th birthday party has come and gone, I can show you how the terrier towel looks like bink's wire-haired fox terrier Astro, with his sticky-uppy ears:

Original post:
After embroidery class yesterday, I looked in the textile center's little shop. They have a shelf of donated vintage stuff, and I found an old linen towel embroidered with a terrier for $5.

I snatched it up for bink's 60th birthday. (I'm co-hosting with Maura bink's birthday party this afternoon.) 
But the dog looked like a Scottie––all black, with a big beard––and bink prefers tri-colored fox terriers, so I picked out some of its beard and added a couple browns, and it looks more like bink's dog Astro.

And now I'm going over to bink's to fix-up the vegan chili I made last night for her party. It's mostly tomatoes, beans, and spices, and without a meat base to ground it, it's too acidy. 

I looked up ideas to make it less tomatoey. I'm going to roast sweet potatoes and also add a little veggie broth with masa harina--fine corn flour. (I don't think I'll do this, but the suggestion of a little peanut butter sounds good too, like in West African dishes.)

No cauliflower was served at the birthday party.

Sashiko & Podcasts

Sashiko embroidery class yesterday was great, not because I learned a stitch––sashiko is as simple as I'd expected, not much to learn––but because, as I'd hoped, I talked to the other students, getting recommendations about things like podcasts to listen to while stitching, and how to dye with black walnuts.

So, my question to you is,

Can you recommend any podcasts?

During class, I started to do the sashiko, a decorative mending stitch (the name means little stabs), on my pants' leg hem, which was coming undone:

It's hard to make the stitches even and evenly spaced, but when I look at vintage sashiko, which was just how everyday people in Japan mended their clothes, it's not going for that anyway.

In fact, the uneven handwork appeals to me more than evenly stitched pieces.
It shows the human hands, like an upright bass echoes in a way that makes you sense the wood. 

via kimonoboy

Knitting in Public

I'm off to the one-time sashiko embroidery class this morning---was happy to read this morning a little story in Selvedge about Kaffe Fassett (famous colorist & textile designer):

Kaffe was born in San Francisco in 1937. At the age of 19, he moved to paint in London. He embarked on a kaleidoscope of ventures:
One of the first was a trip to a Scottish wool mill. There, he bought Shetland wool and some knitting needles, and on the train back to London a fellow passenger taught him how to knit…

Kaffe, young and old:

Registration Point

I. The Perceptible Wavelength

I'm not on Facebook, but every so often I look over bink's shoulder at her FB, to catch up on people we both know. bink is FB-friends with my sister, and last night I looked at what my sister has been posting since our father died two months ago. 

It was so strange to me: she's been posting frequent tributes presenting our father as the most "fun, funny, smart, warm, beautiful man"––her words. An ongoing series of photos illustrates how unmitigatedly adorable [her word] she thought he was.

You know how you get seasick when something changes your vision--like when you get new glasses,  or look through a prism? I felt like that, seeing through my sister's eyes. She always adored our father, and now he's dead, she's flattened his complex personality, papering over the man's twisty shadowed valleys. 

I actually felt rather disturbed when I went to bed last night, the way you do when you've had contact with a reality at odds with your own. But as I was lying there unable to sleep, I was comforted to remember something I'd recently read about human vision in The Brain: The Story of You (companion the PBS television series), by neuroscientist David Eagleman.

Eagleman points out that, as you know, "color" is just the name we give to certain waves that we are able to see--it has no objective reality outside the cave of our brains. And other waves, such waves of cell phone conversations and radio stations, are around and in us all the time, but they are imperceptible to us.

"Humans detect a tiny fraction [about 1.5%] of the information carried on the electromagnetic spectrum. ...Visible light is made of the same stuff as the rest of the spectrum, but it's the only part for which we come equipped with biological receptors."

That's true psychologically too, eh?  
We only register other people's realities that fall within the range we CAN pick up, we only process the emotions and thoughts we have receptors for (or, you know, that we have open, working receptors for).

It was always the case that my sister and I saw my father differently--we picked up different waves.  When I'd try to talk about what I was getting from my father, my sister would reject it, and me––once actually (and usefully) telling me, "I don't care how you see it,"––even though she had sometimes been present when my father had done the thing I was talking about.  She seemed psychically unable to see the full spectrum of who he was.

"Each creature picks up on its own slice of reality," Eagleman writes of the brain. "No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists:

"What does the world outside your head really 'look' like?
Not only is there no color, there's also no sound: the compression and expansion of air is picked up by the ears, and turned into electrical signals. The brain then presents these signals to us as ... tones.  …The real world is not full of rich sensory events; instead our brains light up the world with their own sensuality."

So, that was a good reminder to me that you see what you can see, and my sister and I simply have different capacities, especially where our parents are concerned.  

II. The Point

But also, as Harry Nilsson's Rock Man said (0:28) in The Point (1971), you see what you want to see:

"You ever see a pterodactyl?"

"No."

"You ever want to see a pterodactyl?"

"I guess not."

"Well, that's it: you see what you want to see."

I'd forgotten, but The Point was a big influence on me ten-year-old me. I have yet to this day to see the made-for-TV animated film, which looks pretty great, but I got the album (cover, right--needlepoint by Kathy Torrence) from the library and listened to it over and over.

Looking it up now, I see Nilsson was inspired by an acid trip,* but at the time, it just felt like someone who got reality--- being a kid is pretty trippy. (So's having a human brain). 

(In fact, I see now that growing up in Madison, I was unknowingly influenced by a lot of trippy stuff. When I got older I was, like, Why's everyone so one-dimensional?)

The Point is about a boy, Oblio, who is exiled with his dog Arrow from their town: "You have been found guilty of being pointless", from the album inserts:
 

Funny, speaking of rocks and stones, the example I always give of how my father and I related (or didn't relate) is kind of trippy itself––on my part, anyway. I've never done psychedelics, but I was interested in religion and philosophy, which is related, and when I was fifteen I tried to discuss with my father whether rocks have souls. 

He told me that since we couldn't know, it wasn't worth asking the question.

Well, as the Rock Man says [at 1:39] to Oblio: Being a rock is a very heavy life.

Oblio: Boy, I never realized that rocks and stones were so...

Rock Man: All you gotta do is open your mind, along with your eyes.  
_____________________________
*Nilsson explained his inspiration for The Point!: 

I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.'

The Point--entire album on YouTube, starts at 36:56, narrated by Nilsson

The Point, songs only, pt. 1(no narration) 

Sewing in Public: Making an object by hand

Michael sent me this quote from Rosemary Hill, art historian:

To make objects by hand in an industrial society, to work slowly and uneconomically against the grain, is to offer, however inadvertently, a critique of that society.
--From “Explorations of a Third Space,” Times Literary Supplement, April 23, 1999. Quoted in Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (2000).

Yesterday I chose from my Steeple People Thrift Store stash a linen runner that someone had barely started to work on long ago, and I began to stitch the words. 
I sat outside embroidering at Jasmine, a nearby Vietnamese deli. 
A young man at the next table asked me what I was doing, and I showed him the quote I'd written down. We ended up talking off and on for the whole time he ate his pho––he's a painter, newly moved to town.

A couple people walking past stopped and commented too.

I'm finding that sewing in public solves the problem of eye contact with friendly strangers: You always have your sewing to look at, if it's awkward, there's a gap in the conversation, or you don't want to engage. Very handy.

Prince at Sunset (by happify)

Julia posted on her happify Instagram this photo of Prince in alignment with the Sun, about a mile from my house

Etui too

New words I've learned from looking into sewing notions: 
chatelaine (posted an octopus one the other day), 
and, today, etui.

Etui: (ā twee) a small case for sewing supplies, cosmetics, and other little things, often ornamental
It has a fun etymology, with an unexpected relative:

early 17th century: from French étui, from Old French estui ‘prison,’ from estuier ‘shut up, keep.’
Compare with tweezers.

Nähetui is "sewing kit" in German, as you can see on this appealing one from Laura's German boyfriend, Lutz. It's ornamental and functional--all is tidy and correct inside, but it shows use.

What I've Been Sort of Reading

Autumn is time to clear the clutter before I have to close the doors and stay inside with my stuff.

Today I packed my bike panniers with books to return to the library, sell to the independent bookstore, or put in Little Free Library boxes---then I took them all out again to take their photos.

I've fallen way behind keeping track of what I'm reading––maybe because since the inauguration (and finishing the fandom book), a lot of it's political stuff online.
This is just a quick photo record--a random round-up.

Did I read these books?

Let's see... From the top down:
Yes; currently reading (Midnight Is a Place, children's novel by Joan Aiken); 
yes (Reagan, like Trump, didn't (couldn't?) differentiate between fact and fiction-- but, unlike Trump, seemed "nice"); 
just the intro; looked at the pictures about the brain; decided to keep Association... because I might; didn't even crack it; disappointed (Carrie Brownstein on her life in music--read it all, but I only care about Portlandia, which isn't mentioned); reference book (making stuffed animals)

LIBRARY BOOKS

Below: FROM MY BOOKSHELVES (or floor)
Books that today I sold to the independent bookstore or gave away in Little Free Libraries

Did I read them?
From the top down:
some stories in it; bogged down, just like the nation (Yugoslavia); partly (fandom research on gaming); ditto; 
got halfway; ditto x 2; 
TOO SAD (A Monster Calls--about a boy whose mother is dying) 

Did I read them, below?

From the top down:

Yes, I love Maira Kalman but have a couple other books of hers and this one about the United States is my least favorite; 

You Don't Have to Say... TOO SAD (boy whose mother is tormented--worth it though); much of it (quotes about aging); fandom research; 

disappointed (Hunger--oddly polite & remote for a memoir about becoming obese after being gang raped as a girl--or maybe not odd, since the point of getting fat, she writes, was to create distance); 

mildly disappointed (as I have been by everything Winterson has written since Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)