Summer in the Deep South, Oddments

In early June I wondered if this would be the year of extended spring that went straight to autumn.  No such luck.  We have experienced bursts of rain interspersed with temperatures in the high 80s and low-mid 90s.  Gardening time is just after daylight, then again just before dusk.

Which means the best place to be is in the studio!

One thing Quarantine time has given me is a space to reflect and put things together.  Finishing the Almost-Dones has been a pleasure, too.  I have amassed a collection of little pieces, palm-size or a little larger, and when I came across them, I began to add to the collection.  These are concerned with color and texture, some are about shapes.  None are really finished pieces, but they are ideas.  The best thing to do when you aren't full of inspiration and the muse is off visiting friends and partying, is to simply show up and do something.  Lack of Inspiration and uncooperative Muse can be my excuses for not getting work done.

With that thought, I began to arrange some of the pieces into vignettes.  Once done, I thought of filling in the white spaces between them with little oddments collected since I was a child and curious about all small things that could pop into a pocket and be pulled out later for closer examination.  I found an old frame with a front-closing door and began to assemble these bits and pieces in some order.  I call the collection "Oddments," and, with great originality, they are numbered 1 to 4.  I have not kept any of them in the frame, but I photographed the individual vignettes.  The idea of leaving them flexible and mobile is appealing, particularly in this time of turmoil and change.  Nothing seems to stay the same anymore.

I offer you a guided tour of my day of play.

No. 1:  Here the center green circle is a tag from a dress by Gudrun Sjoden of which I am particularly fond, so I did a little stitching on it.  The other stitcheries are on linen, paper, even one in the lower line (on a yellow wedge ground) is unspun silk on a piece of paper towel with paint splattered onto it.  The slice of house at lower right is what I secretly fantasize about painting my (presently) blue house one day.  Painting the dots was an inspired moment, as the linen was from a very old shift I'd worn threadbare before I would take it out of my closet.

No. 2:  The arched line is an experimental wrapping of thread and fabric scraps, really small shreds of fabric that I dug out of my waste clippings.  The upper left leaf design is stitched on paper and cloth, with the leaf shape sponged onto paper from a wet cloth I'd just dyed.  Next to it is part of a (very) old wax-painted sample.  The wood in center is from a beautiful and large lavender bush that I brought with me when we moved back home from Knoxville in 2008, and after 12 years of bewilderment at its new location, the plant simply folded up shop.  I love the wood, as even the roots of lavender are a feast for the eyes.  The little boat at the bottom center is thumb-sized, to give you an idea of scale (or maybe of the size of my arthritic thumbs).

No. 3:  The center yellow piece was stitched on a scrap from a manilla mailing envelope.  Using Cas Holmes' instructions (The Found Object in Textile Art) for momigami paper, I wadded, folded, scrunched and crinkled until the paper softened to have a fabric-like hand.  I ironed it, and stitched with hand and machine.  It is a memory of travel to New Mexico with our son many years ago.  The thumb tacks next to it are ancient, I remember them in the back of a drawer from my childhood.  And the little ladder in the lower row is from some long-lost toy of my son's saving.  It is next to a stitching on paper (right) and little shape studies (left).  The red buttons were from my mother, and the piece directly above it came from studying Gwen Hedley's Drawn to Stitch.

No. 4:  Here I realized I had gone to setting things up in something like rigid exhibition order, and this page, though it has some of my favorite objects on it, is less animated than the other pages.  I have confessed to you, with the photograph, of my love of buttons that aren't always perfect and round.  Likewise, my feeling about trees and shrubs.  The little trees were wrapped from snips of embroidery and knitting thread so they look as if they can dance and actually enjoy themselves.  The black and white piece at top left ignited an interest in zentangle drawing and stitching that lasted almost a year, along with sketchbooking with white ink on black paper.

What a huge mess I made with this project, but it was a fun and productive mess.  At least that is what I kept telling myself . . .

Of Tea And Teapots

I have loved and collected tea pots since I was a child.  Really.  And boxes, particularly old wooden ones that originally housed candy or stationary.  But is is about tea pots and my love of the world of serving tea that I write today.

The idea of a cup of hot tea can be quite calming even before the kettle boils and the tea begins steeping.  The first thing my husband does each morning is to make me a cup of tea ("Happy Wife, Happy Life").  Charles will agree that it took some time to get the brewing time exactly right, but now he does it so well that I can't start my day without a cup of tea from him!  Dark black English breakfast tea by Twinings.

Once the day is set in motion, other teas will do— Assam, Darjeeling, Oolong, and a variety of green teas.  I make those cups myself.  To the Assam and Darjeeling I will add milk and honey and take a mug into the studio as a companion to the morning.

But in the dead of winter, when there is nothing but grey on the ground and in the sky, I sit with a beautiful teacup and saucer, sipping cup after cup of steaming amber liquid from one or another teapot from my collection.  I don't really have teapots that Lloyd's of London needs to insure, but I have my Grandmother Allen's Rockingham teapot,

along with a child's blue willow pot, and teapots to match almost all my sets of china (which are legion).  I even have three little village tea sets.  My dear friend and former sister-in-law, Cindi, gave me a pink and blue village set, and we immediately sat down and had mint tea in it.  We spent a delightful afternoon with that tea set, and it has always been on display in my home.  These village sets are worth a chapter on their own-- another post, I think.

Teapots call to me when I walk into an antique shop, and I answer automatically.  Sometimes I find a teapot with a matching sugar and creamer, though having the three pieces is not a criteria.  When we visited our friends Mary Kate and Bonnie in Monterey, Massachusetts a few years ago we naturally made the rounds of the antique shops.  I walked through the door of one shop and knew immediately that a teapot waited for me.  I moved slowly around the room filled with lovely objects, waiting for the teapot to reveal itself.  Mid-way down one wall the most gleaming piece of porcelain I have ever seen was waiting for me (you don't believe that?  Neither did Charles).  Despite its age, it looked as if it had never held steeping tea.  It is beautifully wafer-thin, and as I studied it I realized how difficult it would be for me to pour scalding water into it.  Even knowing that, I motioned to the shop owner and waited as she lifted it from its glass shelf.  It still holds my imagination, this beautifully shaped pot of classic, graceful proportions.

The creamer is delightful-- a small clutch of herbs is the perfect complement:

Another special gift was from my beautiful and witty friend, Gloria.  Shaped like a conch shell lying on one side, it is a perfect representation of Gloria's irrepressible humor, and I cannot pass by it without thinking of her.

Then there are the rice-patterned china tea pots.  This beautifully translucent porcelain has tiny rice-grain carvings cut into the piece before it is glazed.  The glaze then collects in the holes, and when it is fired, the tiny holes fill with glaze and allow the light to come through.  Lifting a rice-grained teapot is like lifting a vessel of blue and white light.

I am not the least bit snobbish in my collecting.  I enjoy inexpensive creamware and heavy stoneware, and these tea pots (small-ish and lovely to cradle in your hand) mix well with any sort of setting.

This one is a reproduction of an antique piece.  It is truly a work of art:

Fitz and Floyd created a beautiful circular pattern with this grey-and blue:

Another circular pot is an over-the-top beauty (thank you, Cindi!!!) that always gets a second glance from guests:

And these are my kitchen workhorses, used to steep pitchers of Southern table wine, "Sweet Tea":

This next tea pot falls into the category of "fun" pots.  Look at the sun detail on the yellow piece— I cannot keep from smiling when I use it (and from the chips, it has been used a good bit)!

I think, however, that Judy Brater, of Knoxville, has made the most interesting of my "fun" pots.  This one came to me through an accident of time and place.  One week when I was teaching at the Folk School, a woman walked up to me as I was filling my over-sized mug with hot water for yet another cuppa and announced, "You have my mug."  It took some back and forth and much laughter to realize that "her mug" was one she had made, and one I carried with me every time I left the house!  I told her I wished so often that she made teapots, and she said that she occasionally did, and that she had taken one recently to the Arrowmont School Gift Shop in Gatlinburg.  We were living in Knoxville at that time, so I whipped out my cell phone and called Charles.  This pot was waiting for me when I got home that next weekend (many thanks, dear husband)!

Blue and White always look pert and ready for steeping dark leaves:

These are Hall's pieces, from their Silhouette pattern.  It is, technically, a coffee pot, with a cumbersome drip apparatus that sits over the large open top, but the shape is so traditionally teapot-like that I use it that way (think summertime and iced tea on the porch/patio).  My Irish grandmother had this china.  It was a Jewel Tea collection that was sold off the back of the travelling Jewel Tea truck in the '30s and '40s.  There is even a small platter for scones and tidbits!

And both of Charles' grandmothers had Jewel Tea's Autumn Leaf pattern.  He inherited some of their pieces, which was the beginning of his collecting bug.  This is one of his Autumn Leaf Teapots:

Here is Bethy's chintz tea set, a gift from Granddad when she was only weeks old!  We use this child's set in learning the motions and manners of pouring and serving tea.  One day she can take it home with her— but first we will let Ethan grow up a little and not be so prone to break things.  I keep it in the dining room cupboard, and when she is by herself with me, she asks if we can "play tea" with it.  She very painstakingly helps to lift it from its shelf, including the little embroidered doily it sits on, then goes to the linen chest of drawers and chooses napkins for us to use (do I need to add that her choices are usually in the pink line?).

The little silver spoons, which fit this tiny set so well, are actually the miniature spoons you use with salt dips (of course I had them!):

We are using the smallest of the Portmeirion teapots to practice pouring tea (and water) into her new butterfly-patterned demitasse cups.  She will graduate from the one-cup pot to the two-cup, then to the largest of the pots.

In the basement closet are Christmas teapots, two matching the Cuthbertson Christmas China, and others that are just delightful without being a match for anything other than the spirit of the season.  I will share these with you later in the year. There is even what I call the "Thanksgiving teapot" packed away, and some small pumpkin-shaped ones!  What is a season without a special pot for celebrating?

I am a shameless collector, and there are a few teapots I still crave, though I could never, in good conscience, pay the hundreds of dollars they cost.  Royal Copenhagen's Full Lace pattern is one, and on a quiet day when nothing presses, I will look it up on line and stare at the computer screen the way a teenager stares at a picture of her first love!  Another long-distance love affair is with Belleek's famous basket weave pattern teapot with tiny shamrocks scattered sparingly near the handle.  I will confess to being weak-kneed when I find one in a shop (always new; evidently people never let these teapots out of their hands!).

So, now you are a party to one of my greatest weaknesses:  a love of all things tea-ish, for the ritual of tea with friends or family, and for the beautiful serving pieces that make the simple act of drinking a cup of tea a special event.  I hope Bethy will share that love as she grows older (especially with her British roots), and that the collection will pass to her one day.  She may not want everything I've amassed, but that's quite all right.  Remembering tea with Granmma will be enough for me.

Collecting

"The" season is upon us, and being a list-maker, at the top of that page of "To-Dos" is to remove the gourds from the mantel to make room for the Dickens Village.  Once the Village is in place, I start to think like a real Christmas Person.

I am concerned with all the "stuff" in our lives.  I was looking at the pine cupboard in the dining room, thinking about removing pieces of the ironstone creamer collection to make room for Christmas decorating.  We received a lovely gift from Dennis and it would be perfect in a corner of a cupboard shelf.  And the replaced creamers?  Or the chocolate pots?  Boxed away, of course, in the company of so many other boxes.

I have been a collector since I could remember.  My first love was small boxes, where I kept my childhood treasures.  Teapots followed— this was a direct influence of my grandmother, the Irish link of Mother's family.  My aunt Nancy Cile had Christmas dishes, and I wanted that special dining experience for my own family (which I managed, over a period of years of collecting).  And books?  My mother was the book worm who encouraged us from an early age to have our own personal libraries of favorites . . .

I wonder now if collecting is becoming a thing of the past, a relic from a time when homes were expected to graciously accommodate the various interests and collections of its inhabitants, when these habits could spill over without the need to be Better-Homes-and-Gardens neat at all times.  The perfectly-in-place house always makes me suspect that a very dull group of people live there, and when I am in these spic-and-span homes, I find myself looking for the collection that gives identity to an individual, some small clue to the interests of the family in the house.  Today's open floor plans don't lend themselves to corners where children's crayons and books are stored or wall space for displaying drawings, photographs or a shelf of rare antique books.  Where in the world would we put an old egg carton that cradled a little rock collection?

Which makes me think twice about the pine cupboard and the creamers.  This house is smaller than the one we left in Knoxville, less wall space, not enough book cases or closets.  There are boxes and boxes of pictures (many of my own making) that I have no place to hang, so I have not hung anything yet!  Is it possible that, at the end of things, a collector should not downsize, but UPsize?  And how do you take care of the UPsized home as you age?  A dear sister-in-law one time told me, wistfully, that her ideal home was a large concrete-floored room with a drain in the center of it . . .

What a list of questions without answers this is!  How do I solve this very knotty problem of re-forming the habits of a lifetime?  Is it even possible, at this stage, to aspire to change?  Maybe I should not go antiquing any more, not be lured by the gentle, classic shapes of creamers and white china.  *Sigh*  Glance away from beautiful tea pots.  *Double Sigh*  Never again ask to see the leather-bound books in the glass cases . . . Use the fragile chocolate pots until they are all broken and the problem of preserving them is solved by simple attrition—

Aaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!! (to quote Snoopy.)

Is there a support group "out there" for collectors wishing to go Cold Turkey?

Item two on today's list:  Bring the Dickens Village from the basement closet and become a Christmas Person.

Item three on today's list:  Think about everything else Tomorrow.  After all, tomorrow is . . . . (thank you, Scarlett).