Tag: Moravian blueprint

“…who notices the cloth-gowned scholar?”

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last year's quilt

The winter wren has begun to visit most mornings, perching on a chair outside my study window, peering in, then skitting up to a rattan birdhouse to check it for spiders. Every year I forget and every year I am reminded, when this happens, that they are secret birds, with careful habits, and when I see this one, I know where I am in the year.

waiting

At this point in my life, it’s all about patterns. Reading my entry from November 1st last year—https://theresakishkan.com/2017/11/01/finding-my-way-into-winter/—I see that I was stacking wood (due to a health malady on the part of my husband, whose job this usually is). Last night, around supper time, a guy delivered a load of fir, right on time. (John’s been cutting and splitting wood here, too, but there wasn’t enough to last the cold months; we burn 3 or 4 cords.)

Last year I was stitching the quilt at the beginning of this entry, from linen I’d tied and dipped in indigo dye. I backed it with warm red flannel and it’s on a couch, for cold evenings. This year? I have another length of the linen, not quite so deep a blue, but I’m about to turn it into something, not sure what yet, but maybe, oh, a quilt?

this year's quilt

I have some Moravian blueprint, too, bought from a shop near my grandmother’s village in the Czech Republic, and hoarded until the right thing came along. I think it might look beautiful with this linen. We’ll see. The cold months are long and fires are warm. It’s been raining for days and I think of Du Fu, preparing for winter:

In Chang’an, who notices the cloth-gowned scholar?
Locked behind his gate and guarding his walls.
The old man doesn’t go out, the weeds grow tall,
Children blithely rush through wind and rain.
The rustling rain hastens the early cold,
And geese with wet wings find high flying hard.
This autumn we’ve had no glimpse of the white sun,
When will the mud and dirt become dry earth?

 

notes from a work-in-progress

theresakishkan8 Comments

Anyone expecting to see regular updates on my Euclid’s Orchard quilt and essay must be thinking I am very lazy indeed. And in a way I am. It’s been a long process to figure out how to translate the material I am working on in the form of this essay to actual tangible quilt blocks. I’m not much a seamstress although I’ve been sewing since grade eight when we made aprons and jumpers in Home Economics. I was careless then, in a hurry to finish so I could have an actual made object in my hands, and I’m careless still. I’ve made more than 25 quilts and the sewing has never progressed to the point where anyone looking at them ever comments on the actual stitching. But never mind. I love the process and if you kind of squint when you look at one of my quilts, you might mistake it for something accomplished.

The problem with this quilt is that I am using images from textbooks, many of them graphic representations of particular mathematical theorems or ideas. I’d thought of simply trying to draw them onto white cotton and then embroidering them to highlight the parts that are relevant to the ideas I’m pursuing in my essay. But when I tried to do the drawings, they were lopsided and I knew that every step along the way would compound this problem. And let’s face it: a person who is careless at sewing isn’t going to be any better at embroidery.

I’ve seen quilts with computer-printed images on them so that seemed like a good solution. I thought I could design the blocks on my computer and then take the files somewhere to be printed. That didn’t work. The place I thought would do it, wouldn’t. So then I planned to print them myself, backing cotton with freezer paper which supposedly makes it possible to use it in a printer. But ours is a  a laser printer, a good one, and those won’t work. (They generate too much heat, apparently.) Finally, after some more weighing and pondering, I ordered an ink-jet printer (which seems like the height of self-indulgence) and bought four packages of specially prepared ink jet printable fabric.

Then I looked at my images again and they seemed awfully busy. I wanted one element to travel from one block to another, to provide continuity. But what could that be? Because this is an essay about mathematics and ideas but also about a real orchard, ours, which is fenced with chicken wire, and because one section of the essay is about bees and how they construct their honeycombs in hexagonal cells (which Pappus of Alexandria attributed to “a certain geometrical forethought”), I decided to use a simple model of those cells which echo the pattern of chicken wire. So here’s one block, just printed, the one I chose to accompany the section of the essay which meditates on inheritance. This uses a graphic representation of dominant and recessive phenotypes:

 

P1100087

Something else will happen to this block when the entire quilt top is completed — and so think of it  bordered with Moravian blueprint cotton, brought back from Brno two years ago, and maybe embellished with beads and gold thread among those cells. There will be 14 blocks altogether and I hope I have enough of the blueprint for the top. If not, there will have to be more improvisation…

 When I first began to work on this essay, I wrote this little aria, which I think I posted ages ago. But it’s still at the heart of this work I’m doing, so I will conclude with it.

Aria leading to summer

“Yes, but what can I say about the Parthenon – that my own ghost met me, the girl of 23, with all her life to come…” (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, April 21, 1932) How I felt that as I looked at our photographs of White Pine Island – Brendan and Angie in their little bathing suits, Lily on a log, Forrest rowing the boat away from us, my parents smiling the summer of their 40th wedding anniversary. All the years of our family, the warm days, the smell of pine, the silken texture of dry grass flattened under our towels, taste of lemonade from the River Trails thermos jug, all of them collapsed into an hour, a moment, held in my hands, water falling through my fingers. How do I keep my memories intact, how apart from this, a brief time in the middle of the night, darkness pressed to the window by my desk, myself reflected in glass as I sit in my white nightgown, every cell in my body yearning for those I have loved, still love, though the only one left in the sleeping house is John. Whom I have loved, still love.

Emboldened by Virginia, I think of what I want to say, not what form it must take. There will moments when I embellish, or downright invent; there will be brief arias, phrases of poetry, the instructions for making a quilt, for working out the puzzle of Mendelian genetics.

Of quilts and woodsmoke

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Today I’m hoping to begin a quilt. I have some Moravian blueprint bought in Roznov last February, at the Wallachian Open Air Museum —http://www.vmp.cz/en/visitors-tour-the-museum/roznov-pod-radhostem/ The Museum was fascinating, a collection of traditional Wallachian wood buildings, set among spruce trees. It was there (and a little earlier that same day, in my grandmother’s village of Horni Lomna) that I began to feel the stirrings of my own Czech blood. (I’m a quarter Czech, I said to John in wonder as we left that part of the CR by train. How is it that it took me 57 years to realize that?) Anyway, I’ve preshrunk the beautiful fabric and I’m trying to “see” what might be done with it.

blueprint

In the meantime, here’s a short section of the novella I finished last week. I’ve given it to my husband and my daughter to read, to see if it hangs together, if the dialogue works the way I’ve presented it — I didn’t want to clutter the page with quotation marks or em dashes so I tried to embed the dialogue within the actual narrative. I might have to revisit this but for now I like it. So this is the narrator, a young woman in her late 20s in 1978 (and no, she’s not me…), considering a quilt she has inherited from her grandmother, a Roma woman who came to Canada in 1913, falling in love with a Czech man on the Mount Temple and marrying him once they arrived in Canada.

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1978

I shook out the quilt. It was large, big enough for a queen-sized bed, composed of scraps of wool, mostly, though I could also identify some coarse linen, a few bits and pieces of velvet, and the back was striped ticking, the kind you find on old mattresses. I think it was in fact a cover for what would have been a mattress in the Calderas’s wagon and it was pieced together, probably from scavenged outer edges of the bag once the central part had worn thin. A bag, roughly woven, to hold dried grass or hay, or goose feathers. The stripes had been deep blue – I could tell this by examining the seams where the fabric still kept its vibrant colour, those blue stripes on a creamy ground. Now both were faded almost to grey.

The wool scraps were loden, once green – again, I could tell this by looking closely at the undersides of patches from which the stitching had loosened. And the velvet was black, though faded and rusty. The green wool and black velvet was appliquéd to linen squares, the stitching fine as bird tracks, in thread that was now a faded yellow but which once had obviously been rich gold. I had glimpses of the original colour where the stitches had been covered with sashing, now frayed. And between the squares was sashing pieced from various lengths of grey wool.

The smell of woodsmoke and musty air. My grandmother’s house. My own small flat, on the second floor of the converted theatre, had a set of double windows with a generous sill. I hung the quilt to air, leaving it for an hour or so while I rode my bike into Oak Bay village to buy some groceries. Nuts, rice, and yoghourt at Earth Household; carrots and apples at the Super Valu. I decided I had enough money for a bottle of wine and chose a Hungarian red, the one with the bull on its label.

Riding back, I saw the quilt hanging from my windows like a banner. I propped my bike against the side of the building and looked up. The loden green scraps were leaves, scattered over the surface. I saw this when I looked from a distance, adjusting my eyes to its perspective. Groups of two in some squares, three in others, a single leaf in many. I ran into the building, up the stairs to my apartment. I touched the fabric. It was densely woven, a kind of felt. I bent my face to the leaves and inhaled something animal, oily. Rubbing my fingers together, it was like touching sheep, that coarse wool suffused with lanolin. My grandmother told me once that her father had worn a cloak, a loden cloak, given him by a man who’d bought some of the copper pots. It was very warm, she said, repelling both wind and rain. Sometimes he’d open it to allow two or three of his children to shelter within. We sat under trees while the rain poured down and it was our own tent, warmed by our father’s body.