The Onion Grower

The Onion Grower

He toils and digs in dappled light

Deep in his forest grove

With gnarled hands he tenderly cares

For all the things he grows.
One day he brings them to market
And from his stall he cries

"Onions! scallions! alliums!

Garlic! ramps! chives!
Some to fry, some for tarts, 

some to bake or broil

Sharp, mellow, bitter, sweet

Greens and bulbs and soil"

When the last shallot has been bought
And the leeks are all gone
He packs up his little cart
To start his journey home.
The days grow short and cold and bleak
The snow begins to fly
He dreams of soil and growing things
To help the time go by

The sun grows warm, days grow long
Spring at last arrives
The birds sing, the flowers bloom,
The bees buzz in their hives.
The Onion Grower does not stir
Or from his bed arise.
Winter has consumed him leaving his
Onions, scallions, allium,
Leeks, shallots, and chives.

They lay fallow in his grove
The dappled sunlight has grown dim.
It's now the turn of growing things
 To cry out for him,
"Seeds, soil, water, tended with love,
Our Onion Grower has flown
To the heavens far above
No one will mind us or to the market bring,
Our Grower has gone beyond
The care of any living thing"

So when you go to market
And you see an empty stall
When you eat an onion tart
On the first cool day of Fall
Remember the Onion Grower
On his little patch of land
Love for humble growing things
Springing from his hand.

When you find chives or ramps
Growing in the wood
Know that he has been there
And that his food is good.
Gather what you find
Prepare it at your hearth
The Onion Growers bounty
Is love made from earth.

Whimsy is needed

Dealing with Covid-19 stress and just a bunch of other stuff by making more little knit houses.  This time less like Scotland and more like Faerie, designed to go with some peg people I had made last year.

One squishy house for a family of wee people.

This one has its own little garden to make it suitable for city living as well as the country.

The basic recipe I use for all my knit houses

Painting using a teacup from my mom's wedding china.  

Cloudy checking out the knitting and the directions to make sure they are appropriately comfortable.

As always I used scraps of yarn.  These are the perfect size for using up scraps of yarn.

Art for Inside

As promised here is the first in a series of art lessons for children to get through being shut in and not going crazy.  All of the books used are children's picture books, I've used these books and lessons for children ranging ages 4-11.  With older children I spend some time talking about books as art in their own right which helps them get past using a little kid book and also shows them a new way to look at those books.

Our first artist is Henri Matisse.  The book is Henri's Scissors.  

 I love this book and thought I'd start here because it not only is it beautiful, it is about Matisse toward the end of his life.  It has themes about illness, change, the need to collaborate in order to create, and death.  Before you stop reading it does these things in a way that is age appropriate and ultimately hopeful.  I was surprised the first time I read it with preschool children and they began talking about pets and grandparents and other relatives that had died.  It sparked a really beautiful conversation, especially when they realised they could use art as a means of remembering those they loved and coping with loss.  I'm a bit chagrined to admit I was surprised by the depth of the conversation I found myself having with four and five year old children.  Since we are in such an uncertain time I thought it a good theme to begin with.

For preschool and pre-k children the project began with painting paper as Matisse had his assistants do when he could no longer paint himself.  The intent was for them to paint with one color, but when you put all the colors out at once that isn't what you get.  I love the colorful results but if you want a final project that looks more like the artwork in the book limit choice to one color at a time.

Since most children this age are still learning to manage scissors I drew the shapes on the reverse of the paper and made the shapes with as few angles as possible,  some children will be able to follow the curved lines, some will have a bit more trouble.  All of their efforts were included no matter how perfect.  At this age it's the process that matters.

Older children were given a pile of paper, scissors, glue and a sample of shapes.

They were encouraged to let the project take them on their own path.  

Skills are widely divergent and the work of the older children was kept to individual pieces.  The younger children crested a collaborative piece where each child got to be Matisse and choose the placement of another child's work in the final collage.

We decided to add a little Henri to our final piece.  

The book is available on Amazon as both a digital or paper copy, Barnes and Noble also carries it online for nook users.  There are also several videos read alouds on YouTube.  

Uncle Johnny

This Lonely Walk

I was not a brave kid. My sense of adventure was confined to my very active imagination, with one exception; those magical mornings when Uncle Johnny would come by, usually unannounced but always welcome.  His arrival always meant one thing - a walk.

And by walk I don't mean a casual stroll around the neighborhood, I mean a Walk, a trek, an adventure!  Hours spent wandering blazed trails or unexplored woods where he always seemed to know the way, wading through waist deep streams, precariously walking across frozen ponds, trespassing into abandoned homes and long forgotten mills, exploring the land around the reservoir and learning to duck when the DEM trucks road by.  

Adventure.

On those days I wasn't timid, there was no time for timidity on walks with Uncle Johnny, we were all brave, intrepid explorers, but if ever my courage failed, if the rocky footing across a stream seemed too wobbly, the water too deep and too swift, he was there with an extended hand to help me across with a 

"Hurry up, Wendy, we haven't got all day"

in that gruff tone he had but which always made me believe I was as brave as one of those explorers I daydreamed about.

I didn't know then about his own childhood, how young he was when his dad died, or how hard life was for him and my mom. I did learn as the years went by that there was no hand reaching across treacherous waters for him and his big sister, only that they held tight to each other.

That is how they remained, each the witness to the others life, holding hands through joys and sorrows.  They saw each other married, became parents and saw those children become parents themselves, and they grew older still hand in hand.

The long adventure of his life is over, he has crossed that last icy stream leaving us on the far side with precarious footing ahead.

Every walk in the woods, every time I explored some abandoned place, every time I stood at the edge of the water he has been there in the corner of my mind saying,

"Hurry up, Wendy"

Just as he is here now with all of us as we reach out to help each other across these wobbly rocks,

"Hurry up, we haven't got all day"

And because he believes we can take those next steps, we will, each of us reaching out so no one is left behind.

Orchard House

The new film version of Little Women

so beautifully done and so full of joy

 I had to rush home and capture it

I'll spare the worst of my sketchbook

sketches and great right to the drafting of 

an embroidery project.

Many hours and a very messy sewing box and it is finally beginning to look like Orchard House.

Of course this would be when I realize my proportions are off....

Finished embroidering, then comes the scary part....cutting out the embroidered section to mount it to a background of winter themed fabric....adding some vintage lace trim....once I had it stitched and layered and ready to remove from the hoop I was stuck on what to do for a display...Joe saved the day by coming home from church with a beautiful gift box which had once held some biscotti, perfect size, perfect color, perfect frame...

There it is, my own Orchard House. 

I'll be sitting in the garret scribbling away.

The Crofting Life

I have this moving to Scotland

Outer Hebrides or Shetland Islands

Living on a croft dream

Where I raise sheep and Highland Cattle

Live off the land with the wind and the sea
Outside and a warm fire inside.

It's a distant and unlikely dream but a dream nonetheless.

In the meantime I'll make my own village out of rustic bits of wool

While sitting by my electric fireplace heater next to the Christmas tree
Hoping for snow

Here is my basic Croft recipe
It's a great way to use up bits of yarn

Cast on between 18-25 stitches with worsted weight yarn on size 7 US needles, stockinette for as tall as you want your croft to be, switch to the roof color, stockinette for 1/3 - 1/2 the height of the front wall, do one knit across a purl row to make the peak, then stockinette to make the back wall match the front.  Another row of knit a purl row to turn the edge for the bottom then about 1"-2" of stockinette for the floor depending on how tall you made your croft.  Pick up stitches on the left and right "floor" edges to make the sides stockinette stitch until they're just a bit longer than the height of the house.  Stitch all of the seams, the chimneys are wrapped around the edges of the roof as they're stitched, this is all four layers of chimney and roof with the chimney wrapped around the roof like a taco.  The windows and doors are duplicate stitch.  Some of my crofts have more detailed stitching, that's because my duplicate stitch has become increasingly tidy so I can now add detail.  Next round I think I will add more embroidery, perhaps some flower boxes. Enjoy and stay cozy!  

Longing.

Another Outlander inspired piece...

My original sketch

My intention was to make an embroidered piece. Until I went through my fabric stash and found this beautiful scrap that looks like a sunset.  The fabric is dyed this way and looked like a stunning and somewhat foreboding sunset.

Tea and planning and more planning.

All the fabrics are scraps from sewing projects, in particular here a cloak (the plaid) a shirt (the pink linen) a bag (the yellow and green) and last but not least an old sheet.  The challenge was making the pieces fit into a landscape with the sizes and odd shaped.  

Placement decided and placed in an embroidery hoop.

The fabric is all held with embroidery stitches to look somewhat like flora and inspired by many pictures of Scotland on Pinterest.  The figure is felt applique, mostly because I was at a loss of how to effectively trace out the shape and embroider over the appliqued fabric.  The skirt and the bodice/head are two separate pieces.  I embroidered the stitches for the tartan and the shawl before appliqueing the pieces to the background...and the hair...I'm pleased with how it came out for a first attempt, just don't look at the back.  The stitches for the hair are just under then wrapped over the flat piece so that non of the felt shows through and to give it dimension.

I decided to leave the stones and the house out of the finished piece because the sunset fabric captures that feeling of being alone, longing, and looking toward uncertainty much better than the rather literal representation of the standing stones and the warmth of the house.

For the full feeling hum the Skye Boat Song.

Veronica the Voter

With the election only a month away out greatest hope lies in voting.  It's hard to maintain any sense of optimism in the face of a government which has such hatred toward so many of its citizens.  We choose our government at the ballot box.  

Today's bit of craft activism is the a young women I've named Veronica. Veronica Votes.  She's old enough to remember her mother and grandmother voting for the first time.  Like my father's mother she is bucking expectations and choosing to have a career. My grandmother worked as an administrative assistant in a factory right out of high school, and against the expectations of the day for a middle class women she chose to go back to work after my father was born. She would continue to work until retirement age, at that point she went to work for my dad as his bookkeeper. In retrospect not only is her choice amazing to me but so is my grandfather's unequivocal support of her choices. She is my feminist icon. The woman who I remember behind the counter in my dad's shop, who taught me to love romance novels, and how to bake a perfect apple pie. Who taught me how to know whether an antique plate was authentic or a reproduction. To say nothing of letting me learn to type on her Smith Corona. She worked for most of her adult life, not out of financial necessity but because she loved what she did. 

My mother's mom, my Nana, worked on the floor in a factory, a single mother raising three young children on her own her story almost the polar opposite of my Grandma. Her fourth child, the eldest girl was raised by relatives from birth, the product of a rape so traumatic that she never realized she was pregnant.  She married some years later and had three children with her husband. He died in WWII, leaving my Nana to raise three young children alone.  She went to work in a factory that made electric components such as switch plates and lamp sockets.  As she struggled to keep a roof over the heads of her family and food on the table she watched the men she worked alongside, doing the same work, be paid enough to buy homes, afford a car, and all of the other trappings of middle class life. Paid more solely for being men. Eventually the second eldest was also sent to live with relatives who were more well off.  My grandmother walked five miles to work nearly every day until she retired because the bus cost too much.  For all that she never made us aware of her poverty. I spent nearly every weekend growing up with her, reading and rereading the Little House Series, watching wrestling and the Rockford Files.  She was the person who taught me to sew, how to use coupons, and how to make Portuguese kale soup. Only 4'11" tall she was nevertheless a towering figure in my youth

In my imaginary narrative Veronica is one of the younger women working in that factory, in the office, strong, independent, her ambition mentored by other women who believed she should have choices and opportunities and a career of her own.

I'm grateful to have had my grandmothers and other women of their generation in my life, the front-runners of modern feminism even if that wasn't what they called themselves.   Be like Veronica. Honor the struggles of the women who came before us with your the best way possible.  Vote.  

The Persistence of Beauty and The Resistance of Cute

The last week has been a low point for the women and girls of America.  If we have learned anything it is that sexual assault survivors are treated and viewed no better now than they were thirty or forty years ago.  How do we look at our daughters and explain that we have not come so far, in fact we are falling backward at a dizzying pace. 

It has also made realize I have to stop directing my rage, my disappointment, my frustration at random strangers on social media.  Not that I will cease to step in when I really feed the need, but no more engaging with the toxicity that provides a temporary release of anger without accomplishing anything meaningful.
With that in mind I've been spending more time reading for pleasure - yes, kids, that does mean I re-read the entire Harry Potter series again, next up, revisiting Little Women and maybe some Jane Austen.  Stories shape our world, they give it life.
My other approach has been to spend more time making things, specifically pendants and pins that feel like little talismans to me.  Tiny fiber shields against the darkness swirling around us.

They are not political in and of themselves, yet.  I have a tendency towards pretty and cute when I am making. I struggle with the idea of what place that tendency has when what I feel is so ugly, what I see happening is even uglier.  I don't have an answer yet. I may not get one anytime soon. What I will say is that humans crave beauty even in the darkest places.  To create something pretty, to make someone smile and feel uplifted is its own act of resistance. 

There is also room for the occasional silly self portrait.

World Wide Knit in Public Day at Slater Mill Historic Site

Slater Mill was opened in 1793 as one of the first industrial cotton mills in the US.

It sits along the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, RI.

In addition to two historic mill buildings there is a colonial era house and garden.

The garden features vegetables as well as medicinal plants and plants used for dyeing fibers.

This is the inside of the Wilkinson Mill, which still has its original water wheel and the mechanisms the power the machinery seen here.   Only one floor is currently set up to run with the water wheel....it's deafening and the the floor shakes, I can't imagine what the creaking, groaning, and thumping would have been like with three floors operational.  Part of the exhibit let's kids use a water powered lathe to make spools for thread.

The guide gets a comfy and particularly picturesque seat between tours.

This is the waterwheel.  It's massive and has an impressive array of controls to help regulate water pressure.

The outside of the Wilkinson Mill with the local spinning guild holding demonstrations. The weather was perfect, warm with a touch of  humidity to give the air that soft summer feeling, but with enough of a breeze to make knitting and handling wool in fine.  

The Blackstone River, the source of power for both of the mills on site. The Blackstone played an important role in the Industrial Revolution for much of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  It's a wonder to behold, one of our summer goals is to take the boat tour that explores the rivers history.

Of course there was yarn bombing on some two hundred year old industrial machinery.

The purple pompom was my contribution.

The interior of Slater Mill which was one of the first cotton mills in the US.  There are spinning machines, drum carder, etc...representing the mills over 100 hundred year history as a working mill.

The loom that sits in the colonial era house on the property.   We were able to buy some samples of fabric that had been woven on this loom.

The lovely, sunlit dining room.

If I had this machine I might actually manage to knit a pair of socks.

Part of the WWKIPD event was a yard sale, my 12 year old managed to purchase a pair of wool breeks and a cotton shirt for reenactments for $6!!! He was very excited, they need some alterations so we are going to do them in the period correct way for children's clothes by inserting drawstrings rather than making permanent alterations.

He is going to be training to become a docent at the Nathaniel Greene Homestead.

Later in the day he found a chemise for me for $1...I think the women at the yard sale table were charmed by his enthusiasm for early American history.

This lovely window is in the waterwheel room.  I'd wished I could sit there with a good book or my knitting.   The windows throughout the stone building are gorgeous.

If you're ever in RI check out this gem of a place.  They have many events throughout the year including a fiber festival.  The grounds are a lovely spot to stop and enjoy the river.  It's one of our favorite spots.

Oh, as for knitting...I didn't get a whole lot of that done. Everything else was perfect.