Kiryat Arba

So today we walked to the bus stop after dropping M at gan, took a bus downtown to the Central Bus Station, where the prevailing color was khaki. Sunday is back to work day–all the soldiers coming back from visits home over the weekend.

Two security screenings to enter the bus station: you walk through a metal detector, then your stuff goes through a detector.

Buy a bagel with dill cream cheese.  More cream cheese than bagel, and tomato slices to boot.

The armored, bullet-proof glass bus was full.   The hour long ride wound through rocky land with terraced fields, settlements both Jewish and Arab, and some lone houses.

The tunnels and high walls on parts of the highway were to protect Jewish drivers from rocks through the windshields and bullets.  At the three bus stops along the way were heavy cement guards so drivers could not swerve and kill those waiting for the bus.

Grapes, melons, olives, corn, kale, tomatoes growing.  Saw one herd of sheep and goats.

The Arab homes differed in style but were of similar, if not nicer, substance.  An interesting note:  Jewish homes have white solar water heaters on the roofs; Arab homes have metal or black solar water heaters on the roofs.

Kiryat Arba has a population of about 7500-8000.  We had a fun textile time, A teaching her friend to knit, and I spinning up the last of some pastel Easter Egg colored wool from Germany into a fingering weight yarn.

I saw an olive tree with olives up close and personal.  The olives have to be soaked in brine to be palatable. Mammoth roses and their small apple-sized rose hips.  A nut tree of some sort.  Pomegranate bushes with ripe and splitting fruit.  Gigantic morning glory vine in full bloom.  Lot of other plants in bloom and fruit which i have no name for.

And that wonderful large jaylike bird which has a large, lovely feathered crest more on the order of a parrot than a jay. But it would not sit still for a photo.

The sound of jets training in the desert near by.  A blimp.  Watchtowers. Returning to Jerusalem, the bus had to come through a security checkpoint to enter the city limits.  Lots of men with protective veswts and submachine guns.  Hanging out.

Because really, it is safer here than Chicago.  Robberies are essentially nonexistent because you never know which home has a gun with ammo in the bedroom.  And all security profiling is 100 percent racial profiling.  Which is pretty effective.

A left me in the bus station which also has a small shopping mall.  I made my way home alone via the #6 bus, walked under a large crane which was busy lifting cement for a new building.  The vast cauldron attached to the crane was sitting behind the cement mixer parked by the edge of the sidewalk, being washed out.  I had to scoot to avoid being sprayed.

Now we hope there is no general strike tomorrow, which would put s crimp in plans for the rest of the week.

Season Change

The ancients were correct that this time of year is transitional. Just in the past week the weather has changed: snow twice, hard freezes.  Those freezes mark the end of raspberries from the garden, ferns near the house, bright leaves on the trees.

The rest of the apples need to be picked, and the stems of wild rose hips for bouquets.  The lst hydrangeas picked before the snow:

 

The girl spent more of her birthday money on a new haircut:  a long shag.  Almost half her hair was cut off but it is hard to tell, she has so much!

And I am readying for a trip to visit friends in a far off land, my first visit to the Mediterranean and the Mid-east.  Pounce looked last night like he was waiting to be packed!

He has been joining Hawthorne and me on our morning walks.

Troy Wool Day (2)

The other reason we judges were at the Troy was to judge the fair entries in the various craft categories.  entries were down this year, but we kept quite busy with what was at hand. Here are some snippets.   And then there was some shopping…

Loch’s Maple Fiber Mill was where two of us bought rovings ready to spin.  A half pound each of some lustrous mohair and Wensleydale wool came home with me.  Sharon got those as well as most of a light grey Teasdale/Wensleydale roving.   I highly recommend Randy and Jamie’s business.  They have machines imported from Europe so are able to process fiber into very fine rovings. They have a 16 month backlog for processing!

 

There were lots of fleeces for sale, like these from Mary Stepney’s sheep.  Mary herself no longer runs her place.  The prices have gone up considerably: $15.00 per pound for raw skirted fleeces!  They are beautiful.

 

Here are three examples of yarn we judged: a hand spun boucle (say boo-clay since diacritical marks are outside my skill level to apply), paper yarn, and hand-dyed mohair locks spun into yarn.  The boucle was a wonder: it was also entered in the sheep to shawl in the warp as an accent in the Dream Weaver’s teal-winged duck shawl.  The paper yarn is for display and spun from old tissue sewing patterns.  The goat yarn is pretty and had a hard hand; its intended use was for ornamenting a scarf which we felt might one would not want in contact with skin.

 

The drop spindle contest.  Who can spin the longest thread in ten minutes.  For the first time in memory, we had a tie for first place: a very fine grey wool and a thick, dark brown camel both had 52 yards on the spindle–more than twice as much as any others.  If I am recalling correctly.

 

The Spinning Bunny was there, too.

 

Above are the three shawls that we gave special prizes to.  The Crab Nebula shawl was designed for a Ravelry contest.  The entrant even had a photo of the Crab Nebula attached to show us how well she did.  It is wool and silk.  The gold shawl was spun on a drop spindle and plied on a wheel.  It had some angelina in it so in certain light is looked as if it was covered with gold leaf.  And the rust colored shawl was from yarn spun more thick but incredibly softly and knitted into a lovely leaf-edged pattern.

More entries.  Please note the blanket in the lower left hand corner.  It was our best of show.  Spun by the young weaver for Cat’s Cradle.  It was her second project ever.  She included her pattern draft, a color card of all the yarns she used–all hand spun and hand dyed by herself.  It was soft and the colors worked well together.

And it was beautiful.  The photo does not do it justice.

Wool Day in PA (1)

Yesterday was Wool Day at the Troy, Pa Fair.  Three of us went down to judge the hand spinning, weaving, and sheep-to-shawl contest.

There were four teams competing in the Sheep-to-Shawl:

Each team had six members: five spinners and a weaver.  One spinner plies the yarn.  All prepared the wool for spinning from a fleece of their choice which was brought into the ring with them.  The looms were warped prior to the contest.  Three teams had hand spun warps.  The sett varied from 8 to 12 ends per inch. They had four hours to complete a  (minimum) 72-inch long, 18-inch wide shawl.

 

This is the Fort F__?__ Flickers  (the middle name escapes me) shawl.  It was based on the theme of a daffodil.  The warp was dyed green at one end and slowly changed to deep yellow at the other end.  The team used a white fleece for the warp. It was a nicely spun and woven shawl.  I wonder if their use of food dye will mean it is not light fast.  The Flickers was the youngest team.  They came in second.

 

Cat’s Cradle used an unusual table loom.  The sheds were raised and lowered by turning the wheel. This was the weaver’s third project!  She did an admirable job, but the sett was too high (so the shawl was more like a blanket)  and their shawl too short (a baby blanket).  Cat’s also used a white fleece for the weft. They came in fourth.  Isn’t that warp lovely?

 

From our own guild were the Sheep Thrills.  An appropriate name.  They used a dark grey fleece from Christine Johnson’s Johanneshof Romneys  as the weft over a boughten grey warp that looked almost lavender next to the handspun. Bill, who is an expert weaver in cotton, wove an incredible shawl that had a zig-zag border not only on the long sides but also on both short sides which enclosed a square diaper pattern (diaper in the design sense).*  But alas, their shawl was short.  Sheep Thrills came in third.

Dream Weavers wove a shawl based on the theme of a teal winged duck.  They used two shades of grey hand, a dark blue teal, black and a little bit of boucle–all hand spun in their warp and then used a lighter grey fleece as weft. The result was a simple elegant shawl that  incredibly beautiful. Dream Weavers finished first and won first prize.

* Textile fabric woven with a small and simple pattern formed by the different directions of the thread with the different reflections of light from its surface and consisting of lines crossing diamond-wise with the spaces variously filled up by parallel lines, a central leaf or dot, etc. – the geometrical or conventional pattern design forming the ground of this pattern. A pattern or design of the same kind used to decorate a flat surface.
The Oxford English Dictionary.

How to Look like a Million

It is not hard.  Especially in farm country.

For your perusal: this group of dryers, bins, weigh scale, and transport chutes  are used to  dry, store, and move grain (wheat and corn mostly).  The footers for the pad of the largest bin are over five feet under the soil surface.

This Week’s Catches

There have been lots of catches this week.  Here are some of them.

Lots of frogs were caught over at Dad’s pond.  But also caught was this year old painted turtle.  It resides in the water barrel here at home now, being fed worms and insects and flies.
It left at least 8 of its friends or family to travel here.

The girl decided she was going to catch this wildish kitten at the cousin’s farm.  And she did after two tries.  I kept its attention while she snuck up on it. Daddy said we could not bring it home.  It is skinny as well as being cute.

He gave her some scratches then howled incredibly miserably when he was first caught.

And seemed glad to be released back to his lair.

At the next cousin’s home some neighbors were exercising their horses in the 25 acre pond. Here the Belgian draft horses are swimming.

One thing the girl has wished for a long time is to ride a swimming horse.  She was able to have that dream fulfilled.

The mare really liked to swim and when she had to stop and visit would splash impatiently to get back into the deeper water.

Then of course there was the mess o’fish jay and I caught.

And yesterday I caught this woodchuck who had the temerity to think it was going to live under my front porch.  Not for long.

Hawthorne wished he had caught the woodchuck. It was fortunate, though.  Jay took it down the road several miles to abandoned fields, where the coyotes might find it for supper.

Thoughts on Alexander McQueen

At the Met we went to visit Savage Beauty, the exhibit of clothing from Alexander McQueen’s collections over the years.

The high level of skill and technique in the sewing, tailoring,  and use of various textiles was inspiring.  Lots of beauty.  Lots of perversity.  Lots of silk tulle.

McQueen clearly loved God’s Creation. And he recognized the results of sin. Yet he did not see himself as subordinate to or working with the Creator. From much of his body of work it seems he neither acknowledged that the world was God’s  nor that it is created. Fed through his mind’s eye like a camel through a needle, McQueen’s creations came out similar to that camel: broken reflections born of an unregenerate love; beauty covered with gore, bloody and twisted, at times almost unrecognizable.

His last collection was a marine-themed futuristic full-circle riff on Darwinian what-if’s:what if global warming happens, what if the seas rise, what if we evolve to live in those seas.

You know those old monster/horror flicks?  The ones where it seems obvious in retrospect that mixing nuclear bomb tests with ant nests, or dinosaurs, or tomatoes, was not such a good idea?  There is always foreshadowing in those movies; indications that all is not as it seems or that something more is happening than is evident.  The characters involved in the plot don’t see the hints, but we, the watchers from outside, do.

Where did writers get the idea of foreshadowing?  Dickens and script writers did not come up with it ex nihilo.  They got it from where we all get all our ideas: from creation itself.  The old rerun “Attack of the Killer Migraine” played here last night.  Did I catch the foreshadowing?  Nope.  Though in hindsight it clearly was there. It was not that my glasses were dirty that I had trouble seeing all yesterday.  Those nasty moles on my brother’s back?  dum-dum-DUM.   They hinted that something else was going on.  I think Mr. McQueen didn’t see the foreshadowing either, until close to the time he chose to end his life.

The disconnect between his years of training followed by the ongoing thoughtful effort to imagine, design, and produce unique, beautiful, excellently tailored clothing collections and a worldview of random destructive happenstance must have worn down his psyche.  When one devotes one’s life to creating lovely intelligent work at some point it becomes clear that nothing “just happens”.  How difficult to maintain competing world views!

McQueen, it has been reported, had a line from Helen’s soliloquy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream tattooed on his right arm : “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”

CS Lewis’ poem As The Ruin Falls  may be of use in explanation.

“I talk of love –a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek–
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.”

He saw his self-imprisonment.  He saw his lack. He came to the chasm.  Did he finally see the clues all around him about the bridge God made in Christ and chose immolation instead of submission to the head Creator?  Or did he miss the foreshadowing speaking to him from all the created world and despair?  Or did he want his own will to be done, rather than God’s,  and got it?