The Shortest Paths to Happiness - Literally!

Most business trips are clocked right through to the last minute. Exhausted at check-in, tired and hasty at check-out. Waiting for a cab.Heay rain. Cold wind. The e-mailbox is flodded. But listen: the flight has been delayed... an unexpected gift of an hour, sixty minutes, a huge gift or isn't it? If you are in any of the cities mentioned on this website of IDEAS.TED .COM - count yourself blessed, especially if you are a book lover. Getting from A to B might never have been that much fun! 

Silk Tassel and Silk Soutache Christening Bonnet on Wedding Pocket

Silk Lining of Christening Bonnet on Soutache Wedding Pocket

As a long-time traveler I always look for something interesting in places through which I pass on route from A to B. Travelling von Paris to Lyon, from Toulouse to Barcelone, from London to Manchester, from Chicago to St. Louis, and for the insiders of my blog followers: from Kleinheppach to Nogaret. These routes just packed with places in-between that I never visited or even knew of before I worked out detours in the un/likely event of an unexpected delay or change of means of transportation. Unlikely events? Strikes of tollbooth staff, flooding, cancelled flights due to vulcano eruptions, cancelled train connections because the tracks froze, gasoline shortage (remember those?), demonstrations, forest fires...

Silk Soutache ending in to a Bonnet Adornment at the Nape of the Neck

Soutache Lace Silk Christening Bonnet, with Embroidery and Silk Lining

Soutache adorned Wedding Pocket, lined with Orange Lace

Silk Tassel from Declercq, Paris (France)

Of course in my case I finecomb the routes for bookstores and any place connected to textile crafts, shops, museums or craft shows even. My next trip to Paris will include visits to tassel places. A gift from my god-daughter rekindled my desire to see these fluttering, silky, bejewelled works of art in some of those splendid tassel stores listed below. Above you can see beautiful examples of German Soutache (engl. also Soutache or Galloon), a soutachee being a woven flat rope, sometimes combined with a gold bullion thread or silk, and embroidered on costumes and uniforms in Napoleonic times. A Soutache is made of wool, silk, or cotton. There are tutorials on how to work with a Soutache braid on YouTube.

Les Passementeries de l'Ile-de-France/ - the very picture makes your heart beat faster.

Declercq Passementiers (© Declercq Passementiers, 15 rue Etienne Marcel, 75001 Paris). They even give a demonstration and lecture (in French) in the art of making tassels. If you leave this store with no purchase you will probably regret it for years to come!

Houlès Click on "Trimmings" and submerge yourself in colors, sheeny satin and silky glitter.

Verrier Père et fils They make simply out-of-this world tassels!

And if you wish to have your very own personalized custom-made tassel, turn to this company:
Jende Posamenten Manufaktur or just go for a walk through their site and enjoy looking at their amazing treasures.

Closing this post with an observation:

A child is toddling along the the sandy beach, stopping now and then, seemingly for no particular reason, and then just as spontaneously picking up speed for a short dash to the next invisible attraction. Apparently accompanying the child, an elderly woman is following smilingly, no hurry at all in her steps, her arms a bit stretched out, hands open as if ready to catch the child if need be, maybe the Grandmother. The child turns around to share his joy of having seen something new and the grandmother responds in kind with an understanding and reassuring smile. Treasured moments for both of them. And the onlooker. 

Transparency - Compassion - Hope

"Sometimes the fog in the early morning, just before sunrise, seems to let us gently become aware of the light, opening opaque windows to the bluer sky beyond and wiping them shut a number of times before the gossamer fog cloak becomes transparent". This is a parable for each day, month or year: As time passes, we experience new impressions, events and changes in our lifes, some easily apparent, some hidden until the last moment.

Fog  Blanketing the Fields

According to the Gregorian calendar, the year 2016 is just a few hours away. I pray and hope for peace in the many troubled places around the globe. While the past twelve months were predominantly marked by horrible events, there were also sparks of hope glimmering as if one was asked not to give up and instead get engaged in helping no matter whom. Even if one drops but a penny into the cup a person in need holds out, at that moment you are momentarily engaged into caring about your fellow human being. A small token of your empathy- yet you do make a difference. Everybody does.

Winter Time

Sometimes life changes within a few moments. One sees an image, a picture one cannot wipe from the retina, it logs into our memory, indelibly. The picture of the small child, washed up on shore of a Turkish beach. It is this image of drowned Syrian boy Aylan that went around the world, it brought near the horrors of war, and it stirred a public outcry for help, commiseration and sympathy for the surviving father. I am hoping that we continue to see that image lodged in our brain and that we will remember the fate of this three-year-old child every time we must make a decision whether to accept a refugee or sent her/him back to a place he or she desperately wanted to leave.

Santolina

New Year Resolutions? I was not ever making any. This time will be the first. I don't have much to offer. But maybe teaching a small child how to knit would be a worthwhile gift, lasting a life-time?
Teaching a child the language it will from now on need to make friends, to feel at home in kindergarten, school, and indeed in life. Let us welcome those homeless people into our web of life.

Resilient and Strong

Winter time - I was knitting a few hats for children for our local Refugee Help Center. Always welcome are scarves, mitts, cowls and chokers. Here is a choker, knit in the round with bobbly wool, with a crocheted edge of silky ribbon and fine fuzzy mohair.

Choker

Loopy Yarn

The Translucent Light of a Lithophane

As our thoughts seem to follow the prevailing autumn weather, harbingers of cooler temperatures and early morning fogs, we begin to think about the time when wearing warmer clothes, woolen cardigans and maybe a wrap, cowl or wristlets does not seem totally incongruous any more. Hot soup recipes reappear, as do those for fruit pies and lovely jams made of plums or pears with cinnamon, apples with a shot of Calvados, grapes, rosehip, melons with lemon zest and figs with walnuts. 

One item that has no particular season, yet a more intensive day-to-day use in fall and winter is my beautiful lithophane, a white dome for tea lights, made of very thin, translucent porcelain. The pattern of a lithophane (in German: Lithophanie) can be a pretty design or a scene, appearing in a contrasting gray (en grisaille) or outlined in ebony white. Lithophanes were very popular starting in the early part of the 19th century and to this day those early tea lights are collector items. And if you live in Toledo, Ohio, don't miss a visit to the ceramics museum: The Blair Museum of Lithophanes.

The fine porcelain dome looks precious at any time, but especially when lit from inside with a tea light, literally bringing to light its imposed designs and scenes. I think it will make a lovely present for the lucky ones having a birthday in fall or winter, giving their birthday table a special shine! My lithophany (above) is from Bernardaud, a  dome with dancing butterflies. Lithophanes are available in a wide variety of designs and prices.

 

As fiber equivalent to the translucency of the porcelain, I fell in love with Chinese silk. Visiting a Chinese silk factory in Suzhou, we were shown the entire silk-making process. And although spun and dyed silk in skeins as well as tapestry, garments, quilts, blankets and so forth are readily for sale, just plain silk skeins are not and it took all the charm of our Chinese guide (the elderly lady knew how to knit!) that I was able to buy one: such a fine feel, such a fragile look, yet the continuous staple of the silk filament being so incredibly strong!  

 

Feel like reading a silky tale? Or enjoy some Silk music? Long ago, I had decided to make a special gift to each of my friends for whom I make knitted or crocheted gifts: each one of the knits/crochets includes somewhere a long thread of that special Chinese silk skein. Mostly, it is invisible, melting into the freeform yarn texture. But sometimes it stands out in a special light, maybe in the shimmering glow of a candle, a cobweb-thin shiny thread tying us together, my friends and me. Or myself. Or whatever.

Amazing Lace in Architecture

Lace is one of the most amazing and lovely ways of using yarns. We know that the structure of lace is not limited to textiles. Here is an example in kind - the ingenious lace screens, fences and balustrades by the Dutch company LaFence. It is well worth visiting their site to see more of their lace / lattice projects! By the way, all their lace patterns are reversible!

Isn't it marvellous that lace actually becomes beautiful because of its empty spaces, the holes in the fabric?
By including virtually nothing we get this intricate gorgeous structure! Looking for and at invisible things seems to sharpen your mind and increase your perception!

Taking this to a philosophical level:  Often it is the very absence that improves one's perception and provides more freedom. And with the lack of seemingly indispensable items of everyday life, we learn to do without and reduce our consumption of the superfluous, realizing how presumptious we have become over the many years, expecting to have recourse to all things and comforts of life to which we have become accumstoned. Reducing those expectations - a liberating concept, indeed.

My last post included a link to an entertaining waltz performed by colorful triangles. It reminded me of a Jane Thornley Mini-KAL that called for the use of triangles - so with a sharp eye and some imagination and vision beyond reality you can see a lot of invisible triangles in my project for the Mini-KAL, in fact there are 16 of them!

This modular Mini-Project can be a bracelet or a choker-type Neck-Lace. The individual squares are interconnected with a very small ring that you can find in bead stores. The material I used here is silk embroidery yarn bought at the Texere Company near Leeds (UK). They have many kits with color or material-coordinated yarns, mostly 1-2 yards in length. In fact, they are an absolute Dream Place for yarn people! Prepare to spend hours going through their huge store or browse the online shop.

How about some more triangle news? A friend just send me a link to this incredible artist Michael Moschen, doing his unbelievably fast fleeting triangles act, inside a huge triangle! 

Maybe someting invisible crosses your path today? Keep your inner eyes and your mind open!

Treasured Friends - Silken Gifts

What better gift to a knitter than some
glorious and shiny silk, a soft and fluffy
fleece, a skein of warm and cozy wool...
My wonderful friend Kri surprised me
with beautiful silk embroidery floss from the Souq (سوق) in Fez, Morocco! And I am so delighted with these silk strands I feel
I should just frame them ... too precious to be used!