Taking Time to Look

I want to post about crafty things, and in fact I have been pursuing handiwork like mad, but I just don’t have enough for a respectable new post.  These things I’m doing, they take time, oodles of time to get things accomplished on them.  I’m making hundreds of tiny handstitches a day, but when I step back from the project after all those stitches, it seems like so very little has actually been completed.  And so it goes, another day, and other few hundred stitches.  Today I feel lucky I have very little feeling in three of my fingers, because otherwise I think they’d really hurt from getting poked with needles.

Apart from stitching, one thing I really wanted to start doing was wandering around Austin on foot to see what I could see.  Places look a lot different when you’re walking instead of driving, you know?  So I’ve walked around my neighborhood, around the University of Texas, around downtown and the capitol area, through parks, over rivers, up hills … you get the idea.

One Sunday, I think it was two weeks ago, I went to Waterloo Park, a place I drive by quite frequently but had never been to.  What I found was that this park suffers from a lot of that – thousands must drive by on a weekly basis, but only a handful probably ever stop.  Waller Creek runs through the park, and these pictures are from a pathway that has been built along the creek. I don’t think it was built recently, given the style, but I don’t know.

Thing is, this park and the waterway are falling apart and weed-choked.  It’s sad. It could be a beautiful place, that pathway, but no one seems to care that much that it’s so run down.  It’s a little surprising, honestly.  It’s in the middle of the city, mostly built already, just a few blocks from the University of Texas and the Capitol, in a well-traveled part of the city.  I can only think someone shows up to take care of it better in summer, but somehow I doubt it.

This bridge, for example, is one that I know lots of commuters, goverment officials and the like pass over daily.  I wonder – do people notice this older, pretty bridge?  Do they ever look over the edge?  Do they see this pathway below?  Do they know where it goes in either direction?  Does anyone think – why does this look so rundown here in the middle of everything?

A number of small beasties live down there – I believe we saw squirrls and a rabbit, even, and there are probably possums.  I saw a few turtles peeping up and sunning themselves.  Turtles are lovely creatures, in my opinion, even though they do tend to bite.  I’ve always thought I might like a small turtle pond.  This fine specimen was peering at me suspiciously as I wandered around him taking pictures from various angles.

Part of the pathway ends under a place called Symphony Square, which looks as though it was once used for concerts.  It would be awesome for the window scene in Romeo & Juliet.  The stage is set on one side of the Creek, and the seating is on the other side.  Above the seating, there is a restaurant.  If you stand on the walkway next to the creek you are several feet down from diners and they can’t see you and don’t even know that you are there!

So we stopped to note the details for a minute, and look at the rocks, and think about what could be.  And of course, there was enough time for me to wonder how you can make a quilt look like individual rocks, because that’s how I seem to be seeing the world lately … “can I quilt that?”

I hope one day someone decides that restoring the area is a good use of funds and time, and that they go back to using Symphony Square for concerts in the warmer months, though of course it would help to clean up the water some first, maybe a coat of paint or so would be good, and a gardening team for those weeds … ?  I hope the old byways and buildings in Austin are not forgotten amidst this city’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for new thirty-story buildings and condo developments.

Off to contemplate another few hundred tiny stitches! TTFN, Miriam.

Museum Curiosities

I hope you enjoyed last week’s entry from my range of “stuff on the web that inspires me.”  This is another one of those.

Back when I was a wee graduate student, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the many libraries scattered about Columbia University.  Inordinate. I might possibly have almost lived in stacks of the main library, Butler, and one semester I spent about 20 hours a week in the library at the Union Theological Seminary library because I was studying a manuscript.  I miss those libraries.  I particularly miss the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  My office these days is nowhere near as interesting, even on its best day.

So you can understand why I find the Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities blog so delightful. The entries are “new acquisitions, unique documents, and visual and textual curiosities from the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.”This is something ALL manuscript and rare book libraries should do.  It’s a library exhibition in the form of a blog, and this one never fails to deliver delightful and random pieces.

I am have been delighted to see manuscript pages from artists’ notebooks – I find handwritten notes and the handwriting itself to be fascinating, so I love seeing the pages of Walt Whitman, J. M. Barrie, Gertrude Stein and others.  I have no idea how Ezra Pound ever read his own writing, but James Weldon Johnson’s National Hymn writing is beautiful.

So far I’ve seen sketches, photographs, notebooks, print examples, marketing materials, lottery tickets and more, and I’m thrilled with each selection.  I also think it’s a brilliant way to broaden the reach of a library, particularly in the case of a collection of rare materials to which access is usually restricted.

I was particularly thrilled to see the printing examples that you see here in this post, re-posted from their blog.  Illustrations and borders from older printing presses make me slightly giddy with joy and rapture.  These are from Chicago’s P. C. Darrow Printing Company around the turn of the 20th century, approximately 1902, and I love that era of design.  Love!

Featured here:  print advertisement for the P.C. Darrow Printing Company, (c) 1902, Chicago, Illinois.  From the Beinecke Library General Modern Collection.  Posted under Fine Printing and Resolutions, January 4, 2009.

Portes et Fenetres

I was browsing through my blog reader today looking at some of the curious things it brings to me, and realized I have a number of things in there just because they show me things that are pretty or curious or interesting. When I go through the reader I always end up with about 20 new windows open with things I might like to make, or things that gave me an idea, or something like that.  I have a thick notebook of cut-outs and notes of things I’m contemplating.  Often I build an idea out of notions suggested to me in a wide variety of these places.  I thought I might share some of them …

The first one I picked is Portes et Fenetres, a blog that is entirely about pictures of doors and windows.  In various parts of Europe.  “Curious, strange or simply beautiful.”

I really love these brief, focused pictorial tours outside my own small part of the world, and I really love this  idea!  It’s so brilliant, the views of entrances into other worlds, transitions of some sort, or just the many, many ideas that go into defining the space where you go from one place to another. Doors/windows are invitations, inceptions, outlets, chances as well as closures, completions, obstructions, endings.  Opaque or transparent. Embellished or simple.

Sometimes in these photos you see where you are, sometimes you see through to somewhere else, sometimes it’s the colors of the photo, sometimes it’s just a strange kind of iron door.

I am a lurker here (my French is past rusty and I admit I shy from speaking English), but a fascinated and loyal reader.  One time they showed this little shop in rural France that made me want to go immediately.  Recently the pictures came from Spain, which I loved, although I really don’t mind wherever these three photographers decide to go.  I’m just happy they share.

The sample picture here is from SE France in Avignon, at the Palais de Papes (papal palace) of the popes-in-exile. The photographer is the younger Guy.