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.

The Birches – Day One

I just finished a big project – turned out really nicely, better than I’d hoped, in fact.  But I just can’t do show-and-tell yet, so instead I decided to do something I haven’t done before.

One of the things I don’t think I see enough of on the interwebs is projects in pre-completion states.  Or mistakes, it seems mostly people don’t make mistakes.  Usually it’s – TADA, I shall present my beautiful finished object!  That’s pretty much what you get, except for tutorials.  Even then, there’s often a lack of info about what inspired it, how’d they choose the fabric or whatsit, what technique is used, etc.  Where’s the wherefore?  I enjoy the Craft magazine partially because of the nitty gritty they get into.

The Birches Project (a wall quilt)

So here’s me doing that.  Last Friday I decided I need something for this blank piece of wall I see (over there to the right –> it IS boring, is it not?)when I turn my head left.  My office has a startlingly depressing quantity of putty and gray in it, so I knew it would need color to relieve the drab.  Also, I wanted something “of mine” – something I made, which reminded me of the things I do at home, bring some of that with me here.

The next day, Saturday, I rummaged through my fabrics in search of inspiration.  This is always entertaining because the vast majority of my fabric is odd bolt-ends I found on sale or fabrics someone has given to me.  The latter frequently reflect the stylistic charms of the seventies and early eighties.  Still, I am not a person to throw away or turn my nose up for those reasons, no indeed.  Eventually I happened upon two things.  One was a blue shot with gold and blue threads – two pieces of fabric about the right size for the wall hanging I wanted to do.  It was once a couple of pieces from a sample upholstery fabric set.

The other was a bundle of fabric that Jeff’s grandmother purchased – precut fabrics to make into two quilts.  Looking at the combinations, I knew that to actually make these would be an entertaining, but not entirely enjoyable, jaunt into 1978.  Mustard and brownish.  However, the cut of some of the pieces was wavy, interestingly enough, and I started thinking of hills.  Another patterned piece made me think of the bark of a birch tree.  And then I saw the blue as sky and water.  And I drew it, and it looked good.

And I thought – yes! Once separated from their age-of-disco partnerships, the fabrics changed character. And I thought it would be pretty cool to use these right now, on that Saturday, because Jeff’s grandmother who I inherited these from passed away a year ago Saturday, and it would be a tribute I could pay her in my own way, a quilt of peace and beauty.

Tomorrow I will share some of my beginning process of this quilt.  On Saturday and Sunday I collected the thread and embroidery floss I would need.  I began cutting, and ironing and experimenting, and slowly, it began to look like what I was pictureing in my mind.  My collage shares some of that original gathering stage.  You can see some of the fabrics and colors that don’t look like they belong together yet.

And Callie, who spent all afternoon yesterday sleeping on the backing fabric, which was on my cutting mat, which was square in the middle of my desk, thereby depriving me of all three things.