stitches, objects and memories

ever since working on cleaning out our mother's house, i've been pondering things. the things we collect, stockpile, accumulate over a lifetime. the mundane things - bowls in which we serve dinner, glasses for milk, ceramic bulldogs, socks, tea towels...

i had some breakable glasses wrapped in the tea towel above for the trip home. the glasses are cheery ones from the 50s - with a pink check and a gold rim. i didn't notice that this tea towel had a careful hand-stitched repair of a hole until i went to iron it yesterday. and i welled up. mom must have sat down with it and carefully stitched a fine little oval-shaped patch into place. i find myself wondering when she did it. she couldn't have done it today. she's losing her words for things like needles and thread and while her fingers might remember how to make careful stitches, i'm not certain her mind could any longer make the connections necessary to do so. what made this particular towel worthy of repair? it is a nice, soft towel of the kind that are hard to find these days - the kind that actually absorbs water and which is soft enough to clean your glasses on and have them end up clean. that's part of why i used it to wrap up the glasses, i knew i would appreciate using it when i got home.

mom's house is full of objects and we donated, gave away, threw away and burned a great many of them. but there were things here and there that i wanted to save and take home - like these glasses and this tea towel. i'm not sure what to make of my choices. i don't particularly remember the glasses from my childhood. i think they are something she collected at a flea market in the years after i left home, so there aren't memories attached to them. but still, they spark joy (a factor my sister swears by after reading the marie kondo book). and it means something to have brought them home with me, across half a continent and an ocean. i feel comforted when i use them.

it is, in many ways, a situation without much comfort, this losing your mother to alzheimer's. i have been able to read about it a little bit now, but still haven't found anything that i feel like is the book i need. i think i deal mostly by avoidance. i don't call her much, because it brings it to the surface, hearing her repeat the same stories - the relocation of her cats to another zip code (as she puts it), the evil people who took her driver's license tho' she wasn't hurting anyone, the whereabouts of her (multiple!) guns - hearing her search for words and stumble around in her decreasing vocabulary. it's too raw and distressing. so i seek comfort in drinking my gin and tonic from cheery glasses she chose or fingering the mended stitches on a tea towel. and it hits me that the tea towel could have been my grandmother's and the stitches hers. and she also had alzheimer's and was eventually erased. leaving behind a mended tea towel, that i muse over at my own desk in my home in denmark, so far from where the stitches were stitched. and i wonder if objects can be repositories of memory. and if it will also happen to me...

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speaking of memory and objects, matisse found joy in things as well.

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an interesting piece on alzheimer's as a women's issue in the lenny letter.

it's a slippery slope

i made the mistake of joining a retro toy group on facebook. two of them, actually. it all started with being on the lookout for vintage lego fabuland characters. because obviously, i hadn't found enough of those on ebay...

and while there was no fabuland in the groups, i did run onto these little teeny tiny people, still in their original package. and i just had to have them.

of course, i didn't really care that they were in their original packaging as they weren't going to stay there. i had to take them out and play with them.

it seems that the lego minifigures were just a gateway drug to wider toy photography...

the thrill is gone

i'll admit it, having access to a whole box of fresh series 13 minifigs and just cutting them all open with a scissors and collecting the whole set immediately, while a great privilege, does not fill me with the excitement i felt when i first discovered collectible minifigures at the grocery store back in the summer of 2013. of course, i am pleased to have the whole collection and i do delight in the details in the same way as i did then - the little paleontologist has a cute bone and a little round fossil and the roller skate-wearing groovy singer is so cute, but the thrill of the hunt is gone. that feeling of excitement of not really being sure which ones you got - of opening each package and squealing in delight or groaning because it's another lady cyclops. the pull of going back for more because there's still one more that you just have to have. i miss that.

it leads me to think that a great deal of the pleasure of collecting must actually be in the search - whether it's minifigs or catherine holm enamelware or antique locks or whatever it may be. the pleasure lies less in the having than in the search. i suspect there's a life lesson for me in this.

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thinking so much about spilling ink's gratitude post. 

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withknown looks pretty interesting.

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it's quite obvious that i need a sous vide kitchen machine.
and it's all amy's fault.

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yes, i am continuing to take a photo every day.

for the 5th (or is 6th?) year running.

you can see them here.

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now this wind turbine tree is quite possibly the coolest thing ever!

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fascinating historical photos of titanic survivors taken with a brownie camera.
and more of world war I, also taken with a brownie.
is the brownie the most important camera ever made?

mixel mania!

seismo

shuff

krader

vulk

teslo

zaptor (i think i like him best)

see, two pix of zaptor - i definitely like him best. 

volectro

my mixels crew.

they came out on saturday. and i had to have them all (there are two i haven't built yet, it seemed obscene to build them all in one day, so they're not in the photo). they come in a small, collectible bag, kinda like minifigs and in the same price range. only frankly a way, way better build. i feel like they're teaching me how to be a lego builder with their turnable heads and their ball joint legs and arms and adorable teeth. plus, who can resist those googly eyes? not i. series 2 will come in a couple of months and already i'm chomping at the bit. they'll be blue, brown and orange then. and series 3, before the end of the year in green, gold and purple. i'm thoroughly infatuated and becoming a real lego builder thanks to these guys. i think i can even bring myself to take them apart and try to build something of my very own. and that's a very, very big step in the right direction. plus, they're designed to be able to make a big mixel of the three little ones, so they even want you to mix and match. that's why they're called mixels, after all. there's a tie-in with cartoon network, but i have to say the cartoon doesn't speak to me (i am a little outside their demographic, after all), but i'm in love with the analog mixels. and with my device/internet addiction, that's undoubtedly good for me. i could stand to live a slightly more analog life.

the madness continues - new minifigures from the lego movie

one of our local grocery stores has the latest series of minifigures from the lego movie. and tho' it's less than a week until i start at lego, i couldn't resist. but take a look - could you have resisted?

wild west wyldestyle

scribble-faced bad cop (i love his scribble face)

he's got a bad cop face with sunglasses on the other side.

abraham lincoln

taco tuesday guy

emmet - he's the hero of the movie (as i understand it)

wiley fusebot. he's got an awesome daniel boone hat with a racoon tail.

mrs. scratchen-post - check out the cat hair on her clothes!

panda guy (i really wanted him).

where's my pants guy (i understand he has a reality program in the movie).

marsha queen of the mermaids.

love her blue hair and silver lipstick.

and i couldn't resist a shot of marsha from the back.

pondering collections on a monday morning

Our American Revolution from Dark Rye on Vimeo.

veronica shared this wonderful video and, naturally, it has me thinking about the things we save and the things we display and the things we tuck away. i have, i believe, all, of sabin's baby teeth in these little plastic treasure chests that we at some point got from the dentist. they are tucked away in a box with most of my jewelry and are not on display. but, as you know if you've been around here for any time at all, we have an awful lot of other things on display and you know that collecting is an important part of who i am.

the collections have been ever-shifting, probably starting clear back with the 98 identical first place plaques i won with skip's galley lad, my black and white paint/pinto gelding during the summer of '82. i pounded 98 nails into the wall of my bedroom and hung them all up. after that, there were the marilyn monroe collectible plates, which were dutifully hung on the walls in various apartments from iowa city to scottsdale to chicago. now, i just use those plates for dessert and they always make people smile. i've not reached a point where i can part with them, so we box them up (in their original boxes from the franklin mint) and move them from place to place. there was a period in the late 80s, early 90s, where christmas barbies were the thing. happily, i've finally gotten past that one, as well as the beanie baby obsession (tho' there is a big bag of those somewhere here in this house as i write this).

today, the primary collection on display has to be books. books make a room and this house utterly lacks charm, so i might as well do something to make it cozy and that something is books. they really do help. until recently, i had our bobbaloo collection out on one of the bookshelves, but have tucked them away for now because the cats are very hard on them. what is it with cats and wool? and then, of course, there are my minifigures standing in two long rows in the windowsill above my desk. the things we collect make us smile or comfort us somehow or just bring forth memories, as they make clear in this video. a jar of stones, another of shells, another of fossils remind us of walks on beaches all over the world.

at the moment, the living room shelves and the windowsills contain quite a few bits of natural ephemera - feathers, a single perfect small egg found in the forest, acorns, a delicate ball of light green oak moss, a fetching bit of stick. these are the things that slowly shift out, as other finds replace them or the cats, thinking that a single feather is just as good as an entire bird, play with them and abandon them under a chair.

i have much of my fabric stash in boxes against one wall of the dining room. this house has a tendency to be a bit musty and damp and that room is the least musty and damp, so it's both to protect the fabric and to have it there, where just seeing it makes me happy. in recent days, i've covered the dining table with fabric projects and so it's also served a purpose as workspace and it's nice to have the fabrics at hand. a room full of books and fabric lends warmth and hominess to a space otherwise completely lacking in charm (they seriously used old, rough boards, quite possibly repurposed from palettes, as the (very low) ceiling in this room, they're painted white, but you could still get a handful of splinters from them).

i think my many and ever-changing collections help me rebel at what can be a clinical, spare danish style. i love the clean lines of danish furniture and light fixtures, but not the minimalism and invisibility of personal touches in many danish homes. what items are on display tend to be the same candle holders and the same vases, so i drift towards a style more comforting and more my own through my collections. and anyway, this little video makes me feel more normal for doing that. it's what makes a house a home. watch it and enjoy.

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this is an articulate piece on the decline of the american empire.

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these photos bring new meaning to the words makeup artist.

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americans try to label european countries on a map of europe.
it doesn't go well.

to be fair, when brits were asked to label the states
it didn't go any better.

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what if the planets were as close to us as the moon is?

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coffee.

lego minifigure obsession: the latest additions

i accidentally typed the latest addictions above in the title, instead of additions. i don't think it's a coincidence. i am thoroughly addicted to the clever little collectible lego minifigures. i'm a sucker for cute. for cleverness. for good design. for a sense of humor. for affordability. for the mystery of the little package - like with baseball cards, you don't know what you're getting. and a kind of mania comes over me and i have to have more. it happened years ago with beanie babies as well.

and they honestly give me a childlike sense of delight. when i send sabin and her friend into legoland (the only place we've been able to find series 11) to get them, i'm so excited when they come out with the bag. they sit in the back seat, opening while i'm driving and i almost can't stand it, since it's not me who gets to peek into each package first.

with the simplest of details, so much is expressed. the shape of a hat, a little baton, a badge, a moustache.

a gap-toothed smile, little elf ears that are attached to the hat to accomodate the design of the head. a teddy bear for a friend.

a boy robot (my only series 6 purchase) and a girl robot to hold hands. they have an adorable wind-up key in their backs, once again proving that lego really gets the details right.

and this little tiki man. he has a bone in his funny bowl-cut hair. and while it's probably a bit of stereotyping, it seems to be done in good humor and admiration, not mockery. i've let him stand next to the hula girl from series 3 on the shelf. maybe they'll make some cute little south pacific babies.

and how blues brothers is this little saxophone man, with his ill-fitting wrinkled jacket and shades? seriously, how could i resist? and why should i when they make me smile the way they do.