friday confession - because it's been awhile....

my dear friend polly used to do friday confessions and i've done my share as well.  at the moment, i'm reading jonathan franzen's the discomfort zone and it's giving me a strange desire to make all sorts of awkward confessions... or is it confessions of awkwardness? here are just a few:

~ when my sister and i played battleship as a child, i totally cheated. all. the. time.

~ i'm not that fond of chocolate. if it disappeared from the earth tomorrow, it would make no difference to me (please don't hate me).

~ i had a beautiful black and white gelding when i was 13. one day, i went to get him in the pasture and he bit the hell out of me, on my back, of all places. actually picked me up by my shoulder blade and shook me. and i never told anyone at the time, because i knew he would be sold immediately. no one noticed that i couldn't really lift my left arm for a good week.

~ i am a total sucker for a crime novel, even a crappy crime novel. i just reread stieg larsson's millenium trilogy and i have to say the man is the swedish dan brown, but still, i read like a maniac.

and i'm afraid that's all for today...i spent the little time husband allowed me before the computer today (he's a packing slave driver, i tell you) writing a foodie/wine post over on domestic sensualists, so please do check it out!

happy easter one and all!

"like a fish in water"

from paul jensen's "like a fish in water" series of woven works featuring fish.

i spent my afternoon at paul jensen's weaving atelier. we waited for the sun to break through so we could get pictures of one of his beautiful rugs for the july issue of british home & garden. the sun never did come through, but we did get some pictures that i'm sure will be suitable. and i shot in RAW for the first time, which is somehow both thrilling and scary. when you're shooting for a magazine, you want the best quality you can get, right? i'm really excited about this for a lot of reasons, but the best of all is that paul gave me the beautiful piece above, featuring his upcycled fish. they're little bits of packaging--candy wrappers, toothpaste tubes, etc.--cut into the shape of fish and woven into pockets. and they're absolutely lovely. and i am so grateful that this one is now mine.  i hung it on the wall in the blue room, where i think it looked rather fetching. i hung it just long enough to photograph it and then packed it carefully away. i can't wait to give it a place of honor in the new house.

more about paul's beautiful work coming soon....in the meantime, do check his website if you want to know more.

there's no place like...

as i was packing up the bookshelves in the blue room, i took a moment to arrange these blocks against the beloved blue background. they're letterpress blocks from my dad's letterpress (why didn't i learn how to operate that when i had the chance?). i think they once assembled to spell the name of some or other horse that i had, and i've carried them around the world with me more than once. they're precious and i wouldn't want to be without them, even if they are occasionally jumbled into a box and not used.

moving brings on such mixed feelings. i'm excited and looking forward to the new house and all that we're going to do it to transform it into the house we'd like it to be. i'm going to love having our own lake and a lawn big enough to play football on (not that i want to do that, but knowing that i could is a good thing). space for a horse and chickens and maybe a truffling pig or two, oh and lambs. i'm so looking forward to all of that.

but i've loved this house too and we did so much to it to make it our own and give it our character and leave our mark on it. when we moved in, it was like stepping into a 70s time warp, even the garden looked like some evergreen-covered churchyard, full of low bushes that even looked totally seventies. we leave it transformed and we will miss it.

but as i said when i posted this picture on flickr the other day, we are not our house and we are able to make a home wherever we go. because the things that make a home are all of the things, packed with memory and meaning, that we take with us. even if it is a royal pain packing them all up.

a weaver of words

tonight was the final lesson of my weaving class. the timing is good, as i'm about to move to the other side of the country and start a new job (not necessarily in that order) and i wouldn't have been able to continue anyway. i think the classes were a wonderful introduction to weaving and they were even more than i hoped they would be. i feel very fortunate to have gotten my start with such a good teacher. i had to take one last wander around the little house where the weaving association has its looms. if i counted correctly, there are 19 looms there of varying sizes. here are a few of them:

a loom just like the one i bought.

i've taken loads of pictures of this loom because it's like the one that i bought. i'm a bit worried since i've never seen mine when it's put together. i'm sure all of the pieces are there, but there are an awful lot of them and it looks really, really complicated.

large loom without a project

final set-up before beginning.

setting up the loom is actually the most time-consuming part. it's complicated and requires a level of gymnastics, climbing in and out of the loom itself, before it's ready. i'm already pondering what project i want to be the first on my own loom when we get it set up sometime in the late summer/early fall.

the 7 different 20cm x 20cm patterns that i did during the lessons

i finished my piece last week and took it off the loom then. in the end i finished 7 test patches of 6 different patterns. the last one is really only a half, as i came to the end of the warp i had on the loom. it was a marvelous exercise to do it this way, as i learned about changing the various configurations of the pedals (which may not be the right term - i'm learning this in danish, so i don't know any of the english terms!) to get different patterns and i can see a big improvement from the first to the last of the pieces, as i grew more comfortable with the loom and how tight or loose things needed to be. using three colors, i learned a lot about how the colors interact. i've cut them apart and i've got them in pockets with their patterns in my own weaving notebook, which is a story that's just beginning to be written. 'til now, i've been mostly a weaver of words, but i hope to become a real weaver as well.

i will miss the lessons and the people. but i will find a new vævkreds, as it's called in danish. i'll live close enough to the museum in randbøldal to be able to join the lovely ladies there, which seems fitting since it's where i first discovered weaving last autumn.

but another very good thing has come out of my weaving...i get to photograph one of my teacher's beautiful rugs for the july issue of the british magazine home & garden on thursday. and i'm so excited! i hope the sun shines so that we have good light!

coloring eggs

i'd love to say we used natural dyes, but i'm afraid it was traditional paas and crayons all the way. this was our third batch this year. and we'll probably do at least one more. luckily we like egg salad.

getting out of the irritation zone

i've been a total crab all day. a regular bearcat, as my dad used to say when i was a lazy teenager, lurking around the house like a threatening storm. it started when i lost all hope for humanity watching the extreme display of mediocrity and crimes against superlatives that is the danish X-factor, a singing talent program. and i use the word "talent" loosely. as a parent, you have many battles to fight and so you have to choose them carefully. in the interest of not blocking the child out of all schoolyard conversations next week, we let her watch the finale. and in the interest of being together as a family, we watched it with her. and i became increasingly irritated and crabby. it's everything to do with the chabuduo thing that i talked about recently. i was so irritated at myself that i let her watch it and waste two hours of all of our lives - that's 6 hours that we'll never have back. why didn't we use the opportunity to talk about quality and talent and how if everything is "the best ever" or "iconic" or "diva-esque," then nothing is. sigh.

on top of it, this morning, in my mailbox, some forwarded right wing vitriol from a random stranger was awaiting me. and although it seemed like spam, it actually wasn't. and it further irritated me to think that this person who apparently knows my mother, but whom i have never met,  thought i would enjoy such a thing. and although i knew it didn't deserve my energy, i stewed about it all day. in fact, it pretty much spoiled the majority of my day.

but then, the tide began to turn. i had changed all of my statuses to something about how crabby i was feeling. my sister IMed me to suggest that tequila might help. and i briefly considered it, but it was a bit early for that. she also suggested that spreading the crabbiness around on twitter, FB and gmail probably wasn't that helpful. then i got a message that heather has a fabulous free shipping offer going on in her shop. and might have indulged in some new tea towels to cheer myself up. but only because i had just ironed all the old ones and noticed how stained some of them were getting.

then, my sister told me about her wild weekend back in that little town where we grew up. and it involved old milwaukee lights at the local bar with a few classmates who stayed there - one of which had a husband so kind, he delivered $40 cash to her at the bar because he wasn't sure she had enough money with her for the evening's festivities.  then there was a round of drinks bought by the mayor, who turned out to be a bit smarmy (it's a very small town and mayor is surely a thankless job). then some cute young local boys showed up and shots of tequila appeared on the table. then someone suggested that it was time to go check the cattle (as one does), so everyone picked up their drinks, wandered out to the nearest pickup truck and piled in. my sister said that if she was going to check cattle, she would need one of those long rubber gloves that goes all the way up to your armpit. and someone promptly produced one. which she put on. cattle were checked, but unfortunately, the pickup, perhaps weighed down by 8 people having piled into it, got stuck in a creek. some people went to get a "mulie" which my sister described as a cross between a four-wheeler and a golf cart. and another person called a very drunk guy who had a tractor, which came and pulled the pickup out. and some mouthy high schoolers showed up in the middle of the field, looking for a party. as one does. however, they brought fresh supplies of alcohol, which was good, because everyone was losing their buzz by that point. girls squatted and peed in the weeds. and the night ended with my sister covered in mud from head to toe. she got home and true to the the old family rule that applies to her - no pot in the living room - sat down at the kitchen table with mom and proceeded to regale her with tales of the evening. while mom cleaned the mud off her fancy, expensive danish leather boots.

and i have to say that story cheered me right up. because how you can you not smile at that? at the very least, it takes you back to high school and at most, you're grateful that you didn't stay there where that would be a typical saturday night every week.

and then, we had a little fire out on the terrace and roasted some marshmallows and all was again right with the world.

tilting at windmills

now THAT's a windmill!

we drove past this windmill yesterday and i fell in love. i believe i've mentioned before how much i want to live in one. i'll bet we could get this one for a song since it's a bit of a fixer-upper. hmm, i wonder whether our architect would approve the purchase?