Fiber-minded women gathered at my friend's house today from all over Texas. The house and various outbuildings are fairly stuffed from one end to the other with spinning wheels and looms, at least ten of each. It's like something out of Hansel and Gretel: everywhere you look there are skeins of homespun hand-dyed yarn, home-woven rugs, drawings, paintings, and carvings. Outside there are cisterns, barns, chickens, bathtubs full of Louisiana irises and lily pads, handmade concrete paving stones set with old pieces of china or license plates, fruit trees, vegetable patches, roses, wildflowers, and a lot of cats and dogs.
We dyed some cotton, wool, and silk fibers and fabrics with indigo. One of our company tried to figure out how to make an old fiber-carding machine work that someone had found. The newbies among us practiced spinning; I discovered the problem I was having on my own wheel (aside from the difficulty in keeping the newest dog from eating it) is that the treadle doesn't function smoothly. Having used my friend's better wheel, I'm inspired to fiddle with mine and improve it. I'm not quite ready to bring a loom into my home, though, a fact that should comfort my husband.
12 comments:
Fiber-minded women gathered at my friend's house today from all over Texas.
For one brief moment, I wasn't quite sure I wanted to continue reading...
Fiber-obsessed might have been more accurate.
He may need to lose the pink bow-tie to pick up many girls.
However, there is precedent for this approach.
That young man can play. Let him out of school and let him go to work.
On another note, I wonder whether he might also be interested in (not quite Ferrante and Teicher) duets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyArTMtgT1w
Or some more modern piano: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yRdDnrB5kM
Eric Hines
Jerry Lee... =8^}
Not quite ready, but it's a looming possibility?
The tie does look a tad pink, doesn't it? I think it was supposed to be white, though. His grandfather played with Doc Severinsen's orchestra and has no "tendencies," as they used to say, that I know of. Anyway, would swoony teenage girls really object to pink? Boys of that age all look effeminate to me, but not to their age cohort.
He was playing Chopin for that competition (in which he took an honorable mention), but lately has taken up Shoenberg.
Tom: :-) Yes, but not until we build a cottage or something. As charming as my friend's house is to visit, neither the NPF nor I could tolerate living permanently in a house so full of things. Looms can be very large; her newest is about the size of a golfcart. The NPF has never quite reconciled himself to how much room my piano eats.
Wow, thinking of Jerry Lee while reading the post the first time, then seeing Mr. Hines linked Jerry Lee messed me up and preempted my complimenting the young fellow's skill. He's very good.
Howsomeever, whether or not he's arrived at the age of being a raging chemical cauldron on the hoof, a pink tie just don't get it...
"The NPF has never quite reconciled himself to how much room my piano eats."
We managed to put our very old upright in a room ever so slightly away from the wall/sounding-board, such that it takes up very little space.
Admittedly, the old Beckwith is not a grand, or even a baby grand, but it will suffice.
Otherwise, I am 100% with you Tex and your SO regarding a crowded house. Now that W.B. and I are empty nesters, the house seems mighty crowded, considering the voids.
Again with the pink tie! I don't think it's actually pink; I think it's an artifact of the lighting, and an unfortunate contrast with a "white" shirt that's on the grayish side.
"Again with the pink tie!"
Heh. The things on which knuckle-draggers will dwell...
The men, of all things, forgetting that the boy does not need to be attractive to girls in general, but only to the few that absolutely swoon.
Gentlemen, you grow old. Remember you not the old rake who told you in your youth to ask a hundred women to sleep with you, very early in any conversation, because only one "yes" was necessary?
Not a strategy for the marriage-minded, as I was, but entirely logical for what it was.
The old rake in my case was my jujitsu instructor, and a former Sergeant of Marines. It worked for him too well: having taken women lightly for so long, he missed the one he really wanted.
It may have worked out for him in the end, though; last time I saw him he had gotten back together with an old friend from high school, now much older and wiser (as is he).
Post a Comment