"Put
a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it's a
specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and
everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an
ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear
they've seen a quill pen"
Don't they actually look a lot like little furniture legs with felt nailed on the bottom to prevent scraping?
The other end would be a spike to insert into the bottom of whatever furniture-y thing they were originally attached to...
That seems like the most logical explanation to me. But it had not struck me until I saw them in the photos, apart from the tools in the box.
I've always liked that thought in that Father Brown story, but now it's really been delievered home!
(I still think they make pretty tools, once I find what they're actually useful for...)
My aunt is moving, and getting rid of stuff. She decided to get rid of a large part of her sewing supplies, because, as she said, sewing clothes is not really her thing after all (she makes super-cute toys, like my old teddy). Among other things, that means those old magazines are now definitively mine.
Today, I went to her home to pick some thread and other things (which turned out to be quite a load). I walked, and made a detour through two more villages - well, through one additional one as opposed to the usual way. As I walked through that village, I met a dog. The dog decided I was interesting and went on with me.
This is Dog, before I realised he was not going to stay in the village...
At the edge of the village, I got a first indication of Dog's unique nature. Dog kept running away to inspect various interesting smells along the road; but he kept running back to me. During one such expedition, he got in the way of a car. The driver glowered at me. I shouted at the driver that Dog wasn't mine.
Dog thought I was his, though.
He continued running around me, following me, running in front of me, running through puddles, getting in my way, getting in the way of cars (one stopped just in the nick of time, with a terrible screech) and being a total disgrace.
A clever and audacious and stubborn and cute disgrace.
He went with me all the way to aunt's door, where I had to get in through a narrow gap so that Dog would not follow me into the yard.
I got so many things from aunt that I don't think I can show you all of them here... maybe I'll never show you all of them anyway. :D
A sleeve board! This one I actually already got on Sunday. But oooh, I've been thinking for some time now that I really really needed this!
Some trim. The gold one on top is almost like knitted net, so I'm thinking that maybe I could manipulate it into a hairnet or something...
I also got lots of lace, but that I did not bother photographing. Sooner or later, I'll hopefully use it for something, and then you'll get a photo.
A box full of tailor's chalk! I think I'm going to share this. :D Although I'm definitely keeping the magenta one.
Bias binding! And some khaki twill tape.
A box full of tools, somewhat mysterious.
I have a feeling I've seen something like these before, but I can't place it.
It looks like some sort of smoothing tool?
A little sharp hook.
A curved bodkin.
A tiny hook. (Crochet? Crewelwork?)
A wooden needlecase! How wonderful is that? Also, now I have one of those bone awls! I think that may come in useful when I want to be sure my eyelets won't get too big.
And then I got lots and lots of thread; mostly polyester, but also lots of thick linen heavy duty thread, and two spools of Gütermann's buttonhole twist!
It can't get much better than free Gütermann's buttonhole twist, I think. If I manage it before aunt moves, I think I at least owe her a Tiramisu or something...
After I got home and sorted out most of the things, I
eventually got a text from my aunt, telling me the dog was now sitting
at the bus stop in my hometown: just to wrap up the story.
It's a wonderfully 18th-century-like print. (Although it may have been meant to be Oriental.) I have no idea what the fibre content is - I'd have to pull a thread and play with fire, which I don't feel like doing. It's rather loosely woven and very soft, quite reminiscent of my Indian shawl which is, I believe, rayon. But this isn't an Indian kerchief, because there's this:
I googled "Felicitas Queisser" and did not get much. Most of my results were German. Some Polish. Some Etsy. Some e-Bay. Some claimed vintage. Some claimed new. Some claimed "made in Italy", which did not line up with the fact so many of the results were German. One German site I ran into was an account of 50s fashions and said Felicity Queisser clothing was particularly popular in Germany.
So that's about it. I own a mystery Felicity Queisser kerchief / scarf that could and could not be vintage. It would also make a fabulous printed fichu (there's one here), if only I had a frock that would more or less match it in colour. :D
(Well, of course I'm going to wear it in normal life, just like I wear my Indian shawl. And its colours are so perfectly me.)
Waitaminute, I didn't mean that. But Kuusi and Viisi were too cute to pass up when I had the camera...
The more I listen to this album, the more I love it. Or, rather, the songs on it - Privateering is a very song album.
Also, the colours are giving me ideas. As if I needed them!
We went to a Mark Knopfler & Co.'s concert in Prague yesterday. I cannot refer to it as just Mark Knopfler anymore, and below is a taste of why.
The security at the venue was fairly tight. I began to think my previous post had been premature... I had gone there straight from Brno, and I had a backpack with lots of things that would not have gone down well, like a jar of pins, a tin of needles and my trusty ol' Swiss pocketknife. Thankfully, there was a "depository" where you could leave your backpacks (for money, of course). My sister said the concert better be worth it. I said, with Mark Knopfler, it's fortunately a sure thing.
And boy was I right.
They started out with What It Is, and that alone would have sufficed me. They went on with two new songs - I fell in love with Privateering immediately (must buy the album!) - and then came Hill Farmer's Blues, and that would have sufficed me, too.
But it did not end there. Eventually, Marbletown (the song from the video above) came up. That's a song both me and my sister enjoy a lot, and we kind of even sang, before we realised that probably disturbed the others; and then the band went and did that - although the best part is more or less missing from the video. I wonder how often a single fiddle and a bass keep a hall of some 6000 people on their toes?
They played many other songs, of course, including Sultans of Swing (which is a decade older than me, but you would not know from the audience reaction), and I kept clapping so my hands soon hurt (my arms are still aching a bit) and I kept grinning with utter delight. Until about halfway through Speedway at Nazareth (which is another of those songs that would be in my top ten by MK, except that I'm not sure there are ten of them), when I started biting my finger in order not to cry, because it was so monumental. And then they played Telegraph Road, and I cried.
They got a standing ovation; and I'm still processing the experience.
In other news, Sabine of Kleidung um 1800 made an amazing, amazing discovery concerning early Regency stays and shared her source, so if you're the least bit interested in the clothing of the era, go and read her "Short Stays Studies"!
Oh, and then HSF Challenge: Flora and Fauna. I wanted to sew a dress (I would have cheated by machine), but as I travelled between home and school, I kept forgetting things - material, and pattern, and suddenly it was Sunday and nothing had been done; so I took out a handkerchief I had started a while back, finished the hems and added an embroidery on my way to Brno. The fact that I forgot my embroidery hoop and drew the pattern on a train shows, but I think all in all it's good.
The fabric is this one
- stashbusting is going on, too, even though I never officially signed
up! I had used more of it for bias binding on a very Frankensteined project that has yet to
be photographed...
The Challenge: Flora & Fauna Fabric: Cotton remnant Pattern: None whatsover - the handkerchief is obviously just a square, the embroidery is winged (it kind of shows) Year: 1800-ish, but that's just the overall "feel" I was aiming at Notions: white cotton thread How historically accurate is it? It's natural fibers and fully
handmade, but I wasn't able to determine what your common handkerchief
would have looked like (I only found lacy ones), and did not have time
to check whether the stitches are truly accurate. Hours to complete: I'm bad at this - maybe four? First worn: Not worn, not used yet. It needs a wash first. Total cost: The whole remnant was 9 CZK, and this is just a piece of
that. The thread was vintage. Even the needle was a vintage
pass-me-down! So it's somewhere around 3 CZK plus time and work. Yay for
remnants!
I’m stealing
this feature from the Dreamstress to make sense of my own musings... Some things
I remembered yesterday trigged this, and I thought it could be a good way of
introducing you to some tiny details about the Czech Republic (and me, admittedly).
I may,
sometimes, somewhere, mention that I’ve been to the USA. That was in 2007,
thanks to a Presbyterian congregation that decided to play host to someone from
my church in connection to the Presbyterian Youth Triennium, something they
call “youth conference” which quite scared me at first before I realised it was almost the same sort of youth meeting I was used to, only much bigger and with more paperwork. The Triennium was a huge, and
kind of eye-opening and life-changing event, if in small ways. There’s nothing
quite like meeting fellow young Christians from all over the country and all
over the world... And, well, let’s say that after having spoken in prayer in front of some 7000 people, delivering a school presentation to some 30 people
is not much of a problem anymore...
I spent a bit less than a week on the Triennium, and about three
weeks with people from the congregation, thanks to whose hospitality I had a
chance to visit various places along the East Coast. (My least favourite, and
my favourite, was Baltimore, which I’ll get to.
Aside from
the following five things I missed, there’s also the matter of “the feeling of safety” that
surfaced during the long security lines in the Spy Museum in Washington and at
the Statue of Liberty. At the Statue of Liberty, I realised with quite a shock
that I was in a country where a Swiss Army knife was a weapon, while I’d lived
all my life in a country where it is a tool.
Not that I discount the possibility of it being used as a weapon, or the fact that terrible things did happen in New York and elsewhere. It’s just that
I live in a country that has a very different mindset, and had a different mindset even before that, which is a bit of an explanation why those things happened in the USA and not in the Czech Republic, whether that's a bad thing or not.
Enough of
that.
#1: Soups.
As a child, I used to hate soups with a passion, the notable exception being
the sauerkraut soup and some three or four others. I gradually came to accept
soups and like more of them. Then I went to the USA.
During my
month in the USA, I had a soup two times: in a
Viet-Thai restaurant the day after I arrived, and in an Irish restaurant the day before I left. In the
interim, I missed soups terribly. In the Czech Republic, you would very often
get both soup and a main course for dinner (lunch, because the main meal of the
day is the midday meal). You would, also, very often only get soup for your
dinner. Living on sandwiches and salads (I ate much more salads in the USA than
I normally do, in an attempt to escape the less healthy options) and the occasional chicken, I realised
that I actually loved soups. And begged mother to cook a soup for me when I come home.
#2: Bread.
There’s Czech bread. And then there’s the bread in my hometown. About a thousand
light-years removed from both, there’s the white bread I encountered in the
USA.
Czech bread
isn’t just any bread. It’s bread you actually, hypothetically, could live on.
There are days when I pretty much do.
Father sometimes says, quoting
something (I wish I knew what): “It seemed to me that nobody loved me, so I
bought a loaf of bread and wolfed the whole thing.” ("Zdálo se mi, že mě nikdo nemá rád, tak jsem si koupil bochník chleba a celej jsem ho sežral.")
The loaf of bread we’re
talking about here is usually 0,9-1,2 kg. And when it’s fresh, it is quite
possible to eat the whole thing, as it is, just because it’s so good as it is. Czech
bread, when done properly, has a crunchy crust and a wholesome inside, and it
smells of grain and caraway seeds. My uncle, (in)famously, was once instructed
by my aunt to buy a whole loaf of bread, but the bread was so enticing that he
kept nibbling at it on his way home, and at home he sliced off the eaten part
cleanly, pretending to have only bought a half of a loaf... (Yep, that's a pound of bread nibbled at.)
Moreover, I
live in a town where the local bakery is apparently one of the last mass-produce
bakeries in the Czech Republic to make genuine sourdough bread. And a bakery in
a town not so far away makes the best breadrolls, the kind of breadrolls that’s
spoken about far away as something you have to taste to truly have lived...
Compare
this to the white, tasteless sponge that the Western world calls "bread", and you’ll
understand why I missed bread so much.
#3: Trains.
And walking. I did get my share of walking on the Triennium, and here and
there, but the fact that we travelled everywhere by car, while at home I travel
everywhere by train, was quite a culture shock.
It’s the
little things that throw you. The little thing that threw me was the absence of
an under-the-window heater to rest my leg on. It’s an automatic thing for me. I
have somewhat short legs, and the comfortable way to sit while travelling is to
sit at the window and rest my leg on the heater. It is, also, something I
cannot do in a car, making car rides all the more tiresome.
But there
was also the general absence of trains from the country and from people’s
lives. No timetables to observe when travelling. Almost no railroads to cross. Czech
Republic is criss-crossed by railways, one of the countries with the highest
density of railways in the world (guessing by a map I found online, surpassed
only by Germany and Switzerland). The USA, while it has the longest railways in
the world apparently, has none of the railway culture the Czech Republic has.
My father is a railway enthusiast, and I practically grew up with trains. (I
still find an article on prototype locomotives in Czech history a far more
interesting thing to read in a magazine for railway passengers than, say, an
interview with a famous person...)
This brings
me to Baltimore. Baltimore is a terrible city for someone used to walking
everywhere. But, as I learned after my first visit there, it houses a railway
museum. (Railroad. Whatever.) The day before I left, then, I visited Baltimore
again, and spent a very enjoyable day at the museum, including a very short,
not at all picture-perfect train ride. I put my leg on the heater and I was a
very happy marmot.
#4: The
landscape and the countryside. The thing about Czech landscape is that it is
very rarely flat. And it is quite green. When flying home, I knew we had
crossed the border by the bunches of little forests scattered all over the
country. A village, a field, a forest. A village, a field, a forest. And so on.
Czech
Republic has almost no truly high mountains (our highest mountain is 1602 m
high). But it also has almost no plains. Czech Republic is one of the watersheds
of Europe, and everybody knows that rivers flow downwards. And Czech Republic
is full of hills. It’s a rumpled country, and I missed that rumpledness
terribly in the flat, flat, flat regions of the USA I visited. Czech Republic’s
rumpledness makes it a very cosy country.
#5: The
music. This is the one I would not have expected at all. I expected to miss the
food, and the language, and the cultural customs – maybe even the landscape. I
do not listen to Czech music all that much and modern music seems to be so
American anyway, right?
Well, that’s
modern music, perhaps. But I missed Czech Christian music. I missed the music
of my church. On the Triennium, on one of the meetings with the other
international participants, we sang a song (Jesus Loves Me, or some such) that
they chose because they thought everyone would know it. Everyone did, except
me. Because, while I come from a church with a Presbyterian organisation, my
church has a very different history, very different background, very different
tradition. I only knew two of the songs sung on the Triennium: Bless the Lord, My Soul –
which, to the best of my knowledge, originates with the Taizé community in
France – and Amazing Grace which is... well... Amazing Grace.
Here comes
a rant. It could have been an excellent opportunity to learn new songs, if only
the majority of songs sung at the Triennium had not been “worship songs”. In
retrospect, on the Triennium I came to realise that while I definitely believe
in worship by song, I do not believe in “worship songs”. They were all so tepid,
without any taste of their own (just like the white bread...). The tunes were
interchangeable, and the words were interchangeable, too. Had I known nothing
else, I might have found these songs, sung by the mass of people, moving – I did
find it moving at times. The thing is, before I attended the PYT, I had
attended numerous youth meetings in my own church, and experienced a very
different kind of song. The sad fact is, even compared to the many medieval, renaissance and
baroque songs I know, those modern worship songs were very much dead.
Spirituals and gospel songs and songs based on 1960s folk are very much popular with the
youth in my church which was why I was quite surprised by the blandness
present at the Triennium. (It wasn’t just me, though – I had a very animated
discussion on the subject with a black member of the Presbytery I was
there with, who treated me and some passers-by to a much more soulful rendition
of Amazing Grace than the one at worship). But a number of very old songs
enjoy the same level of popularity, maybe even greater (one of the perennial
favourites is a song recorded in a 1567 hymn-book.)
This, for your info, is a 1630s song.
It helps that my church’s
current cantor really has a knack for bringing those old songs to life.
Unfortunately, this is not one of those old songs. Neither is, technically, this, because that's his own creation. But it gives you an idea of what he is capable of. This is originally from 1490.
Sorry about the bad quality; while Ladislav Moravetz is a celebrity in my own church, he's not much of one elsewhere.
I missed
variety. “Worship” is all fine, but not even all Psalms are “worship songs”,
are they? There is a lot of anxiety, a lot of despair, a lot of almost prideful
assuredness, a lot of joy that makes you burst and want to dance. You do not
get any of that from the sort of tune that usually accompanies “worship songs”.
I do not
want to mislead you: the “music culture” (for lack of a better term) at my own
congregation is quite atrocious. But I can’t help myself; I now have a lot of
almost prideful assuredness in my church’s variety in Christian
songs. It's not just in comparison with the Triennium: many other churches I encountered also tend to have songs from only one period, songs of only one style.
My church's very checkered history prevented that from happening. We have some (few but some) songs from before the hussite period. We have hussite songs. We have songs from the Unity of Brethren. We have renaissance songs like those written by Martin Luther, baroque songs like those written by Jan Ámos Komenský AKA Comenius, classicist songs, 19th century songs, 20th century songs. There’s something for every situation. There are songs that tell a
story. And there are songs that are very much a credo; those are usually the
best...
EDIT: I just ran into this on YouTube, and had to share...
This afternoon, me and my sister played guides to her friend and her friends in our hometown. Well - we mostly found out we don't know our own hometown. :D But it was all right; and it was so warm and sunny, it was unbelievable. It's great to have photography-friendly weather back. I feel more like blogging immediately. :-)
I'm not going to tell you what my hometown is, but I'm going to show you some pictures...
* * *
Yesterday, when I went out to take photos of the Regency-ish necklace, my usual object-photographing spot on the bench was taken...
Nelinka looks grown here, but she's still such a tiny cat. In Czech, I say she's prťavá. I'm not sure how to get the same effect with an English word... it's kind of mocking and kind of fond.
* * *
On a completely different note, American Duchess came with dyeable Regency slippers of the flat kind...
And you may win them in a giveaway - although with the number of American Duchess fans, the chances are pretty slim... :D
Completely different note, but these do look very Springy.
