Posts from the ‘Design’ Category
There is expansion in life! I am not hovering!! I have 7 followers. This is fantastic because I have had a steady five forever…When I have 50 followers, I am giving away a pillow so click on the button kids!
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| And I on a soft pillow will lay down my limbs. Sappho. |
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| Vintage Silk Scarf cut & re-patterned. |
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| Large “Musique” Silk scarf. Cut and repatterned. |
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| Wonderful acid turquoise, yellows pinks and chartreuse. |
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| The alchemy of scissors and thread. |
Piece work for me is about re-inventing and re-designing and re-patterning. It’s the alchemy that comes with cutting something up and putting it back together.
I started collecting vintage silk scarves after a summer course at Fitzwilliam College in 2000. I had a friend there who told me about a distant cousin he had just met in London. The cousin was in his 70’s and lived in South Kensington with his partner in a house filled with antiques. They had a collection of tea cups and silk scarves. At 30 I imagined being 70, in a large house with everything that comes with it, and a collection of silk scarves. I got back from England and I found an Hermes Scarf in a thrift store and my collection began. It is quickly filling up one of my Halliburton suitcases. Pictured here are pillows I made out of a couple of the scarves.
Yes, I know! I’m experimenting with my own product photography. Somebody save me!!! These are 15″x14″ (Clodagh always told me, “We DON’T do square pillows.” …I never asked why…but it was always about the feng shui).
I take it to heart when I’m cutting out pillows. Cush Cush. This is a 1960’s linen appliqued with the found classic Galbraith & Paul Sunflower fabric. So pretty with transitional cotton inserts and exposed zippers. Who needs invisible! –we all know you are there.
Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays: drawing by Mina Loy, 1916
L’Amour dorloté par les belles dames: drawing and gouache by Mina Loy, 1906 (Collection of Roger L. Conover).
La Maison en papier: drawing and gouache by Mina Loy, 1906 (Collection of Michael Duncan).
Love Songs
I
Spawn of fantasies
Sifting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time”
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane
I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva
These are suspect places
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of experience
Colored glass.
II
At your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands
III
Night
Heavy with shut-flower’s nightmares
———————————————
Noon
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun
IV
Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude
Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon
Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccoughs
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiences
Begging dorsal vertebrae
Let meeting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form a blur
Anything
Than to seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other
V
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn
VI
Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern
VII
Once in a mezzanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And Wisdom’s eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair
One bore a baby
In a padded porte-enfant
Tied with a sarsenet ribbon
To her goose’s wings
But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
— Sweeping the brood clean out
VIII
Midnight empties the street
— — — To the left a boy
— One wing has been washed in rain
The other will never be clean any more —
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
— The poor can’t wash in hot water —
And I don’t know which turning to take —
IX
We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill’t on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily-news
Printed in blood on its wings
X
In some
Prenatal plagiarism
Foetal buffoons
Caught tricks
— — — — —
From archetypal pantomime
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
— — — —
For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And most of Nature is green
— — — — — — — — — — — —
XI
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager’s revival
And flowered flummery
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
XII
Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes
We sidle up
To Nature
— — — that irate pornographist
XIII
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching — — — — —— — —
World of Interiors is particularly good this month. To start we have the minty arsenic of the cover story with a framed vintage scarf. I thought this light fixture dynamite–I’d been thinking of this exact thing for my deck if only I had learned to crack off.
Then, we have Bonnard and a new book which would certainly be on my must read list if I happened to read anymore. I have been going back to the books that I should have read at some point but have not. Last night I downloaded The Custom in the Country as I’ve almost finished up with Moby Dick. Okay they are on tape, but how I do wish wish Librivox would do Swann’s Way in English because then I would feel all caught up. Having someone read Proust to me while in bed embroidering pillow fronts seems like it would be quite fun even though I do not have cork lined walls.
Apparently, I like a lot of color. The 19th c Morrocan Fez embroidery pillows are a custom job I finished up last week. They are alongside some Laotian embroideries silk on homespun cotton. There is also a handwoven red, blue, and white textile panel on the back that I think perhaps is from the Balkans or there about. Also, simple orange silk pillows that I did up for my vintage orange sofa.
“Someone will remember us I say even in another time.” Sappho. Linen and silk ground fabric embroidered in vintage cotton thread.
Vintage needlepoint textile with embroidered text in vintage cotton thread.
Strip Pillow. Repatterned Vintage Japanese Silk.
Pillows like belts or ties pull together an ensemble. They allow the eye to rest. Pillows are like the peacemakers of your environment: bridging colors and adding textures and creating focal points. They should have substance, be well done, and they must not be forgotten!
Be Bibelots’ new line of pillows are a mix of craft, imagination and wit.
