Challenge #5 (Cont’d)

This challenge has had me confused for days. In my previous blog entry I explored some potential ideas but nothing really seemed to me to fit the bill.

I woke this morning with yet another idea for “Do Something An Other Would Do”. I get an ant invasion every spring – late May when the weather turns warm (finally). They come in a couple of places – in the window over my kitchen sink and from the back wall in my living room. Last spring I first noticed a swarm by the door leading to my basement! I’d put a box there to take to the recycling pile and when I picked it up it seemed alive with ants. I stomped on most of them but left a couple alone to see where they’d go. These are the foragers – the ones who are sent out to see what they can find – they really are looking for starch so my kitchen cupboards are a target but once disturbed, these couple headed back for the living room where I discovered they had come in – through the heating vent just above the basement window (when I checked there was a “tiny” opening near the bottom of the caulking and there were ants entering there). So this morning, I decided to show you what an Ant’s Eye View of my house looks like – it starts at the basement door. Click here for a link to the movie itself.

Needless to say it’s too early in the season for me to have recruited ants to be in my movie! They won’t show up for nearly another two months but turn up I’m sure they will.

I learned some interesting things from this: the view close to the ground is really quite different from my usual view either sitting or standing. When I’m near the floor I’m usually doing something practical – putting a quilt together, for example, but this time, the purpose was to just see the space from as close to the ground as I could get the camera.

Challenge #5: Do something your “Other” does differently

Now what in the heck does that mean? The explanation says do something your significant other does that you don’t do – significant “other” could be partner, parents, siblings, close friends, pet… This challenge doesn’t connect for me AT ALL. I’m single, my parents are long dead, while I do have two sisters and friends – nothing about their lives strikes me as so “different” that I should try it out. I understand the point of this one – an opportunity to step outside of yourself and try the mantle of another – but nothing comes to mind here.

I am and have been, as Lewis Thomas has written (The Selves, in Medusa and the Snail, 1979) many selves – I am composed of a number of “others” – as Lewis describes it – I am a collection of “selves” picked up from various experiences at various times throughout my life. I seem to be working on my “creative” selves at this point in my life – through my knitting, the quilting in particular, I’m exploring an artistic self – or other – that I didn’t have time for when I was younger. My educator self is also alive and well in the work I’m currently doing with Scouts Canada and their program development. My “nature” self will show up in a couple of months when it’s time to work in my garden again. My social activist self is still lurking – not quite willing to step to centre stage but she may still…

So what “other” do I explore for this challenge? I don’t see a point in doing something silly for the sake of the challenge – wear a moustache for a day – why bother? I’ve looked through some of the responses of other participants in the course, their experiences don’t trigger anything for me.

My child self is active from time to time – last fall I pulled out a few of my kites and took a couple of young people kite flying (I hadn’t flown a kite in several years). Perhaps I should just share that experience and be done with it!

Or perhaps I should showcase my creative problem-solving self – inventing a way to replace the worn-out heels of socks, for example: Replacing Sock Heels.

 

 

Challenge #4: Do Something As A Child (Cont’d)

OK, I finally did something as a child! I revisited a wall I used to walk along 60 years ago and walked along it (well, some of it) again.

I climbed on the wall:

There happened to be a couple walking their dog – they lived a short distance down the street and I asked them for help – I needed them to take my picture standing on the wall:

Here I am, just like I was 10 years old again. I used to run down this wall regularly because it was alongside my Aunt Esther’s house (60 years ago there was just the wall – no wooden structure to prevent children from running the length of the wall). It was just across the street from my house and on the way to my Grandmother’s house.

It doesn’t look high in this photo but there was (and still is) a considerable drop on the side by Aunt Esther’s house

The back corner of the backyard has been filled in against the wall quite a bit – the drop used to be substantial – that didn’t stop us running along the wall, however.

Standing on the wall where I am, I can see across the street to what used to be my house:

Turn to my right and I see my Grandmother’s house (the white house behind the parked car):

The wall is old – you can see the moss has taken over the shade side:

So I revisited my childhood – I haven’t visited the street in what 40 years – in some ways the neighbourhood looks the same but looking closely you can see how much has changed – the modifications each new owner has made to the houses – the neighbourhood has been well kept-up.

Challenge #4: Do Something As A Child

I’m stuck on this challenge – I’m a l-o-n-g way from childhood – having a hard time coming up with an idea I can document for doing something as if I were a child.

What kinds of things do children do? Well, they make a mess, they can fall asleep anywhere, their perspective on the world is different because they’re shorter (sometimes a lot shorter), they eat odd things, dress in mismatched clothes, play dress-up… I could do any of those things but none is easy for me to document in a social context.

It’s the perspective on the world that’s kinda lurking for me – take my camera and see if I can represent what my world looks like from a child’s eye view – probably means taking images on my knees so that I’m lower and able to see stuff at their height. My great nephew Charlie is just two so I need to try seeing the world as if I were Charlie.

In a sense, it’s like my trying to get around on a busy Manhattan street – lots of people and I have difficulty projecting traffic flows because I’m not tall. I was navigating a dispersing crowd in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, walking beside someone who was 6′ 5″ tall – he could see where the breaks in flow were happening – all I could see was the crush of people – so I guess I can imagine what it might be like for Charlie – he’d have seen only legs!

A start: the other day I was heading into Canadian Tire to pick up some curtain rods. Parked my car, got out of it, and was heading toward the store when I saw the following:

I couldn’t walk past without taking a photo – wondered how the gloves actually ended up on the ground, beside a big black truck, neatly side by side as they were. BTW, when I headed back to my car the gloves were gone, although the truck was still there – maybe the gloves didn’t belong to anyone in the truck, then who, do you suppose?

Anyway, I’ll see what other photos I might take to add to this photo to show the world from Charlie’s point of view.

Challenge #3: Talk To Someone Different (Continued)

Day before yesterday I bought some Japanese indigo katagami fabric to back the Japanese print quilt I’m working on – the problem with indigo is that if you don’t wash it thoroughly, the dye will bleed into the quilt when washed. I needed to serge the raw ends of the fabric before I could wash it without it fraying badly – BUT my serger is in the hospital – so I called Bonnie at Sew With Vision (Pfaff/Husqvarna dealer) to ask if she had a serger set up and whether I might use it for 15 minutes. “Come along,” she said.

 

I arrive at the shop to find two women (sisters: Margie Glen and Joan Bowie) from Antigonish (103.84 miles from Halifax) visiting Sew With Vision for the first time – they’re there because one of the women, Margie Glen, wanted to buy fabric for baby quilts. My chance to “talk to someone different!”

This is not the kind of interview I can prepare for – it’s a spontaneous conversation with two people whom I’ve met by chance – but there are some pretty standard interview questions that immediately come to mind:

Why are you visiting Sew With Vision?  One of the women in the Port Hawksbury quilting quild recommend they visit the shop – Bonnie had a good selection of quilting fabrics, they were told. They were in Halifax to visit one of Joan’s daughters in town and decided it was a good opportunity to check out the shop. By the time I’d arrived Joan had a pile of cut fabrics in front of her.

What kind of quilt will you be making? Joan’s daughter (the one who lives in Antigonish) is expecting a baby near the end of May – don’t know if it’s a girl or boy so Joan has bought both a collection of blues and a collection of pinks (and she has a grouping of yellow and blue fabrics to coordinate with some leftover jellyroll strips to make a double bed size bed quilt for the Halifax daughter – so she’s going to be busy!).

How long have you been quilting? For about six years – Margie who’s been quilting for nearly 7 years got Joan started and she became addicted (I can understand that – I’ve done something like 25 lap size quilts in a year and a half).

What’s the baby quilt going to be like? Joan pulls out a quilt pattern she’s chosen: Bunny Hugs – she’s chosen four fabrics in blue and four in pink and some plush fabric for the bunnies at the top of the quilt. This isn’t a difficult quilt to piece – Joan will have one made in very little time.

I’ve brought along my art quilt (In The Park) to show Bonnie and the two women have lots of questions about how I put the piece together. I show them photos of some my pieced quilts as well as a few of the garments I’ve made. I happen to be wearing one of the wool shirts I made in January) and I get lots of complements on the detail.

Before they leave the shop, I give them some online suggestions: YouTube videos from the Missouri Star Quilt Company using pre-cut fabrics to make fast quilts; and Leah Day  who does wonderful free motion quilting. They write both suggestions down.

I enjoyed our conversation – always love meeting and talking to other people who sew (I’ve stopped calling us “sewers” – too easily confused with those underground conduits below the streets!). There are always ideas to swap, new ways to think about old sewing problems and I’m always happy to share what I’ve discovered about sewing/quilting with other people.

And before I left the shop I did manage to serge the raw edges of my fabric!

Challenge #3: Talk To Someone Different

Talk to someone to whom you would not normally talk, and with whom you would not ordinarily speak. You must do this in person and not via any media: i.e. no telephone, email, chat, video, cell phone, or other communication technology. In advance, select the person, contact them and ask them at least five open ended questions…

Too bad I didn’t know about this ten days ago! I flew to Toronto on Friday afternoon for a Scouts Canada National Leadership Summit, spent the weekend there and flew back home Sunday evening. I had a ton of interesting conversations with people I’d not known previously! Five stood out for me:

#1 – Next to me on the flight from Halifax to Ottawa was a young man, a university student, who was a knitter – once we were in the air, he hauled out his knitting (he was working on sleeves for a sweater he was knitting for his husband), I brought out the socks I was working on. We had a wonderful chat, about what he was studying, his trying to decide whether to attend graduate school straight away or to take some time off, about his favourite brand of knitting needles, the kind of knitting he liked to do, how long he’d been at it, what had started him off. We were in Ottawa before either of us knew it (it’s an hour flight).

#2 – From Ottawa to Toronto, a young university professor (Carleton) sat next to me and we had a great conversation about climate change and teaching and technology. We exchanged email addresses so I could send her some resources I had on hand I thought she’d find interesting.

#3 – Friday evening at the Leadership Summit, in the lobby bar, I became involved in a conversation with a Scouter from Calgary – involved as a Council Commissioner in charge of program – he had lots of questions and concerns about The Canadian Path and the pilot testing of the 4 Elements on which the revised program is based – we started out quite a distance apart (in part because of what he does, he’s VP Business Excellence, Operations Support Teams for a Calgary based oil company) – language was the barrier, but it didn’t take long for us to understand we were supporting the same process for how to roll out The Canadian Path – a revamping of scouting in Canada based on Baden-Powell’s belief in youth leadership, youth planning and youth input into the scouting program. I found his business perspective on how to educate/re-educate close to 25,000 adults involved in scouting in Canada helpful – he pushed me to think differently about aspects of the implementation problem the program development team is currently grappling with. We, too, exchanged email addresses – me to send him some of the new material we’ve prepared for the implement phase of The Canadian Path for his thoughts on how we could proceed.

During the weekend I had substantial conversations with several young people – most of them high school students involved in scouting who had interesting things to say about why they were involved, what they wanted to get out of it, what they wanted to see the program become; all of them involved in leadership roles in their councils/areas.

#4 – At dinner at the Pub Saturday evening I sat beside a lawyer from Newfoundland who is also a scouter – we had an engaging conversation about the kind of law he practices, how he got involved in scouting (his children, of course), why he’s continued as his children have grown.

#5 – On the return flight Ottawa-Halifax I was sitting next to a woman who was deeply focused on some work she was doing in a workbook – turned out, she’s just about to retire from her job with a dental equipment/supply business out of France, she wants to become a translator so she’s currently studying French (she was clearly Francophone) to brush up on the technicalities of the language as a lead into courses for translators. We had a great conversation about challenges of learning with a slowing brain, how memorization was much easier for each of us twenty years ago.

However, these conversations don’t count for the challenge! I didn’t prepare in advance – who knew what interesting people I’d actually run into. I certainly didn’t take any photographs of the people I talked to.

So now I’m back home and “talk to someone different” is going to be a challenge – my routine is rather set, I don’t run into new people all that frequently. Yesterday I stopped off at a local fabric store to pick up some indigo-dyed fabric to use to back the quilt I’m currently working on. I realize that while I know the women who work there, I don’t really know much about them at all. So I guess I’ll head back there in a day or two and see if one of them will spend a few minutes with me in conversation! And I’ll be sure to take some pictures this time.

Challenge #2: Wear Something Different

Wear something different. Not just the stuff that’s in the back of your closet, but rather the stuff that’s in your garage, your roommates closet, your car, or the local hardware store. What can you wear? What limitations do you put on yourself about what you wear? (Only pink? Only cotton? Only store bought? Only clothes? Only Chanel?). Plan it. Wear it all day and document a portion of your day out in public, with photos…

This challenge had me stumped for a while. I’d come across the ultimate Wear something different! (This 4-Year-Old Makes Paper Dresses With Her Mom – below is her paper version of what an actress wore at some award show or other. Look at the article – the paper dresses are amazing.)

So, yes, I could conceivably make a paper dress but I have absolutely nowhere I can wear it, trust me.

So I started thinking about what else I might try. First idea: crochet a scarf out of 1/2″ strips cut from plastic shopping bags. I took one bag, created the strips and began to crochet:

  

First, the scarf was going to be VERY stiff, and it was going to take about 10 bags to get a reasonable length, which meant about 6-7 hours work. More than the assignment warranted.

Then a couple of days ago a box of quilting clips I had ordered arrived. They would make good earrings – I tried using earrings I had, but I couldn’t get them to work – which meant I’d have to pick up a cheap pair of fittings – the point of this exercise as far as I was concerned was to use stuff I had in the house. So earrings were out. But I had a box of large colourful plastic-coated paper clips – wouldn’t work as earrings, but I could make a necklace from them.

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So now I have a “necklace” – next to add the quilting clips:

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The clips should hold something… I have some colourful thimbles – just the thing!

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Now I have a necklace:

All that’s left to do is wear it and have some pictures taken!

Well, almost, I realized today (Sunday) instead of three thimbles, I could use my necklace to hold my most used tools while I’m at the sewing machine: so I now have a pair of trimming scissors and a pencil hanging conveniently from the necklace! What’s nice about this idea, is that I could have as many tools to hand as I wanted – I could add a pair of tweezers (which I use a lot when taking out stitches) and a seam ripper as well.

[This reminds me of Charles K. Bliss (inventor of Blissymbolics) whom I met in the early 70s in Toronto. He used to have his possessions attached to him by heavy elastic bands – his wallet, watch, whatever, were always hanging below his jacket. It meant he didn’t have to look far to find whatever it was he needed – couldn’t find a photo of him with his stuff attached online – just a personal memory, I guess.]

BTW – here’s my current project  – a quilt using some of the Japanese fabrics I bought in Portland, Oregon last spring

I’m trying to build a colour flow from the olives – black – red – blue – indigo – the blocks have been on my floor since about noon – I walk away and return to shift a couple of blocks around. The challenge is not to move to joining the blocks too soon.

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I stopped off at the fabric store to pick up some indigo-dyed fabric to back the quilt. I was wearing my tool necklace (the woman beside me was another customer – someone I didn’t know):

And a further wear something different:

I made this pair of socks from two yarns that were complementary – there was enough yarn in each ball for three socks – I gave away a pair of green, and a pair of blue, and kept this pair for myself. So I wore them yesterday as well.

Challenge #1: Eat Something Different

Conceptualize, plan in advance and eat something different. Eat something different; that is, eat something completely different, not something that has been just left out of your diet; suggestions: a different culture, an entirely new creation, or a different manner or definition of eating. You should understand that this is not an assignment solely about food, but about the process of eating, literally and figuratively. Again, plan and implement your plan; report on the results.

Not sure where the idea to eat an alphabet came from but once I had it, I realized I had an alphabet book in my collection of alphabet books: Eating The Alphabet

I immediately had two ideas both of which I intended to implement:

1) To find out how quickly could I manage to Eat an Alphabet – including everything in addition to fruits and vegetables. After a day, I discovered I was likely to eat an alphabet in 2 days (with some creative eating). What I discovered was  “i” and “u” were going to be next to impossible (when I googled for ideas, I found indian corn for “i” and ugli fruit for “u”; “x” turned out to be possible with food additives like xanthum gum which turns out to be vegetable-based). I kept a list and it filled up pretty quickly from avocado – zucchini (with fish and grapefruit and nori included – 23 letters in all – no “i”, “u”, or “x”). This was a solitary activity.

a – avocado b – bread, broccoli c – cabbage, cheese, chocolate, cilantro d – dumplings, dates e – eggs f – falafel, feta, fish g – green onion, grapefruit h – havarti, haddock i – (ice cream) j – jalepeno pickle k – ketchup l – leaf lettuce m – miso soup, muffin

n – nori (japanese seaweed) o – olives p – pork, pecans, paremsan, pistachios q – quinoa r – raisins, radish s – sesame cookies t – turkey (sliced) u – (udon noodles) v – vinegar w – walnuts x – (xanthum gum) y – yoghyrt z – zucchini

2) Friday I headed for Toronto to a largish gathering – I planned to Eat an Alphabet at the Saturday night dinner in a pub by asking the waiter for an extra plate, and then polling the group for a taste of what they might have that “begins with ‘a’, begins with ‘b’ and see how far I could get – I was guessing  a pub wouldn’t be an alphabet friendly milieu! I’d just do the best I could – and take lots of photos.

2a)  In fact my Eat an Alphabet began with lunch on Saturday: a buffet – so there was lots of variety – I filled my plate with as many different foods as I could, sat down to eat, explained to people what I was attempting (there were lots of laughs) and then tallied what I’d managed to put on my plate (15 letters in all):

a – artichoke b – broccolini c – cannellini, creme caramel, chocolate d – e – endive, eggplant f – fennel g – green pepper h – i – j – k – l – leaf lettuce m – mushrooms

n – o – onions, osso buco p – parmesan cheese, pistachios q – r – radicchio, red pepper s – squash ravioli, strawberries t – tomato soup u – v – w – watercress x – y – z – zucchini

2b) At the pub: Because the group was so large (~150 people) we had a set menu – which immediately limited my alphabet options. Most of the 18 people at my table had the filet mignon plate (including me)! Nevertheless, I managed to eat more of the alphabet than I had anticipated I might (13 letters in all – the gal who had risotto gave me a taste, as did the gal who had the Shock Top beer). The salad contributed significantly to the list having spinach, raspberries, walnuts, blueberries, watercress and a vinegar dressing:

a – b – beer (Shock Top), blueberries, bacon c – carrots, cheesecake d – dolce de leche e – f – filet mignon g – goat cheese, green beans, graham crackers h – i – j – k – l – lemon m –

n – o – p – potato, peppercorns q – r – raspberries, risotto s – spinach t – turnip u – v – vinegar w – walnuts, watercress x – y – z – zucchini

The challenge generated a lot of conversation at both meals – particularly about those letters that were difficult to find. I definitely found myself looking at food differently afterward! Each item took on a different significance. I could have delved deeper and investigated the seasonings but I was happy with what I was able to catalogue easily.

Of course, I can now think of a gazillion book related eating ideas – a counting book: 1 carrot, 2 small potatoes, 3 green beans, 4 scoops of ice cream…; meals of all one coloured food – a red meal, a green meal, a blue meal…; a calendar eating: on Monday I ate–, on Tuesday I ate–…; meals from food all grown/harvested/prepared in the same place…; food suggested by specific novels…; the foods I hate book…; lots of ideas