Restingmotion

I finally started looking at the fashion shows for Sping 2010 over the weekend.  I can't believe I missed it yet again.  I shouldn't be surprised.  I haven't even looked at the Fall collections and here I am thinking about fall clothes.

But on to spring.

I started with the last shows, as those came up first on Style.com.  I am just now beginning to look alphabetically through the general list.  So far little has captured my eye, especially in terms of things that I actually want to wear or make.

Alexander McQueen however has captured my imagination.  These are not, for the most part, wearable clothes.  But they are stunningly beautiful. The technique is amazing from the creation of the fabulous fabrics to the manipulation of print and volume in the actual dresses.  The models, on fabulously architectural heels, completely unwearable, but the line, combined with the clothes references history and transcends it some almost otherworldly way.  As seen in the photos the models in the clothes seem like otherwordly goddesses from some strange planet or magical world, tall regal beings both fragile and strong, perhaps from some world with gravity very different from our own.

Sometimes fashion shows are just for art and ideas, sometimes clothing is the stuff of dreams.  

Some things are more wearable, perhaps by the more extreme, or socially protected among us. G particularly likes this dress, more than some of the dresses that are closer to the traditional mold.   It is the contrast of the colors, of the form fitting bodice with the wide feathered skirt and the tough boots, a mixture of soft and strong and the completely irrelevant.   The collection is all about volume, volume and texture and print.  Sometimes texture and print are used to create volume or the illusion of volume.  Sometimes structure is created for its own sake.

I love looking at all these things, just as I love a good romp with a fantasy novel with visually rich prose.

But there are clothes that make me think in more earthly terms.  This jacket reminds me of the 80s and early 90s.  The days when you might find me wearing Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana.  I suppose I have always had a bit of a taste for the stylized extreme. The sleeves are a bit too exaggerated, but if I could modify the sleeves a bit without compromising the idea too much, I would wear this.  On me I see this with pants, pants with full legs and a bit of volume to balance the sleeves, to contrast with the more fitted silhouette.

It is this coat, lined in fabric to match the dress shown underneath that I find most inspiring.

It is a coat and not a coat.  I don't think you could take it off, so it functions like some kind of abstract coat-suit.  It is like the idea of "coat" has been transformed into something else, recognizable but new.  It looks so simple.  I am sure it is not.  To pull this off so that it looks good would require a mastery of cut and subtle structure.  And yet I am fascinated by the idea of this as an ensemble, of some variation of this that might fit my more earth-bound life.

I don't suppose it will show up in Vogue patterns.

Look what what was waiting for me in the mail when I got home!

I've been lusting after this book for quite a long time now, at least a year, and I wrote here about my frustrations at not finding an online vendor who would ship to the United States, and my French is fine for reading a cookbook or even an occasional article or book, but not so good conversationally, especially on the telephone, so the idea of calling up and requesting it was just beyond me.

Sometime in August however I got an email from Amazon France informing that the book was now available and I ordered it immediately.  There were quite a few delays however, and it was shipped just before I left for Texas.

I have been reading it and drooling over the photos.  Reading is about sums up my immediate plans though because macarons are not in my current diet plan, although I know the time will come, and with diligence and luck, perhaps even in time for a Christmas treat.  Regardless of when I first use this book, I know it will become a favorite.

Our local post office is getting used to strange foreign packages arriving for me, knitting and sewing books from Japan, books and yarn from England, France and Germany.  The exchange rate with the pound has been so good that it has been cheaper for me to order my Rowan books and yarns from England lately than it has been to purchase them in the United States, even with the overseas airmail shipping.   Even so there was some excitement when I picked up this package as I had the book from France and a package from England all at the same time.  

I had ordered a sweater from Pure because it looked like it would be the perfect shade to wear with something that is in the works.   I ordered this sweater, but not in this color.  Mine is a soft blue called heather bluebell and it is, in fact, the perfect shade.  I pulled it on in the kitchen while we opened the mail and I could tell from G's face that it was perfect before I even looked in the mirror, so you will be seeing it eventually, once I finish that project.

Sometimes I just feel really stupid.  

Three weeks ago Moisés started hunting yarn, and I moved most of the yarn out of my sewing/yarn room and into the fabric closet.  It is still piled up there and I can hardly get into that closet from the monumental mess.  I thought it was safe as that closet has folding doors which are fairly tight and don't open easily.  At that point Moisés couldn't open those doors, but within about a week and a half he had learned how to worm his body between the doors and shove them open by brute force.  Then the yarn was his.

I am now closing the door to the library, which contains the yarn closet, fully intending to reorganize as soon as I finish the outdoor fall maintenance on the house and the various repairs that have been necessitated by a few years of neglect on my part while G was ill, and on his part while he was gradually becoming more confused but trying to maintain the illusion that it wasn't happening.

I knew Moisés was learning fast and was also determined, but I allowed myself to suppress this information.

Until Sunday night that it is.  

Sunday evening we came home from our concert and, as usual there were three cats at the door ready to greet us.  But wait.  One cat had something soft and fuzzy and maroon colored in his mouth.  My immediate thought was "I know I closed the library door", and yes it was closed.  Then I grabbed the yarn.  Kidsilk Haze, as tempting to cats as to knitters.  I knew it came from the sewing room.  

As I walked through the house I was amazed at what I saw.  There was a giant cobweb of yarn spun around all the furniture, the railings on the stairs and the freestanding chimney in the living room, up and down, over and under, all around there was yarn.  Pink yarn, blue yarn, linen yarn, silk yarn, wool. Oh my. The sewing room was even worse.  

Moises had to be put away in a yarn-free room overnight while I started the slow process of rewinding.  By late Monday morning I had the yarn all back together and I decided to put it back in the cubbies temporarily as I wanted to see how Moisés had managed to get at it.  The yarn cubbies were 4 and 5 1/2 feet off the floor respectively and he is not a jumper.   I let him in and it was only  a short while before the lure of yarn proved too strong to ignore.  I caught him in the act.

Moisés had learned to climb the wall of cubbies.  The yarn will have to be moved of course.  In the meantime I am keeping the door to the fiber haven firmly closed.  But this will not work for long.  Already the little devil is reaching up to the doorknob and trying to turn it.  He has not yet been successful, but I can no longer delude myself into thinking this is anything more than a short term (very short term) solution.

Sunday was a beautiful crisp fall day.  It was the perfect day for another concert in the Berkshires.  Unfortunately the concert did not live up to the standards Mother Nature provided.

It all started well.  The Juilliard has a new first Violinist, Nick Eanet who was apparently making his debut with the quartet.  I think there are still a few bugs to be worked out in this newly evolving ensemble.

The first work, Schubert's Quartet in A Minor, Op 29, the "Rosamunde" was a disappointment.  G had taken his hearing aides out for some reason and was upset that he couldn't hear the music.  I told him it was a blessing.  Now Schubert is not something I usually associate with the Juilliard's spare muscular style, but I was willing to give them a chance,  and Eanet's playing was sweet and melodic.  But the Schubert was flat and boring and a little too spare, while the sentiment was almost sickly sweet and filled with schmaltz, as if we had the Juilliard Quartet auditioning for Lawrence Welk.

But that wasn't even the worst of it.  There was some kind of shifting scraping, wheezing echo that occurred only during play.  I couldn't identify it.  It sounded like a cross between a scrape and the sound of wind in a tunnel.  I looked around me.  I looked at the musicians.  I quickly decided that it was coming from the first violin but I couldn't figure out why or what it was.  I couldn't imagine if something was wrong with the violin.  It was distracting from the music in the extreme, and it was quite audible over the music.  I was a good ways back in the small concert hall, in the 13th row.

Between the first and second pieces, my fellow audience members in the rows around me were wondering what it was, but none of us could quite figure it out.  I was determined to leave at intermission, after the Bartok.  But I didn't.  The Bartok was much to excellent, dry and astringent, thrilling in parts, with that devastating sense of emptiness that is such a shocking ending for the 2nd Quartet in A Minor, Op 17.  Yes there was that same wheezing, foghorn like sound, but it was less frequent.  And the music was just too good.

I stayed and listened to the Beethoven Quartet in F Major, Op 135, which is one of my favorites.  I should have left. During intermission the director of the program had told G that he thought the sound was heavy breathing on the part of the cellist.  This thought held my attention for a while (the playing did not always manage that).  I quickly determined that it couldn't be the cellist though.  It had to be the first violin, but I still couldn't determine what was making the noise.  The Beethoven was not bad, parts of it were wonderful, parts were only acceptable.  The noise was a distraction, and not only to me.

The group played an encore, a Mendelssohn scherzo, which is where I figured it out.  It was the first violinist, not the violin and he was breathing heavily while he played, rasping and almost sighing a couple of times.  There was an audible emotive sigh at one point in the Mendelssohn that killed the whole thing for me.  

The concert would have been much better had I not been so annoyed, and I was very annoyed.  I don't know if Mr. Eanet is an emotive breather during performance or if he just had a cold.  If it is the former I hope he will learn to control it.  The changing dynamic in a group when one member leaves is always difficult and I think that Eanet shows great promise.  I would be interested in hearing the group again, perhaps after a few more performances, perhaps this was just a rough start.