Glistening tears

"It is my second day at school, I am three years old, I am wearing a red woolen cardigan and I am sobbing uncontrollably, I remember the wall painted in a cream gloss and it appears almost liquid-like, I am facing this wall. I also remember my cardigan being very wet and glistening with my tears. All the sounds around me are muffled- I feel very.miserable and scared."

Source: BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/

Creativity - A fresh use is being found daily

Wearing Hats

"I don't wear gratitude
well. Or hats.

What would I do with
veils and silly feathers
or a cloth rose
growing from the top of my head?

What should I do with this
peculiar furred emotion?"


Margaret Atwood, Letters, Towards and Away 6
in Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game, Anansi, Toronto 1978, p.83/84

The Tailor

"Then, don't miss 'The Tailor', the immortal 'Tailor,' by Moroni, (No. 697), one of the gems of the National Gallery; I always go to see 'The Tailor.' Whatever else I miss I find my way to him. There he stands in 'white doublet and red trunk hose, at his board with the shears in his hands, about to cut a piece of black cloth,' standing back, as some one else says somewhere, to see the effect of his cut!

Could any dressmaker ever look as picturesque as that Tailor! Not an Ideal! you will say, like the portrait of the Doge we have just been considering! No, not exactly an Ideal, but a Representation, and a Representation with a good bit of character in it too! To me it conveys the thoughts of a man about his work; he is going to make that coat just right, depend upon it, and he is thinking what cut will do it!"



C.E. Skinner, Art: The Handmaid of Beauty, Part of a course of lectures on beauty, Privately printed 1899, reprinted 1903, p. 71, 72

Quilting points

"... the point of constellations is to make a comprehensible unity out of an underlying chaos, and it takes only one or two stars to anchor a fantasy as odd as a microscope to the heavenly vault. The one star at the top and the other below are like quilting points, the buttons in upholstery: they force the fabric into contact with the frame beneath just enough so the two remain connected. The rest is stuffing."


Elkins, James (1996), The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc. San Diego, New York, London, p.127/128

Black Wedding

"Marry in black you will wish yourself back."
(Proverb)


"Wearing black: the long standing tradition of ladies not wearing black to a wedding has been overturned. Today, even the bridesmaids might be outfitted in black. Just make sure you don't look like you're attending a funeral. Consider accessorizing that little black dress with a brightly colored scarf or blazer."

Guides for Guests: What to Wear
http://www.weddingchannel.com/

Men in Black

"Men's clothes went black in the nineteenth century. The change in look was extremely dramatic, and was much commented on by writers of the time. Dickens, Ruskin and Baudelaire all asked why it was, in an age of supreme wealth and power, that men wanted to dress as if going to a funeral."

John Harvey, Men in Black, Reaktion Books, London 1995, inside cover

Country Colours: "but not black"

"Any shade of brown that is personally becoming, any 'natural colour' - beige, oatmeal, stone - most greys, most soft shades of the primary colours, and many mixture colours are good foundations for country colour schemes; but not black. Black is not a good country colour, except for formal clothes to be worn indoors; out of doors it always manages to make the wearer look as though she were going to or coming from a funeral."

Georgie Henschel's Book of the Well-dressed Woman, Phoenix House Limited, London 1951, p.38

Crochet Commission

'Such was the state of things when I left Cranford and went to Drumble. I had, however, several correspondents, who kept me au fait as to the proceedings of the dear little town. There was Miss Pole, who was becoming as much absorbed in crochet as she had been once in knitting, and the burden of whose letters was something like, 'But don't you forget the white worsted at Flint's'of the old song; for at the end of every sentence of news came a fresh direction as to some crochet commission which I was to execute for her."


Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, London and Glasgow Collin's Clear-Type Press n.d. p. 29/30