It started innocently enough, as these things do, with a newly organized sewing room. Fabrics stowed in their appropriate bins. Bins stacked in accessible columns in the closet. Notions in a neat row on a shelf. In short, our heroine could walk across the floor unimpeded and see the surface of her sewing table. A blank slate, if you will, for chalking up some sewing successes.
So, what to tackle first? Christmas presents--two slippers from felted sweaters to sew, for example? Embroidered Christmas ornaments from said felted sweaters?
Nah.
How about playing around with quirky, this-side-of-kitsch curtain panels with fairy tale motifs in two colorways that our fortunate heroine received in a swap from Resurrection Fern?
Perfect!
Said fabric panels showed scenes from three fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the Three Little Pigs. Intrepid heroine cut out each of the scenes to assemble into three separate pieced pillows for the kids' rooms. Simple enough, you say.
Then a little lightbulb went off over the heroine's head. What if she used a passage from each fairy tale to "Illuminate" the scene, and to fulfill a long-overdue commitment to contribute to Smoothpebble's "Illuminated Phrase" project?
Gentle readers, this may have been where things started going very, very wrong.
Our stalwart heroine headed to the computer to do some research. Turns out that the Little Red Riding Hood tale has its roots as a folk tale from France, and the original story involved a strong heroine who kicks the big bad wolf's a** herself. The first writer to put the tale in written form (in 1697) was Charles Perrault, a French courtier to Louis XIV, the Sun King. Perrault's wolf gobbled up both the grandma and poor little despoiled Hood--a warning to all young girls not to trust strange men, especially the sweet talkers.
So, with the idea of a sweet little fairy tale pillow banished from our heroine's mind with this image, she set out to make something a little edgier. Poet Anne Sexton's rewriting of the tale--as one of appetites and deceptions of all kinds--fit the bill:
Red Riding Hood
By Anne Sexton
Many are the deceivers:
The suburban matron,
proper in the supermarket,
list in hand so she won't suddenly fly,
buying her Duz and Chuck Wagon dog food,
meanwhile ascending from earth,
letting her stomach fill up with helium,
letting her arms go loose as kite tails,
getting ready to meet her lover
a mile down Apple Crest Road
in the Congregational Church parking lot.
Two seemingly respectable women
come up to an old Jenny
and show her an envelope
full of money
and promise to share the booty
if she'll give them ten thou
as an act of faith.
Her life savings are under the mattress
covered with rust stains
and counting.
They are as wrinkled as prunes
but negotiable.
The two women take the money and disappear.
Where is the moral?
Not all knives are for
stabbing the exposed belly.
Rock climbs on rock
and it only makes a seashore.
Old Jenny has lost her belief in mattresses
and now she has no wastebasket in which
to keep her youth.
The standup comic
on the "Tonight" show
who imitates the Vice President
and cracks up Johnny Carson
and delays sleep for millions
of bedfellows watching between their feet,
slits his wrist the next morning
in the Algonquin's old-fashioned bathroom,
the razor in his hand like a toothbrush,
wall as anonymous as a urinal,
the shower curtain his slack rubberman audience,
and then the slash
as simple as opening as a letter
and the warm blood breaking out like a rose
upon the bathtub with its claw and ball feet.
And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.
The heart, poor fellow,
pounding on his little tin drum
with a faint death beat,
The heart, that eyeless beetle,
running panicked through his maze,
never stopping one foot after the other
one hour after the other
until he gags on an apple
and it's all over.
And I. I too again.
I built a summer house on Cape Ann.
A simple A-frame and this too was
a deception -- nothing haunts a new house.
When I moved in with a bathing suit and tea bags
the ocean rumbled like a train backing up
and at each window secrets came in
like gas. My mother, that departed soul,
sat in my Eames chair and reproached me
for losing her keys to the old cottage.
Even in the electric kitchen there was
the smell of a journey. The ocean
was seeping through its frontiers
and laying me out on its wet rails.
The bed was stale with my childhood
and I could not move to another city
where the worthy make a new life.
Long ago
there was a strange deception:
a wolf dressed in frills,
a kind of transvestite.
But I get ahead of my story.
In the beginning
there was just little Red Riding Hood,
so called because her grandmother
made her a red cape and she was never without it.
It was her Linus blanket, besides
it was red, as red as the Swiss flag,
yes it was red, as red as chicken blood,
But more than she loved her riding hood
she loved her grandmother who lived
far from the city in the big wood.
This one day her mother gave her
a basket of wine and cake
to take to her grandmother
because she was ill.
Wine and cake?
Where's the aspirin? The penicillin?
Where's the fruit juice?
Peter Rabbit got camomile tea.
But wine and cake it was.
On her way in the big wood
Red Riding Hood met the wolf.
Good day, Mr. Wolf, she said,
thinking him no more dangerous
than a streetcar or a panhandler.
He asked where she was going
and she obligingly told him
There among the roots and trunks
with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss
he planned how to eat them both,
the grandmother an old carrot
and the child a shy budkin
in a red red hood.
He bade her to look at the bloodroot,
the small bunchberry and the dogtooth
and pick some for her grandmother.
And this she did.
Meanwhile he scampered off
to Grandmother's house and ate her up
as quick as a slap.
Then he put on her nightdress and cap
and snuggled down in to bed.
A deceptive fellow.
Red Riding hood
knocked on the door and entered
with her flowers, her cake, her wine.
Grandmother looked strange,
a dark and hairy disease it seemed.
Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have,
ears, eyes, hands and then the teeth.
The better to eat you with my dear.
So the wolf gobbled Red Riding Hood down
like a gumdrop. Now he was fat.
He appeared to be in his ninth month
and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother
rode like two Jonahs up and down with
his every breath. One pigeon. One partridge.
He was fast asleep,
dreaming in his cap and gown,
wolfless.
Along came a huntsman who heard
the loud contented snores
and knew that was no grandmother.
He opened the door and said,
So it's you, old sinner.
He raised his gun to shoot him
when it occured to him that maybe
the wolf had eaten up the old lady.
So he took a knife and began cutting open
the sleeping wolf, a kind of caesarian section.
It was a carnal knife that let
Red Riding Hood out like a poppy,
quite alive from the kingdom of the belly.
And grandmother too
still waiting for cakes and wine.
The wolf, they decided, was too mean
to be simply shot so they filled his belly
with large stones and sewed him up.
He was as heavy as a cemetery
and when he woke up and tried to run off
he fell over dead. Killed by his own weight.
Many a deception ends on such a note.
The huntsman and the grandmother and Red Riding Hood
sat down by his corpse and had a meal of wine and cake.
Those two remembering
nothing naked and brutal
from that little death,
that little birth,
from their going down
and their lifting up.
Roots, mushrooms, carrots--all imagery from the poem--were added to the assembled piece. Three thrifted napkins with embroidered mushrooms were chopped up and painted to match the graphics on the original piece. Lines from the poem chopped and added to the mix. Circular lines of a target quilted all of the pieces together.
Was our heroine satisfied with the finished piece? She agreed with her husband when he tentatively asked, "Is it a placemat?" Tim Gunn would have called it a hot mess--the simple geometry of the piecing at war with the odd placement of the carrot and mushroom mix-ins; the colors an unharmonious mix; sweetness jarring with edginess. At each addition, a little voice inside the heroine suggested, You could take it all apart and start over. Again--Nah. It will all come together if I just add this, paint this, or do that, she thought, thinking of Calamity Kim's textile collages or Danny Mansmith's textile art. Alas, it did not come together. So, no, not happy.
As our heroine sits here today in front of the completed piece--nicely sewn though it is--she wonders, dear readers, what moral can be drawn from this failed creative exercise? Quit while you're ahead? Don't quit the day job? To thine own self be true? Make up your own fairy tale?
I leave it to my gentle readers to decide.
So, what to tackle first? Christmas presents--two slippers from felted sweaters to sew, for example? Embroidered Christmas ornaments from said felted sweaters?
Nah.
How about playing around with quirky, this-side-of-kitsch curtain panels with fairy tale motifs in two colorways that our fortunate heroine received in a swap from Resurrection Fern?
Perfect!
Said fabric panels showed scenes from three fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the Three Little Pigs. Intrepid heroine cut out each of the scenes to assemble into three separate pieced pillows for the kids' rooms. Simple enough, you say.
Then a little lightbulb went off over the heroine's head. What if she used a passage from each fairy tale to "Illuminate" the scene, and to fulfill a long-overdue commitment to contribute to Smoothpebble's "Illuminated Phrase" project?
Gentle readers, this may have been where things started going very, very wrong.
Our stalwart heroine headed to the computer to do some research. Turns out that the Little Red Riding Hood tale has its roots as a folk tale from France, and the original story involved a strong heroine who kicks the big bad wolf's a** herself. The first writer to put the tale in written form (in 1697) was Charles Perrault, a French courtier to Louis XIV, the Sun King. Perrault's wolf gobbled up both the grandma and poor little despoiled Hood--a warning to all young girls not to trust strange men, especially the sweet talkers.
So, with the idea of a sweet little fairy tale pillow banished from our heroine's mind with this image, she set out to make something a little edgier. Poet Anne Sexton's rewriting of the tale--as one of appetites and deceptions of all kinds--fit the bill:
Red Riding Hood
By Anne Sexton
Many are the deceivers:
The suburban matron,
proper in the supermarket,
list in hand so she won't suddenly fly,
buying her Duz and Chuck Wagon dog food,
meanwhile ascending from earth,
letting her stomach fill up with helium,
letting her arms go loose as kite tails,
getting ready to meet her lover
a mile down Apple Crest Road
in the Congregational Church parking lot.
Two seemingly respectable women
come up to an old Jenny
and show her an envelope
full of money
and promise to share the booty
if she'll give them ten thou
as an act of faith.
Her life savings are under the mattress
covered with rust stains
and counting.
They are as wrinkled as prunes
but negotiable.
The two women take the money and disappear.
Where is the moral?
Not all knives are for
stabbing the exposed belly.
Rock climbs on rock
and it only makes a seashore.
Old Jenny has lost her belief in mattresses
and now she has no wastebasket in which
to keep her youth.
The standup comic
on the "Tonight" show
who imitates the Vice President
and cracks up Johnny Carson
and delays sleep for millions
of bedfellows watching between their feet,
slits his wrist the next morning
in the Algonquin's old-fashioned bathroom,
the razor in his hand like a toothbrush,
wall as anonymous as a urinal,
the shower curtain his slack rubberman audience,
and then the slash
as simple as opening as a letter
and the warm blood breaking out like a rose
upon the bathtub with its claw and ball feet.
And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.
The heart, poor fellow,
pounding on his little tin drum
with a faint death beat,
The heart, that eyeless beetle,
running panicked through his maze,
never stopping one foot after the other
one hour after the other
until he gags on an apple
and it's all over.
And I. I too again.
I built a summer house on Cape Ann.
A simple A-frame and this too was
a deception -- nothing haunts a new house.
When I moved in with a bathing suit and tea bags
the ocean rumbled like a train backing up
and at each window secrets came in
like gas. My mother, that departed soul,
sat in my Eames chair and reproached me
for losing her keys to the old cottage.
Even in the electric kitchen there was
the smell of a journey. The ocean
was seeping through its frontiers
and laying me out on its wet rails.
The bed was stale with my childhood
and I could not move to another city
where the worthy make a new life.
Long ago
there was a strange deception:
a wolf dressed in frills,
a kind of transvestite.
But I get ahead of my story.
In the beginning
there was just little Red Riding Hood,
so called because her grandmother
made her a red cape and she was never without it.
It was her Linus blanket, besides
it was red, as red as the Swiss flag,
yes it was red, as red as chicken blood,
But more than she loved her riding hood
she loved her grandmother who lived
far from the city in the big wood.
This one day her mother gave her
a basket of wine and cake
to take to her grandmother
because she was ill.
Wine and cake?
Where's the aspirin? The penicillin?
Where's the fruit juice?
Peter Rabbit got camomile tea.
But wine and cake it was.
On her way in the big wood
Red Riding Hood met the wolf.
Good day, Mr. Wolf, she said,
thinking him no more dangerous
than a streetcar or a panhandler.
He asked where she was going
and she obligingly told him
There among the roots and trunks
with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss
he planned how to eat them both,
the grandmother an old carrot
and the child a shy budkin
in a red red hood.
He bade her to look at the bloodroot,
the small bunchberry and the dogtooth
and pick some for her grandmother.
And this she did.
Meanwhile he scampered off
to Grandmother's house and ate her up
as quick as a slap.
Then he put on her nightdress and cap
and snuggled down in to bed.
A deceptive fellow.
Red Riding hood
knocked on the door and entered
with her flowers, her cake, her wine.
Grandmother looked strange,
a dark and hairy disease it seemed.
Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have,
ears, eyes, hands and then the teeth.
The better to eat you with my dear.
So the wolf gobbled Red Riding Hood down
like a gumdrop. Now he was fat.
He appeared to be in his ninth month
and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother
rode like two Jonahs up and down with
his every breath. One pigeon. One partridge.
He was fast asleep,
dreaming in his cap and gown,
wolfless.
Along came a huntsman who heard
the loud contented snores
and knew that was no grandmother.
He opened the door and said,
So it's you, old sinner.
He raised his gun to shoot him
when it occured to him that maybe
the wolf had eaten up the old lady.
So he took a knife and began cutting open
the sleeping wolf, a kind of caesarian section.
It was a carnal knife that let
Red Riding Hood out like a poppy,
quite alive from the kingdom of the belly.
And grandmother too
still waiting for cakes and wine.
The wolf, they decided, was too mean
to be simply shot so they filled his belly
with large stones and sewed him up.
He was as heavy as a cemetery
and when he woke up and tried to run off
he fell over dead. Killed by his own weight.
Many a deception ends on such a note.
The huntsman and the grandmother and Red Riding Hood
sat down by his corpse and had a meal of wine and cake.
Those two remembering
nothing naked and brutal
from that little death,
that little birth,
from their going down
and their lifting up.
Roots, mushrooms, carrots--all imagery from the poem--were added to the assembled piece. Three thrifted napkins with embroidered mushrooms were chopped up and painted to match the graphics on the original piece. Lines from the poem chopped and added to the mix. Circular lines of a target quilted all of the pieces together.
Was our heroine satisfied with the finished piece? She agreed with her husband when he tentatively asked, "Is it a placemat?" Tim Gunn would have called it a hot mess--the simple geometry of the piecing at war with the odd placement of the carrot and mushroom mix-ins; the colors an unharmonious mix; sweetness jarring with edginess. At each addition, a little voice inside the heroine suggested, You could take it all apart and start over. Again--Nah. It will all come together if I just add this, paint this, or do that, she thought, thinking of Calamity Kim's textile collages or Danny Mansmith's textile art. Alas, it did not come together. So, no, not happy.
As our heroine sits here today in front of the completed piece--nicely sewn though it is--she wonders, dear readers, what moral can be drawn from this failed creative exercise? Quit while you're ahead? Don't quit the day job? To thine own self be true? Make up your own fairy tale?
I leave it to my gentle readers to decide.
7 comments:
Well, first I'm wondering if the heroine of this story could come over to my house and organize my creative space? I will gladly pull my rusty savings from under the matress to pay the heroine!
Secondly, I love that you picked the edgy and disturbing poem to use for your Illuminated Phrase, and I think you should shush your inner critic. There is something compelling about the disturbing words juxtaposed with the bright cheerful fabric. I certainly don't consider this a failed creative exercise so I think the moral of the tale is that you should be kinder to the heroine - after all heroines prevail in the end!
I do understand your feelings though (but disagree with your assesment), as I just completed my Scavenger Project this weekend and truly felt that most of my attempts were very junior high-ish!
I think beauty is in the eye of the beholder not the artist in this case. I love it , it is foremost not boring or carbon copyish, it is quirky with interesting angles and placement. I love the text you used, definitely food for thought. Your little embroidered and colored mushrooms add a very special handmade touch to the piece. I think you took a nice piece of vintage curtain and turned it into an original piece of art worthy of being framed and hung somewhere special. Don't ever be afraid of crafting outside the box or patterned boundaries .
The moral might be that we are our own worst critics. I think that the heroine was so immersed in her process, that it was hard to see the end-result objectively. Not only is it cohesive and has a thread (quite literally) that spirals it all together, but it's dramatic with many fascinating details that are "illuminated" with perfect "phrases". This is truly art! I would frame it and put it up in that tidy sewing room. Step away from it for a day or two. Come back with fresh eyes, and maybe you will recognize what your gentle readers see: a rich and unique collage, worthy of shushing that inner critic for good!
xo
m
I love it. It's a great success and absolutely adorable. Forget the critics, inner or outer.
i think the word "placemats" may have set you off of the wrong track.
i am confirmed in my idea that an orderly space encourages real risks.
party on, garth.
Oh if only I had found your blog sooner. I could have warned you about LRRH stories. We covered this in an anthropology class once. There is no one original LRRH but many versions of the story all over Europe. The lecturer set it as homework just for the fun of watching us all turn up defeated the next week. Gah!
I like it. I really do.
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