Chicken Romance

Chicken Romance
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

There's a crappy cell phone photo of part of the flour-sack towel set that I like to call Chicken Romance. (That's in its raw, barely finished state. You can see the blue marks on there and everything.) I finished that bad boy up today while I was watching Sense and Sensibility. (Talk about your cornball movie. I love me some Ang Lee directed films, but when you mix Ang Lee with Jane Austin, it is straight up corn-eee.)

So, yeah. That's what I did today mostly, watch corny movies and embroider flour sack towels. Today I did the pair of chickens (two different designs on two towels) and one of a gnome riding a snail. I drew out a pattern for another gnome in a little patch of toadstools and a pattern for a couple of pastry fairies (that is, fairies perched on various pastries).

Dave and I decided that we were going handmade this Christmas. His contribution to each gift is pottery. My contribution is a pair of embroidered flour-sack towels. I have seven pairs done so far (santos, calaveras, kittens, matroyshka dolls, girls with monsters, the chickens, and...I'm forgetting one...I gave Ellen the dogs for her birthday...oh, right! The piggies!)

All I need is a pair of duckies for my brother and then I'm all set!

Read!

In the midst of all that stitching and corny-movie watching, I finished Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson. Bardach was a physician who at the time the book was published (1999) was living in the US, but he was earlier a Polish citizen who became a prisoner in a gulag in the 1930's. It wasn't just any gulag, either, it was one of the gold-mining gulag in Kolyma, the likes of which have been compared to concentration camps like Auschwitz. Despite the incredibly torturous events in the book, it is not a difficult book to read in part because Bardach never loses hope that things will turn out okay for him. That kind of hope in the face of that kind of adversity is almost absurd, but there is no arguing with the success of that absurd hopefulness, is there?

I decided to follow the gulag reading up with Peter Pan. It too is not a difficult read obviously, except that it is so sacharinely sweet that three of my teeth rotted in the first ten pages alone. I don't know if I can afford any more dentists visits, so I've set it aside for the time being.