Lichen, Moss, and Tea Leaves

Dear readers,

First, I need your help.  The die is cast here.  My recent visit to a specialist has revealed I am asthmatic - I had strongly suspect this since my bronchitis in October - and that consequently it would be unwise to replace our dear Sakura with another cat.  There have been tears from younger members of the family but I believe good must come from this disappointment. My instinct is veering strongly towards owning a dog and my doctor has agreed to this possibility.  So please, any advice from you canine lovers would be simply wonderful.  Which breed do you love?  I have a soft spot for King Charles Spaniel because I know they are gentle with children but my husband Mickaël needs a little convincing!

Second, I received a truly inspirational gift while I was away on holiday. Wonderful Annie's amazing giveaway present arrived against the odds just before Christmas and was smuggled in our present stash and transported to our winter destination.   I should add that I knew nothing about the aforementionned arrival and smuggling so when I ripped open the Knitsofacto parcel on Christmas Day I was heard making a number of highpitched noises denoting both astonishment and pleasure.  Yes indeed.  These days the book, Vintage Flowers by Vic Brotherson, has not left the sofa and I marvel at it each and every day.  I have decided to use it as a regular inspiration prop here in this space of mine as I would very much like to share its colour celebration with you all.  So relish the few pictures below and rest assured there will be more to follow soon with a creative theme woven in. Thank you so much Annie for filling my winter with colour. 

Now all those who know Knitsofacto will agree it is an inspiring blog indeed.  When Annie decided to commit to a Ravelry project to knit twelve shawls in 2012 it got me thinking.  I do not have Annie's knitting experience but I felt all fired up.  The result?  I am now part of the 12 Sweaters in 2012 on Ravelry.  If any of you would like to join I would be thrilled to see you there! Let me know, ok?

Last but not least, I would like to thank Louise from Tea At Weasel's 

for generously offering Millefeuilles a Liebster Blog Award.  It has really touched me and I will be mulling over who I should be passing this special award on to.  

Our Holidays

I think some of you will be disappointed to learn we did not opt for the fairytale roulotte in the snow scene.  I am so sorry Melissa!  Will you forgive me?  We have merely postponed the dream to more clement springtime. Yippee!  This family of ours is becoming more earnest about owning our own gipsy caravan when we will finally have a house of our own; a project I hope to share with you on this blog in the future.

We spent a week in Le Cantal, near Salers, a dramatic, austere region which is both stunningly beautiful and isolated.  Most villages are filled with houses with firmly closed shutters.  Many of these are family homes which are now seldom visited for this region does not boast a high employment rate.  The thing which struck me the most - and I hope I have conveyed this in the pictures below - is the perfect harmony between the natural landscape and the local architecture.

Take a look:

Browns, greys, and greens were the stars of the show in the valley...

with a generous sprinkling of snow on the mountain.

This region is a walker's paradise regardless of the season.

One thing I learned to do here was to look at vegetation in detail particularly growing on the stone walls.

  I LOVE the varied colours of lichen and moss and could quite happily knit in these shades for a long, long time.

According to Katherine Swift in a January extract of The Morville Year, "lichens are extremely sensitive indictators of environmental pollution: a rich bloom of lichen means clean air.  They also grow infinitesimally slowly - half a millimetre a year is fast - so lichen growth is also an inicator of age.  Many lichens will be as old as the tombstones and walls on which they live".

The trees, knotted and gnarled and somewhat reminiscent of Arthur Rackham's fairytale illustrations, were also coated with lichen and moss.

Yes indeed, Mrs Swift; judging from the lichens I saw the air in Le Cantal is very pure indeed.

Speaking of walls, moss, and browns ...

Here is my eldest daughter, Héloïse wearing her Tea Leaves for the very first time.

She's a wonderful girl...

and willing to pander to our strange whims.

Thank you Héloïse!

This Tea Leaves will be the first cardigan to join the 12 Sweater in 2012 over on Ravelry!  I'll be putting up the details on my profile Ornamentation.

Thank you so much for bearing with me in this green, brown, grey, and white post.

I wish you a beautiful week.

Stephanie

ps There is a giveaway being planned here so watch this space.

Hoffmann And A Good Yarn

Dearest readers,

I promise to share with you the colours and natural beauty of our winter holiday very soon but today I feel compelled to link up with Ginny's Yarn Along over at Small Things. In this space she shares her love of knitting and reading and invites others to reveal which books and patterns are tickling their current fancy.

My knitting needs little introduction:

I hope to join the tail end of the current 1705 Madelinetosh Tea Leaves Cardigans over at Ravelry by the end of this week. I am nothing if not original! This pattern was carefully chosen with my eldest daughter Héloïse for her post Christmas gift and is - please listen out for the shrill blast of trumpets - my first adult-sized pullover project to date after two years of knitting.  Héloïse was unshakable in her choice of Malabrigo Worsted despite my various attempts at seducing her to choose Madelinetosh.  Her choice of colour - Black Forest - was perfect for our holiday destination.... More on that soon.

My book, Hoffmann's Nutcracker and Mouse King, was chosen initially for its obvious Christmas season overtones.  I wanted to get away from the sugary simplicity of the ballet's libretto (which I love really) and turn to the original fairy tale with its darker, more violent atmosphere. Aside from being a wonderful piece of escapism for these long wintery nights its central message has struck a chord with me and is, I believe, important to all of us.

In his introduction to this tale Jack Zipes explains that E.T.A. Hoffmann was never able to discard his middle-class social conditioning to become a free-spirited artist.  When he wrote Nutcracker and Mouse King in 1816 Hoffmann had observed how the children of bourgeois families were overly regulated.  Zipes writes "they were drilled to behave according to moral and ethical principles that were to curb their imagination".  The question that Hoffmann asks in Nutcracker and Mouse King is how to free the children's imaginations so that they may fulfill their desires.  It is no coincidence that the parents of the two children, Marie and Fritz, bear the surname Stahlbaum, or "Steel Tree".  They are indeed inflexible and made nervous by the threatening figure of the godfather Drosselmeier with his creative mind and eerie stories.

 If Marie's family believes she talks nonsense Drosselmeier is struck by the manner in which she marries her visions and dreams with the everyday world which surrounds her.  As the tale draws to an end Hoffmann wrote " Marie suposedly is still queen of a land where you can see sparkling Christmas Forests everywhere as well as translucent Marzipan Castles -- in short, the most splendid and most wondrous things, if you only have the right eyes to see them with." (My italics.)

And so I dedicate this post to my seven-year old Tristan whose creative energy is a force to be reckoned with (REALLY) although his baroque guitar playing and detailed explanations concerning the composition of the pieces he plays help ease my knotted neck muscles at the end of a day.

I shall leave you with Hoffmann's following description of the Marzipan Castle:

"A rose red brightly shimmering castle with a hundred airy turrets... the dark, burning colors simply dazzled as they heightened the rosy tint against the white ground.  The vast dome of the central building as well as the pyramid-shaped roofs of the turrets were strewn with a thousand gold and silver twinkling stars."

And Tristan's own version of this enchanted palace which is big enough to cover our entire dining table:

I wish you all a peaceful and imaginative new year.  I know I will be endeavouring in 2012 to see the everyday world with Marie's imaginative eyes... most of the time ;-)

I'll return soon.

A bientôt,

from Tristan and Stephanie