Tag Archives: postcards

embroidery and textiles, food, journaling + mail art, travel

It’s not over yet…

Kek Lok Si wooden fan

You didn’t really believe I was done writing about Malaysia, did you?

You did? What, and not even one long, raving, ecstatic post about all the fabulous Penang street food—the primary purpose of my visit—that I tried? Are you kidding?

I’ve only been so quiet about it because I’ve been sorting through my notes—doing  a bit of backstory research, tracking down the origins of some of the dishes, the recipes for others—but I am almost ready to publish a monster post or two about my gustatory pilgrimage to Pulau Pinang. In the meantime, these are a couple more postcards I stitched during the trip…

Kuala Lumpur

Teh Tarik

Now that I’m home again, my wild foodie excesses have been reined in; I am back on my Low GI diet of soaked rolled oats, cracked wheat, simple salads, and temperate-climate fruit (tropical fruits being rich in high GI sugars). Sigh. It’s better for me, and I have to confess that I’m glad I don’t live where the food is exciting…or I’d have a hard time keeping the diabetes that’s been programmed into my genes, away.

Darwin‘s everyday food scene is no temptation: the blandness, the priggishness, the uninspired phantom of WASP cooking still haunts its flavours and methods (around these parts, ‘deep-fried’ is a flavour, and covering things in breadcrumbs is a favorite method.) I wander around the malls, oppressed by slab-like, drowned things  called uninspired names like “Veggie Bake” or “Meat Pie”. Most ‘ethnic’ cuisines are represented, of course…more often than not, though, by Chinese cooks. And these places seem to have altered the flavours to suit the Aussie palate (i.e. no heat, no subtle perfumes of herbs or spices, lots of salt and LOTS of sugar.)

Don’t get me wrong, I like living here, and there’s much more to life than food. It just isn’t (nor will it ever be) a destination for food lovers. Because cuisine is such an important part of cultural identity, not having the one can easily make the place feel like it hasn’t got the other, either. Some days it can seem more tragic than on others. :)

Darwin’s a great place for crocodiles, for camping and wilderness adventures, for going pig hunting in a pickup truck, with a cooler full of beer, some ugly murderous dogs in the back, and some ugly murderous friend in the passenger’s seat. I met a Canadian who said she came to Darwin because she wanted to “visit the tropics, without having to visit the Third World.” Well, there you go, a catchy line for our tourism campaign, if we run out of crocs and want to attract the sort of people who travel around the world in search of the same things they left back home: friendly white faces, McDonald’s, and the English language.

Is it any wonder that I escape into my memories of Malaysian food, and threaten to write long, wistful posts about them? I miss Asia…the buzzing, swelling, engulfing, “if-you-are-here-then-you-are-part-of-it” liveliness of its streets. The urgency and passion with which people celebrate and pursue their cultural signposts. The way people are pushed up against one another, both physically and emotionally…brushing barriers aside, and thinning the psychological walls between individuals.

Surprisingly, it makes for higher public levels of courtesy, tolerance and equanimity than you’d find in the neat and less crowded streets of Darwin. Strangers don’t abuse each other over brief encroachments upon personal space, or snap at each other over small mistakes. An outburst of self-righteous rage or an adult tantrum in public is a rare sight, and the one who loses his cool loses his status in everyone’s eyes (even if he does get what he wants in the end.)

Being impassive and watchful is probably what earned Asians (the Chinese in particular) the label ‘inscrutable’. All it means is that they’ve managed to move past the emotional intelligence of five-year-olds, and they won’t waste time or demean themselves by slobbering insincere friendliness over a perfect stranger…which, until they get to know you, is what you are.

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embroidery and textiles, Inspirations, journaling + mail art, life, stuff i've made, travel

A Streetcar Named Desir*

treehouse

Took this the day before I had a decent map of Georgetown, so I don’t even know where this building is—it was a Chinese school. I was just walking along (totally lost, I admit it) when this house loomed up, standing in a wide open lot. Banyan trees have grown up through the house, and there are even a few smaller trees starting up on the roof. It looked amazing. Penang is absolutely chock-full of grand 18th and 19th century buildings like this, one after the other, up and down the streets…many of them restored to their original dignity. No wonder the whole town was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.

A Streetcar Named Desir*

I picked up a few romantic black and white postcards of old Penang at a lovely bookshop along Lebuh Chulia. Each evening I sit and stitch one of them. It’s been a nice way to make the mass-produced postcards my own. Thank you, Shaun Kardinal, for the inspiration!

This one’s for Kris, of an old fashioned trishaw in a narrow lorong (lane). I’ve written “A Streetcar Named Desir” on the back, and that’s not a typo. Desir is Bahasa Melayu for “the sound of leaves being blown by the wind.”

journal pages

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amazing people, Inspirations, uber embroiderers

über embroiderers : : Shaun Kardinal

Shaun Kardinal / Many Moons, hand-embroidered catalog pages

I’m trying to keep up a sort of regular ‘feature’ on über embroiderers on The Smallest Forest: These are the big kids, the crème de la crème, the leet of needle and thread…that runts like me long to play with, but will never even exist in the same universe with…

Not necessarily technical virtuosos or professional embroiderers, but artists who do strange, new and wonderfully unusual things with embroidery…creativity, concept, media, message. Just…different, somehow.

✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂

Getting a kick out of Shaun Kardinal’s embroidered + collaged pieces…the clean, geometrical lines of his shapes and stitching contrast strikingly against the vintage postcards in muted colors of textbook landscapes and manmade structures in washed-out stillness.

Something about the juxtaposition makes me think of the planet viewed through alien eyes, or what the watercolours by alien tourists would look like. Vaguely familiar, and yet…disturbing. Inhuman, somehow. A mesh or grid hanging hugely over the scene like a web of laserlight coordinates for landing UFOs. Must be all that B-grade sci-fi in my youth…

But they’re compelling and delightful, anyway! The small size of postcards must make these works feel very precious.

The recent stitching-on-paper trend has been given a refreshingly (do I dare to say this?) masculine feel in Shaun’s pieces…those regular, precise, symmetrical, minimalist lines are almost industrial, no? I like it. I like his hard-edged, novel approach to working with needle and thread.

✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂ – – – ✂

Just as an aside, I’m so intrigued by this whole working with paper thing…I’ve a hundred ideas for it, myself, and nothing would be easier to do, but at the moment they are still heavily influenced by what others have done. So I am leaving them to sit on their own for a while, I want to see whether something grows organically from it all that will contribute to the conversation, not just mimick someone else.
Shaun Kardinal / Embroidery

via Shaun Kardinal

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embroidery and textiles

The day ends in “Fiery Frustration”

matchbox art

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

—Kurt Vonnegut

fiery frustration: a fabric postcard

Just about ready to hurl my Singer overlocker into the harbor. Spent most of yesterday trying to figure out what was wrong with it…it’s been in storage for 2 years, and pretty much brand new, I hardly used it when I bought it. Now this big fat curtain job has come along, and I desperately need to overlock the pieces because it’s such heavy fabric that hemming would increase the bulk ridiculously.

I opened it up, cleaned and greased all the parts, threaded it…started the generator (bit tricky, you wrap a cable around the flywheel and pull as hard as you can)…tried it, no go…re-threaded it…found that the upper looper piston had seized…un-seized it…threaded it again…started the generator, tried it…not making chain stitches…re-threaded it…cleaned it again…finally got it all spinning and pumping…started the generator…then that accursed, un-seized upper looper swings up just as nice as you please, and snaps both needles into several small pieces and throws the needle plate out of whack.

It was night by this time. I was fuming and near to tears. A whole day gone, and nothing working. Desperate to get something right, I fired up the generator one last time, hauled out my regular sewing machine, and in a swirl of fabric scraps, paper bits and some ribbon, I made a long-overdue fabric postcard for Sharon McGrath. Sharon sent me a beautiful fabric postcard last May, and it was high time I made her one in reply.

I’ve been putting off making this postcard for a month, waiting for that perfect concord of peace, cheer, and stitchiness to strike me…and here all it took was the pent-up murderous energy, some rage against a machine, and the mule’s obstinacy to do something creative before the day was out.

It’s called “Fiery Frustration” and it was glee to sew. It improved my mood compeletely…I loved the colors, the random patches of fabric I tore and stitched down. I loved that I could go to my To Do list that evening and ‘X’ off an item that had been nagging at my conscience for a while.

Comin’ at ya, Shazz! Ahhh….X marks the spot.

fiery frustration: a fabric postcard

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bookbinding, paints and pens, stuff i've made

Postcards from The Archipelago

Deep sea was the wandering,
deep brass the dripping loot,
deep crimson the bloodspill,
lyrics begotten on lush lips
and many a hawser they saw—
rotting rope and rusting chain
and anchors…many lost anchors.

—Carl Sandburg

Finished painting the first of that small batch of journal cases (covers) I made recently. It’s called Postcards from The Archipelago, and this is the second time I’ve painted these designs on a cover; the first time was for a little journal that I gave to my Belovéd.

It’s a very special little pair of paintings I’ve put on here, full of significance, wonderful memories, and love, love, love…so now I don’t want to sell it! I won’t be in a  hurry to sell it, anyway…it must go to someone who really resonates with it…someone who has lived close to the sea, or has lain in the dark at night listening to the ‘bulge and nuzzle’ of the waves, has loved a pirate, has “sailed away for a year and a day”…or someone who has pulled up his/her anchors (or is about to) and is open to the adventure that life can become when you don’t know where you’re going, only that you’ve got to go…

*Is she serious?* Okay, I can hardly insist on these conditions…(can’t you just see me, though, interviewing prospective buyers? *crazy laugh*) I guess all I am trying to say is:     I love this one so much and I hope someone out there will love it, too. You’ll find it in my Etsy and Madeit shops very soon.

The story behind the covers…

There’s a golden compass on the spine, surrounded by curling tendrils of seaweed. The cover paintings both have landscape formats (to look like postcards), so that either side can be the ‘front’ of this journal (and I’ve put ‘headbands’ on both ends of the book, so you can decide which is front for you).

On one cover is my version of an old woodblock print showing a sea monster attacking a ship. I love the old accounts of monsters and terrors of the deep, love the fact that they were made in all seriousness, to illustrate real accounts made by sailors and travelers. When I met Kris he was in the process of compiling an old-fashioned bestiary of fantastic creatures from all over the world. He had stacks of research, and had painstakingly done a painting for every creature on his list. I loved that he would devote so much of his time and energy doing something purely personal, entirely for his own pleasure and of no immediate use to anyone else at all.

Beside the sea monster vignette is a tiny map of the Bacuit Archipelago, which is where Kris and I met, and where we lived in a fisherman’s hut on the beach for many years. That little boat with the Chinese junk rig is Kehaar, Kris’ sailboat. On the bit of land to the right, just under the name El Nido, hic sunt leonis (here there be lions) marks the spot where we lived, with our two fat cats (lions!) ruling that part of the jungle.

On the other cover are fragments of Carl Sandburg’s poem, and a painting of Kehaar on the sea at night. The little portholes glow with the light of candles inside, a fingerail-paring of moon hangs overhead, and the sky is salted with stars.

When Kris decided that he wanted to return to Australia after 13 years being away, we made the trip by sailboat. It took us five weeks to reach East Timor, and another 10 days from Timor to Darwin, Australia. Kris has a lot of respect for the men who crossed the world’s oceans in the days before the engine was invented, and he likes that kind of old-fashioned self-reliance. Hence, Kehaar is just a sailboat. There is no engine on board. There is no GPS, radio, EPIRB, toilet, lights or electricity on board, either, for that matter.

It was Real Sailing: perfectly silent, isolated, and oftentimes, slow. Time opened like origami…we had time…plenty of time. There was no need to hurry…what for? Three days without wind meant we sat on deck in patches of shade, talking or doing some small, intricate chore, just trying to stay busy until the wind picked up again. Kris wrote for his book or drew monsters and patterns in the borders of his sailing charts; I sat embroidering, or reading. We spent hours staring at the horizon, sometimes. At night, when it was my turn to steer, I had conversations with myself, sang every song I knew—a lot of Basia, isn’t that daggy?—wished on shooting stars (there were hundreds) and tried to learn the major constellations. Herds of whales would surface around us and blast smelly water into the air; pods of dolphins raced with us when we were going fast; sea birds—boobies, mainly—hung around for days, resting en route to god-knows-where. We saw turtles the size of picnic tables (before they saw us…another advantage to sailing without an engine!) and lots of sea snakes. Sharks trailed behind us in some seas. One night while I was steering in a strong wind, something big (the size of our boat) swam beside us for half an hour (the sea is pitch dark, but when the tiny bits of plankton are disturbed, they emit a bright glow or phosphoresence that will reveal the outline of larger fish, dolphins, anything moving fast enough to alarm the little guys) and it scared me a bit!

It was a big adventure, and a big move for me, but Kris had given (a somewhat trying) life in the Third World a go, for my sake, so I thought it was only fair that I spend some time in his country. It was difficult at first, took me a year to find my own place in the scheme of things. But I’ve fallen in love with Oz, and Darwin in particular, and there are no plans of sailing away again for a long while!

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