Silver and Silk

And now for something totally different... Silver and Silk is the name of a DVD documentary that Kathy and Bart lent me recently (the link is to the book, I can't find the DVD online). The documentary is about the marvelous textiles, embroidery, and silver jewelry crafted by the people of the Guizhou Province of China. Phila McDaniel, a friend of Kathy's, is the woman who went to Guizhou 27 times starting in 1984 to study the 17 different nationalities of people living there and brought back to this country examples of their wonderful artwork which were on display in an exhibit at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego until October 1st. But it is not to late to see examples from the exhibit as they are now part of the permanent Chinese collection at the museum.

I wish I could show you pictures from the documentary because the fiber artwork is stunning. The few pictures that the Mingei have put up on the web do not do justice to them. Incredibly, the amazing gowns, collars, skirts, bibs, and headpieces are crafted for the ordinary citizen to wear and not just for royalty. Each baby is given a cap at birth and at age one, they are given a new hat. When they enter school, they get a scholar's cap. Baby carriers display the best needlework of the women.

They do not marry within their own village, so festivals are held between villages so that the young people may meet. It is at these festivals that the fantastic silver headdresses are worn by the girls (usually made by their fathers) along with their own hand crafted skirts, etc. In one clan, the Small-flower Miao, girls embroider collars to give the boys they wish to marry. A boy may get several collars but he will return all but the one from the girl of his choice. A girl will start at age 7 to embroider and create her wedding dress. She will marry 7 years later. Her excellence in needlecraft is a sign of her diligence, creativity, and even beauty.

The names of the various clans will sometimes describe the particular type of garment that clan specializes in as in the Long-skirt Miao, and the Short-skirt Miao. The Folded-silk Miao fold silk into triangles to appliqué them on to costumes. The 100-bird Miao drop silk worms onto a board and let them crawl in all directions to make silk felt. Long Horn Miao men wear horns on their heads all day every day. The women specialize in pleated skirts and will wear several layers of skirts. The more pleats, the better, and the more skirts, the better. There are also the Small-flower Miao mentioned above and the Moon Mountain Miao.

Since they have no written language, the people tell stories with their needlework. Dragons are very popular in their designs. Paper cuts are used as templates. The pattern is drawn on paper and embroidered over. The Dong nationality makes Brown Shiny Cloth using indigo dyed silk that is rubbed with a hide soaked in pig's blood which makes the fabric tough (and brown). It is then polished with egg whites.

Guizhou, China was only accessible by a footpath until the 1980s and the recent industrialization of China has not changed the way of life for these people very much—yet. You can see more photos of their artwork at this site. Photos of the people of Guizhou and nearby provinces at work on their textiles are shown here.

Fog, Smoke, and Comets

This is the scene that greeted me yesterday morning when I went out to get the newspaper. When hot land meets cold water, you get fog, and the land has been very hot. The afternoon before the scene looked like the photo below, at noon! That's the noonday sun trying to break through the smoke from the fires that have ringed the Los Angeles basin. Needless to say we have not been going outdoors very much.

Today's L.A. Times has an article about the Santiago fire in Orange County which is the one that has caused most of the smoke for us. The fire is threatening a canyon called Silverado Canyon in which I have a special interest. I have a friend who lives there, another independent woman, trying to have her cake and eat it, too. The canyon is somewhat remote and rural, yet it is within driving distance of all the Southern California civilized amenities like concert halls, museums, and shopping centers. I toyed briefly with the idea of buying a home there myself after my husband died. It helped to ease my grief to think about starting a new life doing what I have always wanted to do, i.e., have my own private nature reserve in a remote area where I would spend my days feeding the birds and playing my violin. But after making a visit to the canyon, I changed my mind. It was a fire waiting to happen. Very dry woods on the slopes of a very narrow canyon with only one road in and out. The road stops abruptly at the top of the canyon and you have to u-turn to drive back out. Uh-oh thought I.

The current residents have been evacuated once and were allowed to return to their homes only to be told to evacuate again. What makes this all so much more tragic is that the Santiago fire is believed to be the result of arson. Unfathomable!

This morning things are looking more normal here. The fog is not so thick but the skies are overcast. There was even blue sky showing straight overhead yesterday afternoon. I hope the skies clear tonight because there is a new comet to see—Holmes 17P. It was a faint 18th magnitude comet in the constellation Perseus a few days ago that has suddenly brightened to almost magnitude 2 which makes it visible with the naked eye. I was able to see it last night with my binoculars even though the skies were cloudy. To see this new celestial wonder, go out at about 10 or 11 pm and look up into the northeast. The moon is full right now but the comet is so bright that it doesn't interfere. Look to the left of the moon and straight up from Capella (a very bright star). Last night the comet looked like a big fuzzy ball with no tail.

P.S. Yesterday's junk mail included a chance to win a free cremation! Now that's poor timing.

Smoke and Ashes

It was eerily quiet here this afternoon. Not a single car went down my street after I arrived home from a morning children's concert. There was no breeze where 90% of the time we have ocean breezes in the afternoon. It was hot—95 degrees—and the air was full of smoke and ash.

I thought the mail lady was not going to come. I would not have blamed her for staying home, but she finally arrived around 4:30 pm. You know the expression, "Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor dark of night... " I wonder if anyone ever mentioned smoke and ashes to her. There was one bill and lots of junk mail in my delivery, so she could have stayed home as far as I am concerned.

My student cancelled. I don't blame her mother either for not wanting to bring her children out in this stuff. Usually, she waits in the car with her younger child while her daughter has her lesson. That was not an option today.

Let's hope the wind changes soon.

Fires

For any family and friends who may be wondering how we are doing here in LA during these firestorms, we are fine. I am not in any danger and neither is my daughter. There is a lot of smoke and ash everywhere so we have all been advised to stay indoors and not do any heavy work outdoors. And it is also very hot. Hopefully, it will start to cool off tomorrow and the wind will shift. Those rains we had recently were not enough to ward off the inevitable.

Here is a link to CNN that shows a map of where the fires are. You can also go over to Grace's site and check out the wealth of information she has there on the fires.

If you live in Southern California, and are not in danger of the fires (and don't own an outdoor cat), I would urge you to put out some water for the birds. They are in full migration right now and the drought, not to mention the fires, has got to be very hard on them. If you don't have a bird bath, just a shallow bowl will do. You can hear dozens of warblers every morning voraciously combing the trees and bushes for bugs. They make a very high-pitched zeet zeet sound. They need to fill up on both water and food before continuing their journey.

Zonotrichia leucophrys Returns!

I caught a shadowy figure skulking across the lawn in my backyard this morning just before sunrise. I grabbed my binoculars which are always out on the kitchen counter, but he was too fast for me. Later, as I was eating breakfast I heard a very strange sound. My early morning visitor was trying to get in the window!

But this time I caught him! It was a White-crowned Sparrow. The sparrows have returned! A week late, but that's OK. I hope his journey wasn't too arduous. I will have to clean the feeder again and put out fresh seeds, throwing a few on the lawn underneath the feeder for ground feeders like him to hunt for.

Futility

It rained again yesterday morning. Yes, this is getting monotonous, I know. This storm took my LA Times delivery man by surprise. There was no plastic bag to protect the paper and it was soaking wet when I went out to pick it up. I called the Times 800 number to request a new paper be delivered. An hour later I got a call from the delivery man himself saying that they had received over 200 calls and he had no more papers to replace the damaged ones. So he said my account would be credited.

Hmmpf! He knew it was raining when he threw the paper on my driveway from his speeding truck. With a little extra effort, he could have thrown it up under my porch roof where it would have stayed dry. But no... He preferred to let the customers complain and the Times take the loss. What a waste! A waste of all those trees and ink, too.

It reminded me of when I was 10 and my older brother had a newspaper route. It was a large route, although not 200 customers. So large that he needed help from me and later my younger brother to deliver the papers every evening. We rode our bicycles (in winter, in the dark) with the papers hanging in a bag from the handlebars. On Fridays, we had to ring every doorbell and wait for the customer to give us the $0.35 for the weekly subscription. If we were lucky, the customer would give us $0.50 and let us keep the change. We lived in an area of tenement housing which meant parking the bike and running up one or two flights of stairs at every house. We got lots of exercise. And our customers got great service—no wet papers.

Such a thing would not be allowed in today's world. It's not safe for our kids to be out riding their bikes after dark and going door to door. It's too bad because our kids not only lose a chance to make some money, they lose their freedom to roam and explore their world. A great learning experience.

Iridium Flare

I just saw an Iridium flare this morning when I went out to pick up the newspaper. The first time I heard the guys at the astronomy club mention seeing Iridium flares, I had no idea what they were talking about. What phenomenon of nature was that? It turns out it is not a natural phenomenon, but a man-made one. The Iridium satellites are small communication satellites orbiting the Earth with antennas that can give off a spectacular flare when angled to the sun just right. (Whether you can call these bursts of bright light a glint, a flash, or a flare is explained here.) This one occurred at 6:23:29 am PDT as the sun was rising. So it was not exactly daylight, but the sky was very bright. Venus and Saturn were visible in the east and Sirius was holding forth in the south-southeast.

There is a web page, called Heavens Above, which has tons of information about astronomy and will predict for you when a flare is going to occur at your location. This flare (my judgement) was extremely bright—magnitude -6. It lasted for several seconds and moved upward and spread outward briefly, then vanished. The particular satellite was the Iridium 25 which was launched from Vandenburg AFB in 1997. Heavens Above will even tell you which antenna caused the flare. In this case it was the left antenna. Amazing!