It’s so nice to start with flowers!

Life has been full of complications lately. It turns out that we are having to move. We found a tiny townhouse just two blocks away from “the Studio”. It will be a major change of lifestyle for us. The townhouse is as new and nice as the current facilities are funky. We do live in a great neighborhood.

Lets go back to Switzerland!

On the last day that I had for wandering around Zurich I discovered an unknown treasure. I went to see an exhibit at the Archeological Museum and made a small detour along the way to the Zoological Museum (the Stationary Zoo). The displays were modern and very well done. The animals were stuffed. No matter how modern the museum is there is something nostalgic about these creatures and artfully arranged displays.

See what I mean?

It does make it easier to study a subject if it sits still. There was a group of school kids drawing the fish downstairs. My batteries gave out before I could get pictures down there.

They had bones too.

Even a cute kitty (not domestic). I’m sure I was looking at some very fine examples of the art of taxidermy. After all, it is pretty much sculpture. I hope these creatures aren’t grossing you out…

This place was one photo-op after another!

And another! This is beginning to seem like showing too many old home movies.

This couple seems to be quite content.

We love bat images for Halloween. This is one really looks like. I would have enjoyed just looking at a collection of bats. They are so odd.

Now here’s a face only his mother could love!

Another motherly-love mug…

I actually do adore bugs (not flying in my face). Beetles are among the most fantastic.

Here’s a nice display. Bunn-ny…

They have a sense of humor too! The “Jackalope” was part of a Wunderkammer (Wonder Cabinet) display.

I am really enjoying sharing these pictures with you! And now I have to get back to work…

PS – The Paper News issue 6 has been posted on the website. I haven’t sent out a notice yet because if you click on a link and then click back to return to the newsletter, it takes you back to the beginning of the newsletter. I hate that! The problem is solved by downloading the file and opening it in Adobe Reader or Acrobat. When you click on a link it opens a new window for each link. Very handy.

I hope everyone is up to something creative!

No, we didn’t eat these flowers.

I just needed something vertical to get started. This is a detail from a huge container of flowers that was in the center square of our village in Switzerland.

One of the things that I enjoyed while being away was having time to do some serious cooking. My labor intensive specialty is my favorite Italian pastry called sfogliatelle. This is something no one would make at home. No one in their right mind, anyway. Just the sort of thing I love to tackle! I was determined to make some sfogliatelle to take to Easter dinner with our friends. First I had to find a pasta machine. Nobody had one that I could borrow, so I went out and bought one. This is what the pastry looks like.

They are served with powdered sugar on top. It’s a crispy pastry with a pretty firm filling. For years I had wondered how these pastries were made. I could see that they were a spiral of many layers of very thin dough, but did it require a special machine?

I found the recipe several years ago. First you make a plain, firm pasta dough. Then you roll it out in the pasta machine through all the thicknesses to the finest which should be paper thin. It is really the same stuff as streudel or phyllo dough, but it needs to be in a very long strip. I make it in six pieces each one about 6 ft long. It gets covered with a butter and lard mixture and rolled up into a big cylinder. The dining table was just barely long enough!

After it is all rolled up and chilled it is cut into crosswise slices. These are flattened out a bit to get the spiral action going.

Then the disk is formed into a cone.

The filling is piped into the cone. It is mostly semolina (like Cream of Wheat) with regular ricotta, sheep ricotta that is salty, and the most important ingredient, fresh home made candied orange peel. The orange peel is straightforward to make, but it does require boiling the peel in a fresh change of water 8 (yes, eight) times. There is no substitute for this stuff. Even fruitcakes would be better with fresh candied peel! When I want to be in caloric denial I tell myself that the pastry is pretty much a simple breakfast of hot cereal and corn flakes. This is what they look like filled and ready to put into the oven.

They should come out golden and very crispy with a filling that isn’t too sweet. I’m getting hungry!!

I mentioned to my friends that making pasta is really easy, and since I had the machine, Carolina wanted to see how it is done. The machine I bought has a spaghetti attachment, and thus, the big spaghetti feed was born. We had the table maxed out with eight hungry and rowdy diners. Bruce and Carolina and I were running fast to roll out and cook a mountain of pasta. Unfortunately we were so busy that I didn’t think to take pictures. Now I wish I had some so that I could share the feast with you!

So much pasta needed a lot of tomato sauce, so I went to the market a week before and got a whole bunch of tomatoes. I let them ripen on the window ledge in the kitchen.

I make a simple fresh tomato sauce:

Sauté some onion, garlic and grated carrot in olive oil. Add the tomatoes cut into quarters. Season with salt and pepper. Cover and cook until the skins are loose, then pick them out with chopsticks. You can peel the tomatoes beforehand, but I’m too lazy. Besides fishing for skins is kinda fun. Cook until you like the thickness. You can add some basil near the end of the cooking. I envy anyone who has garden tomatoes to make sauce with!

Here’s some spaghetti before cooking. I just “sprinkle” it onto a towel or plate to rest a bit before cooking.

Of course, we had sfogliatelle for desert!!!

I’m going to stop here and eat my breakfast. This is making me too hungry!

Best wishes to all.

Going to Switzerland meant having some time to do some of the projects I had been wanting to finish or get to. I had enough projects with me to last at least 9 months!

I love this design. It is a 17th century altar cloth of netted lace, and very charming in a naive and primitive way. It looks like an old sampler to me. I had started graphing it out a couple of years ago and couldn’t get a large enough block of time to concentrate on it. If the lace is nice and straight and flat in the picture it can be scanned on the computer and used as a template. But if it is a crooked, wiggly and not lying flat, as this one was, it has to be graphed by hand. The picture had too much contrast to be able to distinguish individual filled squares where it is white, so the number of squares had to be deduced by graphing the background of empty squares. Yes, it does take a certain level of insanity to even contemplate this tedium! (But I love it.)

Can you see the little empty squares? This is what the graphing looked like when it was well underway. Square by square, page after page…

I was able to make a test of the design, and it turned out quite well. I will eventually make some templates of sections of the design. The whole design measures about 22″square.

The imagery in this piece intrigues me. The theme is clearly the Virgin Mary. The lower part depicts the Annunciation and the Nativity. There are lots of angels and birds. The Sun, the Moon and another face appear along the top. The other face is repeated three times – any idea what it is? The urns are a bit strange too. But the image that I find most unusual is the central figure. It looks like a goddess figure from Crete, with flames attached. Mother Earth? Queen of the Heavens? If you know what it might be send me a note!

An interesting feature of the design is the four different corners (Evangelists?), and the wide border run almost randomly in between them. There is a lot of symmetry and asymmetry mixed together, which adds to its charm. The way the border is run made me think about the many ways one can address a border or frame. I’m in the process of writing an article for The Paper News on this topic. Stay tuned.

I also took along another design (early 20th century) that is fabulous. The lace is very loose and rounded making it difficult to determine the pattern. The technique is Tulle Work which is less modular than the Lacis design above. I had to do a lot of guessing! I’m still working on this one. The design is just plain fabulous.

This stuff just knocks me out.

I also devoted some time to purely personal projects. The crocheted lace doily under the African violet was already in progress before we left. It turned out very nicely. The pattern is from a Japanese book. The plant was so pretty I wanted to bring it back to the States.

Ah, doilies… I don’t know what to do with them, but they are fun to crochet and knit. I am especially fond of the knitted lace doilies. The second crocheted doily was given away before I thought to photograph it. I also made two knitted ones. This is a picture of the one I kept. The design was very interesting to make because it uses both techniques. The pattern is from the May issue of Anna magazine (German).

Once in a while I like to make something practical. This is the lower part of the body of a cardigan that I started. Still have some work to do on it, but no rush now in the warm weather.

I also made a few little things. I have to confess to having a weakness for cute. These Japanese felt figures knock me out. Sometimes I just have to take a break from my own stuff and follow somebody else’s instructions for a change. These projects are small enough to actually finish! I have made several different animals, but the chimp is the one I did in Switzerland. He is a mascot that hangs on my pack. The book is in Japanese, so the best way to describe the title is ISBN978-4-391-11758-5. It is available at Kinokuniya bookstores.

On the other side of my pack hangs this little dog that I made in Switzerland. This one is an American pattern from the book entitled Softies. This design is by Chika Mori. The book has a variety of projects from several artists. By following some of the internet info on the artists I found this great site for The Softie Awards Pool. Check it out and be prepared for a visual feast of very impressive creativity. Click on the links to the artists and you can spend days in amazement.

I also did some cooking in Switzerland, but that is another story…and right now I had better get back to work.

Bye for now!

I hope the weather where you are is treating you well.

It has been very hard to adjust to being back home. All I want to do is clean and organize a frightening amount of stuff. Must be the aftereffect of living in such a sparse apartment in Switzerland!

I still have tons of pictures to post, so lets finish the train ride.

As we came out of the snow we returned to more Heidi scenes. Take a look at the buildings to the left of the house. I’ll return to these structures later.

How could I travel through Switzerland without a picture of the cows?! The selection of cheeses in the grocery stores was impressive. Seems to be a popular food…

Late in the afternoon we arrived at Zermatt. Here is a view of the Matterhorn from the town.

Here’s a typical street in the town. The picture was taken the next day on our way to the gondola that would take us up the mountain as high as possible.

Remember the storage buildings to the left of the house in the first picture? This is what they look like up close. There were several of these structures in the town. Notice that it is sitting on pillars that look like mushrooms.

Here is a detail of one of the pillars from another building. Why are these buildings on “mushrooms”? Can you guess?

The gondola looked like this. There were people still going up the mountain to hike and ski – in May! In winter there is a second gondola that goes even higher, but we were up pretty high anyway.

On the way up… The scenery on this whole trip was fantastic!

And here is Bruce at the top. It was chilly and we had to catch the train back to Zurich, so we didn’t stay long. The mountain peak can be seen from here, but the clouds just wouldn’t part for us. We were very lucky to have such good weather for the train. It had been rainy and cloudy the week before, and we returned to the same sort of weather when we got back to Zurich.

The “mushrooms” were to keep the rats out of the building, much like the things they put on ropes going up to ships in port.

There is still so much to share about our trip. I’ll try to get the next posting up a little faster!

Cheers!

We are back in Seattle and I think I’ve just about adjusted to the time change. I really have a hard time going west.

Although we hated to leave Switzerland, really hated to leave Switzerland, home wasn’t so bad either. Well, when we first walked into a neat and pretty clean studio, it felt like home. Then I started to unpack the enormous amount of stuff I brought back and suddenly it looked like a bomb had gone off. (What home usually looks like.) I’m still rearranging the books to find the right places to put all the new acquisitions!

This is what the apartment in Zurich looked like. Pretty sparse!

Actually, I had already taken some things off the bookshelves for packing. It was a very large contrast to what we live in.

This is the neatest part of our living space. These shelves are one side of a wall made of bookshelves, only a small fraction of the collection. I love books!

We did a lot of traveling that I haven’t written about, so even though we are home, the travel blog will continue. I left off last time on the Glacier Express train ride.

Here is some more.

I took so many pictures from the train. Often the scene would be blocked by trees or posts from the electrical supports for the train. As far as I know, the trains in Switzerland are all electric. A nice feature considering the gas prices these days, and green to boot.

We saw a few castles along the way.

Then we were definitely headed for the mountains. It was amazing to see substantial towns in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere.

This isn’t the most beautiful picture, but it shows the train emerging from one of the many tunnels we encountered along the way. Notice that the train is on a very tall stone trestle!

When it was our turn to go have lunch we headed to the dining car. It was all wood and velvet; quite charming. I had a salad Niçoise which was delicious.

And wouldn’t you know it, the most spectacular scenery was passing by as we ate!

On one side it looked like this. Down… Sometimes the train was traveling quite near the edge.

This was the view from other side of the train.

We were up pretty high. To get there, the railway was way too steep for a normal train, so it had cogs in the center of the track. The engine had cogged wheels underneath that it used to pull itself up and down the slope. This is what some of the cogs looked like in Zermatt at the end of our trip. This is a set of about five tracks with a walkway built in between.

At the summit we passed another train. I guess we were a tourist attraction too!

Coming down the other side we saw a bunch of little houses that looked they they were pretty hard to climb up to every day. It turns out they were for storage. Here is one in the foreground and some more on the hillside below.

This hillside with the sheds on it was very dreamy looking. This time the houses were above the sheds. As we said many times, “What goes down has to go back up!”

By the way, one can drive up into these mountains too.

How’s this for a view? I wonder how the occupants got up this hill!

Enough for now. The next installment is the destination of the train, Zermatt.

Bye for now. Be well.

After our trip to the museums (my travel agenda) we took the Glacier Express from St. Moritz to Zermatt (Bruce’s agenda). It was a nice contrast and a fabulous journey. Express, it was not. Exciting it was very.

We started from Zurich and took a normal train to St. Moritz, arriving there in the afternoon. It was the off-season, so most shops and restaurants were closed and there was construction going on everywhere. Luckily this did not hamper the beauty of the lake one little bit. We almost had the place to ourselves!

This was the view from our hotel room. We had a little balcony, which made the viewing even nicer. After settling in, we went for a walk around the lake.

Mountains, mountains, and more mountains. It was beautiful at night too.

This was a nice carved design on a building in the town. I am always interested in nice designs carved or otherwise! You never know what may come of it.

In the morning we boarded the Glacier Express. (I love this sign that I spotted in a town along the way.)

The train itself was just a bit more modern, and built for maximum viewing!

There were headphones for listening to the commentary about all the things we were seeing. I didn’t hear much of it because I was going from one side of the car to the other trying to catch a photo of something that was constantly changing.

Does this look like Heidi, or what?

The train was quite long and the track was very curvy. We traveled along rivers and up and down the mountains.

I’m going to pause here to upload this part of the ride because we are in Stockholm (beautiful!) at the moment and I have to jump in the shower and get going. The journey shall continue…

Best wishes to all!

In the morning we took off for the Musée Swisse du Jeu (Swiss Game Museum). I love games and puzzles, so I was curious to check this museum out. It was fun to see some antique games, precursors to contemporary games, and different versions of the same game from several parts of the world. There were games that one could play as well. Here’s a scan from the brochure.

The antique games were very cool!

Then we zipped off to Geneva to visit the Fondation Martin Bodmer museum on the outskirts of town. Finding the place was a challenge, but we finally made it. And it was well worth the trouble! Martin Bodmer collected books, especially hand written manuscripts. I didn’t expect to find this type of thing fascinating, until I saw a long scroll in the tiniest, densely-packed handwriting – written by the Marquis de Sade when he was in prison! And music written by Mozart. There were Egyptian scrolls, ancient Greek writings, and even the original manuscript, with corrections, for Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Here’s a picture from the guide booklet.

There are several first editions of Shakespeare in the collection, including the only known copy of the original printed text of The Tempest and Macbeth.

I found out about the museum quite by accident when I spotted a book about some tapestries that belongs to a secretary at the university who is also a textile designer. The book was about a set of tapestries in the Bodmer collection. So I had to check this out. We were very pleasantly surprised to find the place so fascinating. If you like to look at illustrated manuscripts and other old books, check out the e-Codices website that includes several books from the Bodmer Library. Be sure to also check the other libraries listed in the “choose library” menu in the upper left corner of the page.

The drive between museums led along the lake with beautiful terraced vinyards on the bank.

And another…

The terraces made it easier to cultivate on a steep slope and kept the plants from shading each other, giving them plenty of sun on the south-facing hills.

We grabbed some sandwiches along the way and headed back to Zurich for a few days. Our next trip was to the mountains.

On Monday we headed to the eastern end of Lake Geneva to see the Chateau de Chillon, which is a very impressive castle.

The self-guided tour had 47 places of interest and it took quite q while to get through the whole place which is bigger than it looks from the outside. The dungeon of the castle was made famous by Lord Byron who wrote a poem about it.

The dungeon was a nasty looking place. The floor here is the rock that the castle is built on. The rock is surrounded by the lake and just offshore enough to make a great moat.

There was a swan in the moat sitting on her nest. My lens cap wound up in the moat with her. When we left the castle a woman who lived in the town and watched the swan daily said the lake was rising and that soon it would be over the nest, and the eggs (there were three) would be ruined. Poor swan.

The castle was enlarged and remodeled countless times. There were passages everywhere and several large reception rooms.The bathrooms were nothing more than indoor outhouses. The views from the castle were spectacular.

This was taken from the tower overlooking some of the castle roofs and Montreaux, the town that hosts a famous jazz festival in the summer.

The highways in Switzerland are marvels of engineering. Check this out. Also taken from inside the castle.

The old and the new. That horizontal stretch of concrete perched on the hill is the highway. Here is a wider view of it going along the coast.

OK. Just one more shot of the castle with the mountains in the background. Learn more about the Castle…

After the castle we zipped up to Riggisberg to visit the Abegg-Stiftung which is one of my top ten favorite museums in the world. It is a private collection based on excellence of design and craftsmanship, with pieces of all types, old and older, from many parts of the world. The collection is not large but the quality is fabulous and it is displayed with just as much attention to design and craftsmanship. The Abegg Foundation is known for its restoration of textiles. The museum has changing exhibits devoted to fiber.

This is a scan of the front of the brochure for the show. The show consisted of several upper garment pieces from the 17th and 18th century that once belonged to wealthy (ie. merchants) citizens, not the nobility. Clothing was the way to show one’s wealth. Very little of this type of clothing survives as recycling was big in the old days and once out of fashion the fabric was reused. Skirts were especially vulnerable to reuse and didn’t survive.

As a fiber artist I was blown away by the craftsmanship of the elaborate embroidery and really cool buttons. The fabric in the picture above was cut with rows of slits (all bound, of course, to avoid fraying) and then embroidered with gold colored thread to create raised bars of gathered fabric between each pair of slits. An unimaginable amount of work! The openwork was backed with a gold colored fabric underneath. What splendor! I went crazy, Bruce took a short nap.

Another thing we both enjoy about this museum is the location. The countryside is spectacular.

Mountains and meadows.

“The hills are alive…” Looks like the opening shot in the film except for the absence of Julie Andrews.

We went back down to the lake to stay the night in Lutry, a small town on the lake east of Lausanne. This was the view out the window in our room.

Enough for now. I will finish this trip tomorrow.

We left Bern in the late morning (always running late…) and headed for Lausanne to see the Collection de L’Art Brut which is one of my favorite museums. It is one of the major collections of Outsider Art–outsiders being visionaries, mentally disturbed, and those who follow their own strange path. These untrained artists have produced some really fabulous art. This is a scan of the brochure for the temporary exhibit of Japanese outsiders.

I was really impressed with the expansion of their permanent collection which now includes several large panels from Henry Darger.

In the afternoon we rushed off to catch the Musée du CIMA (International Center for Mechanical Art) in St. Croix, which happens to be the music box capital of the world. These are not your ordinary music boxes, but rather elaborate and large ones that run about $5-10 thousand dollars each. We managed to catch the last tour. The guide ran a lot of the machines and explained the history of the manufacturing. What I was waiting for was the automatons, and I wasn’t disappointed. Two of them wrote letters to each other. You can click around the website (sorry, the English version doesn’t work) to get an idea of the collection. Fun place.

After the museum we zipped back down to the Swiss Riviera on Lake Geneva and stayed the night in a small town. Driving on the highway looks a lot like this.

And this.

There were a lot of tunnels, some through mountains and some under farmland. Quite an amazing road!

There were, of course some great views of the countryside too. The land everywhere is dotted with swathes of intense yellow. I think it is flaxseed.

Notice how the fields extend in the background. Here another shot out the car window a bit closer.

Our next stop is the Chateaux de Chillon which is open on Monday. To be continued…

Bye for now, and best wishes to all!

We have been traveling by car around Switzerland for the last 4 days, so I have a lot of pictures to share with you. It is impossible to get the photos ready to post, etc. when we are actually traveling. By the time we have finished dinner (usually around 10:00) we are pooped! So I will have to catch up while I’m home for a couple of days before the next outing.

Our first stop was Bern, the capital of Switzerland. The streets are lined with flags.

And statues, like this monkey which I found particularly charming.

Bern is surrounded on three sides by a river, the Aare, which is in a deep gorge. A nice feature for defense in the old days. Nowadays there are several bridges spanning the gorge. This was taken from one of them.

The focus of our trip was to visit museums. We wanted to see the “Charles the Bold” exhibit at the Historisches (Historical) Museum in Bern. It was a huge exhibit, but the most impressive things were the tapestries. I bought a book on just the tapestries and this is a scan of the cover, just to give you an idea.

The actual tapestry didn’t have as much yellow in it and looked more like this.

On Sunday morning we went to see the cathedral, but it was closed. There is one door that they have reconstructed to look like it did when it was new. I was quite taken by this decorated arch. Here is St. George with the dragon. Heaven on the left, Hell on the right. The dragon is right in front of the figure, note the loops of guts that look like sausage coming out of the dragon.

Here is a detail from the side of the doorway. The cathedrals must have been breathtaking when they were built!

And finally, here is most of the upper part of the doorway. I hope you are enjoying it as much as I do. There are at least 100 Christmas cards in all the imagery!

Our next stop is Lausanne to see the Collection de L’Art Brut. It is one of my favorite museums.