fiber arts

cosycardigan — *Hand Knitted Christmas Cardigan Cosy by rTracyO*

Surely the best part of winter is having reason to drink even more tea. Gotta keep warm, right?

‘Tis not the season for mug-in-the-microwave tea. Nay, winter tea calls for the careful selection of just the right teapot, just the right cup and saucer, and your favorite silver teaspoon. It often means turning your nose up at tea bags (gasp!) in favor of that raise-the-eyebrow indulgence, loose tea. Oh yes — you’re worth it, you tea slut, you.

Loose loose loose.

Don’t worry, I won’t tell your mama.

And as long as you’re gonna brew a perky pot (better look sharp as Mr. Darcy is sure to visit), you know very well this will require some patience. Once it’s ready you’ll want to sip and savor ever so slowly, while you dip into that ~~bodice ripper~~ socially redeeming literary novel, or skillfully chat up your dapper British tea companion.

It was for times like these that lovely, adorable, whimsical tea cosies were invented. They likely appeared around the same time the Duchess of Bedford popularized afternoon tea in late 19th century Britain. With so much serious chit chat and juicy gossip going on — and when one is trading scandalous bon mots, one must never rush — they had to find a way to keep their teapots warm.

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1. Love finding cute notecards, and when they have TEA written on them I can’t resist! Louise Neumann of LouPaper calls herself a professional doodler. It certainly looks like she’s having a lot of fun celebrating “things that make life lovely” (food, travel, gardens, and cocktails) with her bright cheery designs.

Her Etsy Shop contains a nice selection of notecards, notebooks, prints and calendars. She has a cool series that features various states and the things commonly associated with them. She hasn’t done Hawai’i yet, but the Virginia one includes Williamsburg, Jamestown, peanuts, and the red cardinal.

Naturally I’m partial to her food designs, which includes donuts, shellfish, beer, sushi, cheese and bread. And all done with marker pens! Check it out. 🙂

2. New Book Alert: Hooray, Barbara Crooker has just published another poetry collection! Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017) was just released a couple of weeks ago:

LES FAUVES is, as the title suggests, a collection of ekphrastic poetry, meditations on paintings from the Fauve and Post-Impressionist movements. But it also contains poetry’s equivalent to Fauvism, poems that take a walk on the wild side. There are language experiment poems, poems of word play, poems in form both usual (end rhymes, sonnets, ghazals) and unusual (abecedaries, traditional, embedded, and double helix), palindromes, anagrams, and word scrambles. Crazy word salad poems. Crooker’s subjects range widely, from living and working in a small village in the South of France, love in a long-term relationship, food as more than sustenance, faith in a secular age, grammar and usage, the pains and pleasures of the aging body. But always, what engages her most is what it means to be human on this fragile planet, at this time in our troubled history, still believing that “Beauty will save the world” (Fyodor Dostoevsky).