Utensils

 I am taking an extended break from knitting and have pacified my knitting buddies by drawing hand-knitted seasonal soft toys as a record of Christmas 2024.  I can turn to my sketchbook and remember our autumn meetings together in a corner of the pub - although I haven't attempted real people yet.

I have a new topic: small utensils.  For the last couple of days I have been sketching odd items from the kitchen drawer.  These have been in our family for several generations and are the kind of bric-a-brac seen in a local antique shop causing you to exclaim that they seem familiar or regret that they were too easily disposed of in the last century.

So far I have attempted a porcelain pipe for pastry pies - to let the steam out; an apple corer, an old fashioned potato peeler, a knife-sharpener that designates itself 'loyal services' with a patent number I am unable to decipher; a pastry wheel for decoration and prinking crusts; an ornamental three-pronged fork - EPNS because my family could not regularly afford sterling silver; nutcrackers and a 'pusher' which would be given to a weaned infant to encourage them to manipulate solid food.

These objects charm me by their solidity, their fitness for purpose as they sit comfortably in my palm, their craftsmanship and their ornamentation which I discover every time I attempt to draw accurately, according to the book, what I see and not what I think I see.  Even the EPNS fork and the 'pusher' have delicate art nouveau patterns on their handles which is very difficult to reproduce in two dimensions.

The challenge of still life, according to the art book, is to position them together, having mastered them individually, and assign significance through their relation to each other.  The other really hard aspect is to learn to draw the spaces in between them.  

That will require some thought.  So before I embark, in homage to my family and Christmas past, I will attempt the coffee spoons, still in their original case; a present from Coronation Year with all the challenges of light on metal and the folded material in which they sit.

Urban Pond Margins

Pond margins should be places for bulrushes.  They should slope gently to aid emergent frogs and toads in their crawl to dry land. Moorhens should find platforms to build and ducks places to dabble.  Waterlilies should float, anchored in mud all winter long and expand and blossom in the long warm summers.  This is the idyllic picture of the countryside pond in the era before pesticides and fertilizer run-offs.

Sadly our urban ponds do not completely live up to the picture.  The ducks are there, sometimes the moorhens.  The waterlilies flower in summer and the bulrushes shed their fluffy heads in the winter.  But along one margin is an ever-increasing layer of empty plastic bottles and semi-inflated footballs.  

Now I have returned to logging on to social media, the metrics of Meta have clocked my interest in the impact of plastic on the environment.  I click on a video clip and see vast booms trawling the Pacific or Caribbean seas.  Enthusiastic volunteers clean clogged rivers in Indo-China.  Kind fishermen remove netting from entangled dolphins or release orcas and committed locals further up our Fylde Coast clear the flotsam and jetsam.

We do our bit, but only on the landward side with my husband's name as lead litter picker on the list.  We, by which I usually mean hubby, push in to undergrowth and extract squashed, tossed beer cans, vodka bottles, plastic water bottles.  But we cannot and should not tackle the pond, it is outside our guidelines and remit.

We once rescued a straying duckling at the entrance to our road.  It was captured in a dive by my husband and carried in a corduroy cap by me back to the (relative) safety of the pond, cheeping as I walked.  It swam, still cheeping, towards the other ducks as we encouraged it down the (relatively) clean side of the slope.

  

Deck the Strelitzia

As we got out the Christmas bauble box earlier this week I wondered how my husband would rise to the challenge.  I have been leaving the decorations to him for some time...

During our married life we have decorated small artificial trees, larger artificial trees with unnatural branches (from the charity shop), small conifers that ended up finding a home with friends in Greater Manchester; and finally two potted Christmas trees passed on by V, both now defunct exemplifying her oft-repeated phrase 'I kill houseplants'.

Our indoor houseplants are generally in good health. We have a Strelitzia from my family and two Sansevieria that came from a teaching assignment in North London.  Room is more limited in our front room since we acquired our two charity shop two-seater sofas so we had to confine ourselves to the houseplants and the coffee table 

All it needed was a wigwam-like framework of last season's coppiced hazel sticks from the glade, and the requisite shiny ribbon and baubles.  It took my husband most of Tuesday morning whilst I was out knitting and nattering.

I am proud of our sustainable, low-cost and festive houseplants and am trying to persuade my husband to post a picture on his social media.  We have even encouraged a friend in the US, living in a 'condo' with strict regulations to enliven her Ficus or ornamental fig.  This Advent season, begin with what is to hand.