Teapots

"You can never have too many eagles," Jason Robards says in the wonderful movie A Thousand Clowns. Can you also never have too many teapots? Looking around my kitchen the other day I was thinking that I possibly just might.

I can't quite remember where the charming big-bellied number pictured above came from. It has a 1930's look to it, but doesn't pour well. It says "U.S.A." on the bottom, which was a way to let buyers know, right after WWII, that it wasn't "made in Japan".

My husband painted one of my teapots, was it for an exhibit? What's wrong with my aging brain? My husband and his painting buddy Stapleton Kearns are on their way to paint in Texas for a few weeks, so I can't ask him.

When I moved to Maine twenty-three years ago, one of my first exploratory trips was to the gorgeous town of Blue Hill. I discovered a pottery shop called Rowantrees. The pottery was made on the premises with Maine clay. It was founded in 1934 by a woman who had been to India and met Gandhi. When she asked Gandhi what she could do for the people of Blue Hill, he told her to start a pottery. So back she went to Blue Hill and started Rowantrees. The White House has a set of Rowantrees dinnerware, bought by the Eisenhower's. The designs are charming, but the pottery closed last year. Still, that's a pretty long run. Andrew Phelan, the son of one of the potters who worked there, wrote a history of it Following the Brick Path: The Story of Rowantrees Pottery.

There is a wonderful English teapot called a "Brown Betty" which this is not, but I have seen the same design in a British movie. Either a Miss Marple mystery or The Secret of Roan Inish, I think.
This is a plain, inexpensive, "made in Japan" or perhaps China, teapot, but I love it and use it often. If I am home, I drink a pot of tea in the afternoon. There are people who don't like hot liquids. I don't like cold liquids.

The interior basket is perfect for Lapsang Souchong.

My wonderful aunt, who passed away last year, bought this very silly teapot for me on the sly after I laughed at it in a store in California.

My friend Sally gave me this delightful art deco number. It says "coorsite No. 920" on the bottom, which means it was made by the H.F. Coors Pottery.

I have never made tea in this silver German teapot inherited from my grandparents. It belonged to my great-grandmother. My grandparents fled Germany before World War II and I am not sure how this teapot came to be in America. Like most immigrants they arrived in this country with nothing. My grandmother was very modern. She was a Freudian psychoanalyst and loved Danish modern design and modern art. I never saw her use this teapot.

I found this French teapot at Village Books in Washington, Maine and fell in love with it.

The teapot below was given to me by my mother. It is a from a child's tea set and has the phoenix design on it.
This is a very large teapot from my father, handmade by a potter in the Northwest.

I believe this is Japanese. There is a word for the type of unglazed pottery this is, but I can't find it right this minute an the web.

Here is another unglazed Japanese pot.


I have never made tea in either of those beauties above. But the one below I use all the time.


Arthritis in my thumbs has kept me from knitting for awhile. It seems better now, so I will pick up the needles again soon.

Also, I just began teaching a course on Shakespeare and the Renaissance at the Senior College in Belfast, Maine. I LOVE it!

Hope to see some of you on Saturday, April 30th at the Connecticut Sheep and Wool Festival!
- Kathy

Around the house, December 2010

It's fun to see inside people's homes on their blogs. It's most fun when the blogger is a good photographer, which I am not, but I thought I'd putter around the house and throw up some photos anyway. The embroidery above is Ukrainian. It was made by the mother of a friend of mine who was born in Ukraine. It is a long table runner, and I am very grateful to have it. It makes me happy, but more than that, it reminds me how important the "small" things in life are.
I have orchids, this one was given to me by a friend. The bloom is spectacular. So nice when the temperatures outside are below freezing.
Our daughter is home from her first year in art school. The painting on the left is a copy of Edouard Manet's The Fifer, which she made in Painting 101. We liked it so much we framed it. The painting on the left is by our friend Stapleton Kearns.
This is a pillow my mother-in-law made for us celebrating our marriage. Needlepoint. The plaid throw we bought in Scotland. I love plaid, my favorite plaid is the modern reconstruction of the Thorsberg Mantle (circa 200 A.D.) on page 67 of "Textiles, 5000 Years".
Our kitchen gods.
Yes! A sink full of dirty dishes! Our dishwasher has been broken since right after Christmas (so nice of it to wait). Doing dishes is not bad actually, especially when your daughter stands next to you and dries and you have a nice cozy chat right out of Prairie Home Companion. But the point here is the plate, which she decorated when she was perhaps four.
We love this redware pottery, made in Maine by Henderson's Redware. We bought this plate at Maine's Common Ground Fair, a wonderful country fair.
Knitting Out Loud narrator Melissa Hughes, who did such a lovely job on A History of Hand Knitting and The Art of Fair Isle Knitting, spends the winter in London and I babysit for her amazing begonia.
Our house is stuffed with books.
My grandparents blue and white china on the right, and my great grandmother's gold rimmed china.
Dining room rug. Okay, this is silly.
Clock we inherited from my husband's mother's family.
This painting I found at Goodwill for seven dollars. Sicily? Corsica?
Bits of stash.
Clivia.
Hand knits in our basket of hats and outdoor gear by the door.
A painting by our friend Cathy Melio.
Our daughter.
This delightful primitive, painted by a friend, reminds us of our long gone cat Hodge. He was a character.
This painting was in the dining room of my grandparents' apartment in New York. They loved modern art.
These amazing books were given to me by a friend who used them in her youth. They are interesting in terms of the history of education in this country. I just pulled one of these off the shelf. They re meant for elementary school age students. The table of contents begins: Mr.Pickwick and Sam Weller by Charles Dickens, The Death of Caesar by Plutarch, The Death of Caesar by Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Life of Johnson by James Boswell, The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allen Poe, Abraham Lincoln by Theodore Roosevelt, Of Expense by Sir Francis Bacon, Ode On a Grecian Urn by John Keats, and on. Published 1913.
Modern Italian faience plate.
This was a baby blanket crotcheted by a friend for our daughter. It now resides on a stool.
A shelf of my gardening library. Vita Sackville-West is my favorite garden writer. Then Katharine White, with her wonderful Onward and Upward in the Garden, written about her garden in Maine.

It's an old house and I love it.

Best wishes to everyone for 2011!

Ruth Marshall

Ruth Marshall and I first connected on Facebook. I was just totally astounded by her amazing knitting.

This piece, "Lacey Rocky", is sweet, charming and old-fashioned, with a kind of folk-art feel to it.
The other knitted pieces are, well, knitted reptile and animal skins.

Beautifully knit.

This is a full knitted pelt. Ruth Marshall's website has many of these pelts.

Why does Ruth knit skins?

Here's her story:

"I was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. In my twenties I traveled overseas for two years, living in Amsterdam, Holland, visiting Thailand, Myanmar, most of Europe and fulfilled a lifelong desire to see the ancient art of Egypt. I returned home to Australia and studied for my BA in sculpture and printmaking at Phillip Institute of Technology.

In 1993 I was awarded the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, a generous sponsor in promoting overseas education of Australian visual art students. I began my Masters degree in sculpture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Upon graduation I obtained employment at the Wildlife Conservation Society, more commonly known as the Bronx Zoo. I was employed at the Bronx Zoo as an exhibit sculptor and fabricator for fourteen years, where my primary goal was to replicate artificial natural environments, offering enriched and educational arenas for animals and humans alike. Presently I teach drawing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

I started knitting animal skins while I was working at the Bronx Zoo. I learnt so much about the animals there and immediately started incorporating them into my artwork. My workplace backed up to the snow leopard enclosures and I was really captivated by the beauty of these animals and struggled with ideas about how to represent them.
My mother and aunt taught me how to knit as a young girl and I was an obsessive and quite accomplished knitter up until I became a teenager. Segue to the present - I hadn't knitted much for years just baby clothes for new additions to the family, but on a trip to Australia a number of years ago I was bored and looking for something to do and I began knitting socks for my whole family, (complicated Estonian socks from Nancy Bush's books).
I took to knitting these socks at work and my boss was particularly fascinated by them. One day he gave me a job to repair a cast plastic Gabon viper and joked about the pattern of the snakes skin saying, "You should knit that!", it was one of those light bulb moments that just exploded, so I did knit that snake and that's really how it started. I looked around me at the animal collection and realized that there was a whole array of animals that could be interpreted into knitted textiles. In particular species of the cat family have at various times struggled to survive because the beauty and texture of their coats have long been coveted and this problem continues to plague species today alongside other issues of conservation. So I am very interested in the idea of replacing the real pelt with a knitted one. With a knitted pelt I can showcase the beauty, size and the violence that visits these animals when they are slain by stretching the knitted pelt on a frame of sticks - (this idea comes from a photo I saw in a book where a jaguar was killed and stretched out on some sticks lashed together to dry out the skin, this jaguar had been studied in the wild with a radio collar on. When the signal went dead the scientist quickly found out what had happened to his study animal when he went back to the village where he was staying.) So I am very interested in the idea of replacing the real pelt with a knitted one and having a dialogue about conservation in my artwork.

Ruth is about to begin a three month residency at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City where she will begin a series of knitted tiger pelts. Wish I could trot right over and have a look.
-Kathy