post-industrial dreams / art/ play

A character in my novel Five Roses squats in one of the towers of an abandoned industrial complex along the Lachine Canal in Montreal. 

I don't identify the building in the novel, nor is the architectural layout exactly alike, but in my mind I thought of Canada Malting. Among the derelict edifices along the canal--many of them still there in the years when I was writing the novel--Canada Malting was the only one with towers and silos as high as I imagined my characters climbing. 

Important in the novel is the watchman's cabin, which reminds Rose of her cabin in the woods (and reminds me of the cabin my father built, where our family used to spend weekends and summers).  

I was delighted to notice a year ago that the watchman's cabin on Canada Malting (still abandoned) was refurbished with a coat of pink paint and windowboxes. This year, for Xmas, an intrepid group of artists have painted the shed behind the cabin red and erected a Christmas tree they decorated. This has even made the news. (Something other than Covid-19!) The article is in French but have a look at the closeup photos and drone footage of the pink and red cabins and tree. The gift box is addressed to St-Henri, the neighbourhood below Canada Malting.

https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2020-12-13/le-mystere-de-la-maison-rose.php

As a footnote: take pictures when doing research. It's good to have them!

plumed weaving / Museo de Textil de Oaxaca

I have a long-term passion for fibre: what it's made from, how it's spun, dyed, woven, what's done with it, what can be done with it.
In another life, I'd have devoted myself to textiles entirely. In this life, I got waylaid by words, reading, languages, books, writing. No regrets.

The yarn detail above and the sculpture below by were made by the fibre artist, Judith Scott. I had read about her and then saw her work at the Oakville Galleries in Oakville, Ontario in 2016. Judith, in particular, interests me because of research I'm doing for a new novel.

Ditto clothing by Jean-Paul Gaultier who designed the pink corset with the cone bra Madonna wore during her 1990 Blond Ambition tour. I'm lucky there was an exhibit of Gaultier's créations at the Musée des beaux arts in Montreal in 2011. I took LOTS of pictures. I mean... a dress with suction cup/button nipples and sequined pubic hair? Who wouldn't?  

More recently I spent an entrancing afternoon at the Museo de Textil de Oaxaca in Mexico. They were hosting an exhibit of weaving that incorporated down from various indigenous birds. One doesn't usually think of feathers as yarn, but down has the flexibility to allow it be spun and twisted with another fibre such as cotton.  

Plumed weaving is a technique that was almost lost. There are only six known pieces of weaving with down, all of them Mexican, dating from 300 years ago. Contemporary weavers have resurrected the process and I was astounded by the beauty of the hangings on display in the museum. The pieces were accompanied by an excellent video. A small but unique and well-curated exhibit. 

What I also appreciated about the exhibit was how the space was divided with textile walls. Fitting, no?

Did I mention that the fibre artist up top, Judith Scott, had Down Syndrome? It shouldn't matter when looking at her work, though it raises the interesting question about the relationship between intelligence and the making of art. 

aprons / Grimms' fairy tales / linen

Do you wear an apron? I'm pretty sure my mother wore one when I was growing up but I didn't take the habit with me when I left home.

I wore one the year I had a job baking cakes in a restaurant, because I didn't want melted chocolate or egg yolks dripped and smeared on my clothes. The kitchen wasn't so fancy that any of us wore full kitchen whites, except for the supper chef who gave himself airs. He had trained in France. The rest of us wore jeans and aprons. That was in 1981? 82?

At home I only started wearing an apron after I splashed a beloved sweater with hot olive oil. I opted for the bibbed apron over the skirt-style apron my mother used to wear.

That's not a picture of my mother and I haven't included a photo of my apron because it's long ago acquired a patina of avocado, tomato, orange juice, chocolate, oil and whatever else I've wiped across it over the years. An apron is handy when you need to blot your hands or clean a knife fast. I do wash the apron but the stains are there to stay. That's why they're called stains. (Stay = stains?)

I've been thinking about aprons because I want to know what kind of cloth would have been used to make an apron in Grimms' fairy tale times.

As far as I can discover, the common household fibre at that time in Europe was linen. Linen is made from flax. There are a few Grimms' fairy tales about the spinning of flax--most often when an irrational monarch demands that a girl spin flax into gold.

Last year I happened to wander into a shed in Austria where I saw honest-to-goodness flax. Even in the dim light, the fairy tales about spinning flax into gold suddenly made sense.

To get flax supple enough to spin into yarn, the stalks are threshed with a flail, followed by retting, then scutching, AND THEN they are heckled with heckling combs!

If I'm ever heckled when I'm standing on stage, I hope I have the presence of mind to point out to my heckler that I am not a stalk of flax.

And here's a linguistic/textile tidbit I came across while looking up the history of cloth. When cotton was first introduced to Europe in the 1300s, people knew only that it came from a plant, and so they imagined there were trees that grew in India with tiny lambs on the ends of its branches. This myth lives on in the German word for cotton which is baumwolle. Literally: tree wool.

If you're wondering how far off the beaten path I went to find an old shed where flax used to be threshed, retted, scutched, and heckled, here's the view. The first snow had blown in the night before. Guess from which direction.

Making linen was a laborious process, but in countries that didn't have ties to cotton-growing colonies linen was still the least inexpensive textile until partway through the 19th century. Nightgowns were made from linen. Underwear was linen. Shirts were linen. Collars were linen. Skirts were linen.
When the brothers Grimm were researching and writing their fairy tales, aprons were made of linen. And people wore aprons. The word has been around in English since the early 1600s. Men wore aprons specific to their trade--carpenters, butchers, stonemasons, cobblers...

Even the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" wears an apron.

Illustrations of aprons courtesy of Fritz Fischer in Grimms Märchen (Bertelsmann Verlag, 1957) 

writing research / Five Roses, a novel

Increasingly, I do things because I need to know how something works or how it’s done, because I want to write about it. Writing makes me go out and explore the world. 

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon with a tailor in her atelier. She was tracing a pattern she'd made on fine grey wool that she'd imported from England. We talked fabric, design, making patterns, cutting them, and more. Listening to her talk about her work and how she’d trained for it was fascinating. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram: Susana Vera. 

On a personal level I'm interested in how one acquires skills, but I would never have contacted a tailor and asked if I could spend an afternoon with her if I weren’t writing about costumes.

Talking with people is one way of doing research. Trawling the internet is another. (How did we ever manage without the internet????) Youtube, books, a camera. maps, looking over people's shoulders. Taking a trip and taking notes. And baking cream puffs, why not? 

I have a new novel, Five Roses, coming out this summer. The novel isn’t about food, but two of the characters work in a patisserie. I thought it would be fun to include a recipe with the book--and wanted an easy one that didn't require fancy equipment. I used to make cream puffs when I was kid. You don’t even need a mixer. They are that easy. But I haven’t made them for years and felt I should test the recipe before sending it to my publisher. I took a picture in sunlight so you can see how light and airy they are. I poked them with the knife to release steam and keep them dry before they’re filled with... whipped cream, custard, ice cream, jam, sliced fruit?

I also wanted something made with flour since the novel is called Five Roses--for the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign on the south-west horizon of Montreal. The sign was erected in 1948. Each letter is 15 feet or 5 metres high.

I live west of the sign in Pointe St-Charles, the post-industrial neighbourhood where the novel is set, and on days when the wind comes from that direction, you can smell flour being milled. It gets up your nose.

I didn't write about the milling of flour in Five Roses, but I'm thinking that's something else I want to know about. More research.