Covid finally caught us...and taught me a new craft!

We put up all the fortification we could and took all evasive action as dictated by health officials and common sense, alas, only to have the virus invade our family after two and a half years of pursuit. Starting with DH, we fell ill one by one at the end of July. The kids bounced back to normal routine after a week. Us elders however, found it very hard to make a quick comeback. 

One week after the virus attack, I couldn't read, I couldn't work on the computer, I couldn't do any housework or gardening. My hands simply itched for something to do, something new, something not strenuous. "Learn tatting!" burst into my mind. What, that old thing? Starting in 2004, how many times had I tried to teach myself the same thing? After failing to learn to tat with shuttles, I put them away and got tatting needles. It was so easy to tat on needles, but all the patterns were for tatting with shuttles. Another dead end.

Not one to ignore my intuition, though, I dragged myself up the stairs to my craft room and searched high and low for the shuttles. I searched all the cupboards and shelves. Na-ah. Before giving up, I opened an old carry-on case in which some odds and ends were stashed, and there they were! They were safely put away in a pouch carefully labelled "tatting shuttles" on the outside. 

Now what? I dragged out the tome I had started out with...

I found the rudimentary instructions in the Lacework section and wound the shuttle thread around my fingers and started... only to give up once again because the "flipping" was not working. That's when my intuition shouted, "Check YouTube, you..." (My intuition is usually a well-mannered entity. But sometimes I try her patience.)

So I went to YouTube. I checked out 5 beginners' videos and learned several things from all of them... One showed me the most efficient way to hold and move the shuttle, one showed me exactly how to slack the left hand for the 'flip' to occur smoothly, one showed me the whole process in close up... I bowed to all those teachers in my mind and started tatting. The end results of three and a half weeks of tatting almost half an hour on weekdays looks thus...

Yes, that is most of the "work" that I have created in the past month. As I was in the process of mastering the all-important flip and creating the muscle memory to keep it smooth, it resulted in plenty of mishaps. For example, the one below shows one perfectly executed ring. When I started the other, the fifth stitch refused to flip and I had to stop because of the tight knot.

Then I started making rings and connecting picots, but sometimes got the counting all wrong resulting rings of various sizes...

Then I noticed that sometimes I would get the picot connecting wrong - not collecting the proper thread through the loop or pulling the thread in backwards, resulting in more knots...

Then I managed a string of rings, attached with loops of varying and untidy lengths. I then tried my hand at tatting with size 40 thread, resulting in the teeny little blue ring that you see in the picture below. I found that I would need magnifying glasses to make those. So I desisted, mercilessly unwinding all that thread from the shuttle and throwing it away. Seriously, what had I been thinking when I bought size 40 thread, with my high-myopic eyes? Nope, nothing but no. 10 thread for me!

Then I went back to the RD Book of Needlework and tried out a tiny pattern that required me to reverse my work after each ring and connect the rings in a double row. By this time, I had learned to keep tugging at my shuttle thread to see if was gliding smoothly and caught mistakes long before they spoiled my whole ring. By taking off my specs and squinting at the offending stitches, I also learned to unpick them, correct my mistake, and go on my merry way.

Last week, I tried a shuttle and ball affair, changing between shuttle thread and ball thread and learning to keep them separate. I winged the pattern and created the motif below. I first made the outer circle and then went mad and created a hodgepodge in the inner circle. Just for fun...

But yesterday, I created a motif with two shuttles, again on my own, again unpicking several knots along the way... completely imperfect, but beautiful still...

The picots are not equal-sized. I've created quite a few unintentional tiny picots along the chains, but it is still a recognizable tatted motif. As I've moved along, I've learned to not look at the piece, but my counting needs to improve. It is so easy to transport as well. So now a couple of shuttles, thread, and a small pair of blunt scissors travel in a Ziploc bag with me wherever I go. 

I've just learned the basics and there are a lot of things that I have to learn before I can use tatting in projects. But it is a start. And it is so heartening to finally have got through the difficulty of mastering the "flip". Now looking forward to creating things from these patiently waiting books in my collection...

Meanwhile, I have gained enough energy to get the housework done and have started taking care of the garden for half an hour every day. Small bursts of work are okay. But I tried cooking for 4 hours straight last Saturday for DH's birthday, and couldn't move at all on Sunday. But that is how it rolls. 

Journey to Craft World aka The Craft Village at Vellar

It has been flu fortnight here at Karthi, with DH succumbing first, then Ani, then Kunju and finally the nursemaid who was running around with thermometer, oxymeter, meds, hot water, and tissues. DH was tested for Covid twice and the results were negative, even though we have all the symptoms. Karthi is currently like an echo-cave. The cough starting in one room will set off an echo in several other rooms and go on awhile. But enough of that, let us look at something bright and cheery.

Forever on the lookout out for new attractions in this area, I heard a lot about a craft village on the way to Kovalam. A few years ago we did look in, but the place was still under construction and there wasn't much to see. We thought, "Oh, just another 'government undertaking' to waste public resources." I mean, have you been to any of those state craft emporiums that are horribly designed, where items are displayed haphazardly, and where the staff is so demoralized that they barely open their mouth to talk? And the same products: wooden elephants, plaster Kathakali faces, snake boat replicas, and the metal cornered ornament boxes lined with flimsy red velvet ad nauseam. 

Last year, I saw an article about the Craft Village in the newspaper and got good reviews from my sister who went there once. So we went there on Christmas morning in 2021...

Well, well... this looked nothing like the place I remembered! We got there slightly before the opening time – 10 am – and got parking inside the campus. Waiting for the artisans to arrive and open their stalls, we took a little walk and found this wonderful square to relax in...

 

It was only later that I came to know that the stalls are built around this pretty place. Let me show you just a sample of the things we saw. Starting from Nettippattams of different sizes...

Then chendas and maddalams of different sizes starting from miniature ones that are made with the same materials as those of the original.

Isn't this Kathakali painting beautiful? It's life-size too. Now what if I tell you that it is all made of quilled paper???

You don't believe me? Let us take a closer look...

Just take a look at that detail!!! It took the "quiller" duo of husband and wife around a month to finish this masterpiece!

 

These stalls are also the workshops of these artists and crafters. According to the space required, there might or might not be separate spaces available for the workshop. For example, the ceramic artist who made these...

has a huge workshop behind the showroom, complete with a potter's wheel. They even hold classes there! Of course, there were the traditional crafts if you have a hankering for elephants and snake boats. Cane furniture and handloom textiles are available as well. But then there are also these...

 

and these...

These are beautiful miniature replicas of the uru made in Beypore, the ancient ship-building art, brought to life by one of the traditional artisans. 

Going into the workshop of a wood craft stall, we were awed by a sculpture in progress that was eight feet tall...

This is a depiction of the Viswaroopa commissioned by a well-known actor and with the addition of a final piece above it, will attain a total height of 11–12 feet. I wandered around the piece and caught sight of Sree Krishna blowing the Panchajanya...

 

There are scenes from the Mahabharata worked all over the piece. Just look at this Dasavathara  necklace! Start from the left top and you can see all ten!

I prised myself away from the wonderful piece of art and craft because there was a lot more to see. Here is a stall of metal craft...

 

An example of papier mache combined with bamboo...

Macrame hammocks and swings...

I could go on, but then this post would be too long, and I still have to show you the Emporium.

which housed a two-storey tromp l'oeil painting...

Look at how the railing of the top floor balcony is blended into and continued in the painting. We had to have some fun with it, so here is Kunju stepping into the market...

 

And here is DH waiting patiently for the cobbler to finish his current job...

The Emporium was a veritable Aladdin's cave filled with treasure...

The floor above the emporium houses a painting gallery, of which I will not post photos, but leave you to discover for yourself.

The Art and Craft Village is still expanding with more facilities and attractions to be added soon. The layout of the buildings reminded me of Technopark and the facilities provided are Technopark-standard too—which is excellent for a any institution. There is plenty of space for kids to run around and exhaust themselves while the adults browse through the stalls. It is also elderly-friendly as the stalls are accessible on one floor and there are plenty of places to rest if need be. There is a restaurant on the premises and we would have tried it if we hadn't made lunch plans for the day. All in all, the Village is worth spending at least half a day. 

The life of the place are the crafters whose passion fills the spaces that they work in. If you go there, make sure to talk to them about their work, it is simply heartwarming. I have shown a mere fraction of the items available. There are products for pockets of all sizes.

The cost of admission is Rs.100 for adults and half that for kids. Separate fee for parking.

If only that Village was within commutable distance, I would have taken a teeny, tiny stall for crochet and spent the whole day crocheting and nattering with the other crafters!!!

Blooms in 2021...

Phew! I have made it back to my blog before I completed one whole year of absence. Well, just about... Because as you can see, my last post was written on the 2nd of October, 2020. After that, I didn't feel like sharing anything on the blog. Instead, I dug deep into my cozy space and got entrenched in an effort to shut out the crazy world as much as possible. 

We have had our portion of goodbyes, the most painful being the demise of a brother-figure, a standup guy who was just 42. As I write this, my sister-in-law and her family are in their second week of Covid infection, resting at home in isolation. Fortunately, all of them are doing ok after the initial fever and symptoms.

Meanwhile, some things have been blooming here at Karthi...

like this morning glory vine that I have managed to keep alive in my balcony garden which you might remember... I bought this vine back in March from a nursery on the way back from Kottayam.

Then there is this beauty... 

... who came with us from Vandiperiyar when we went there in December for the only pleasure trip we've undertaken in the Covid era. She put out her first, single bloom just in time for DH's birthday in August. This time, there is another branch with promise of more to come...

 

This year, I have been able to take better care of my garden, pruning it back into shape, trimming, mulching and fertilizing on a regular basis. My cousin gave me a mulberry cutting three years ago. Look what I found last weekend!

 

 

Sometimes, I feel that the garden I am trying to grow is the one I am recreating from my mother's family home in my childhood. I have succeeded in getting the coral jasmine to bloom. The mulberry is another childhood favorite. My old friend the mulberry tree is still thriving at Kottayam although when I go there, I forget to visit. You could call my mulberry a granddaughter of that tree, because my cousin took a cutting to her home and grew it there, and I got mine from hers. Now if I could only get the plant that we knew as Nakshatra Mulla (star jasmine), a bushy variety of jasmine that truly looked like stars scattered over a velvety dark green bush. Two of those flanked the entrance to the front yard at my mother's home. Our childhood pictures were mostly taken at the side of either of them. 

Apart from gardening, copy editing, and a little bit of creative writing, here is what I have been up to...

This project has just completed two years in the making and is no where near finished. Gaaah!!!

More on that later. Meanwhile, if any of you love books, take a look at the tabs above where I have listed the books I have been reading since 2017! 

Hope to see you all again next week! Stay safe!

Two finished projects

The past two weeks at Karthi have been busy with the kiddos returning to some semblance of schooling. The end of May and beginning of June saw us scrambling to get electronic devices suited for both to attend either live classes via Microsoft Teams (elder) or recorded classes via the school website (younger). Naturally, we have cut down TV time to after 7 pm and Prime only on the weekends, just like school time. What with the transition and new routines to plan and implement, my creative output suffered. But this week I got back in the groove.

Back in February, I had written about a tapestry crochet bag that I was making. The original design was for a tote that had handles that wouldn't take any weight. So I changed my project into a backpack, but found myself in uncharted waters. I had to create a flap, sturdy straps, affix these correctly to the body, attach a magnetic clasp, make a lining, and make pockets for the lining. I was in creative overwhelm. The new things needed a lot of fermentation time in my head, so I put the project aside and completed a crochet scarf and made a few masks. 

Proceeding in baby steps, I first found a very sturdy, double-layered crochet stitch for the straps. I made a smaller version for a loop that would serve to hang up the bag, then attached them to a crocheted rectangle and then sewed and crocheted the whole on to the back of the bag. 

Once that was done, I turned my attention to the flap, which I needed to taper to a point. Crocheted a few rows each day, gave it a contrasting border and and ta da!

Next, I hunted up a salvaged magnetic clasp from a dilapidated wallet and attached them with the help of some denim fabric because I didn't want to attach the prongs to the crocheted part.

The sewing of the denim patch on the flap wasn't as straight as I would have liked it to be as you can see from the picture below, but hey, I am a recovering perfectionist and the job was neat enough. The opening is of course the drawstring that I designed by myself. 

Finally, I found a length of cotton in my stash that had complementary colors and sewed the seams before hand-stitching it to the bag. For the pockets, I used the back pockets of a soft, stretchy jeans that I had massacred to make masks. 

And here is the bag with some books in it for ballast, on Ani's shoulder.

On the whole, not a bad job for a first-time bag-maker, hey? 

When I was finished with mask- and pocket-making from my old pair of jeans, the only part left was the waist band and the front pockets. So I made this...

My "house uniform" of salwar-kameez has a great drawback. It doesn't have pockets. At Karthi, you can often hear me requesting people to find my phone, because I leave it all over the house. This "belt", worn over my salwar, now keeps my phone near me all the time. The only problem is that my brain has not yet registered that this is my phone's new home. Yesterday, someone called as I was cooking and I searched the whole kitchen for my phone without realizing that it was safely ensconced in my pocket! 

As for our garden and yard, the monsoon rains have brought out the grass and weeds in full force. I have been subduing them with my weed-trimmer. I hated the thought of taking out my trimmer, because it has a bad habit of flooding very often. I always followed the correct procedure, using the choke sparingly. But after a couple of sessions, it would flood and respond to no amount of persuasion. Earlier, this meant a 30-km drive to the nearest Stihl service center to get it firing again. This month, determined to fix it myself, I searched and found a YouTube video and learned how to do it. If air was solid, it would have had several holes in it from all the punching I did the day I restarted the flooded engine by myself! So now the grass will not get a chance to grow higher than a couple of inches around our home. 

In pandemic-related news, each Saturday when we go out shopping, we find more and more people out on the streets, mostly wearing masks and giving wide berths to each other. But things are more lackadaisical closer to home, with neighborhood boys playing together outside and even elderly people wandering around without masks at our nearest junction. At Karthi, we are still in full vigilant mode. The kids have been so understanding of conditions and have adjusted much better to the lockdown than I had ever expected. That is something that I am very grateful for. DH did go to the office a couple of times to see what it was like. But he missed the hot tea and snacks that I provide at his table even if he is in conf calls. Both days he came back home hungry and crabby! So for now, he prefers working from home. 

That's all from Karthi for the time being. See y'all next week!

Infinite variety

Some people assume that a homemaker's life is humdrum and yawn-inducingly boring. One of my young cousins recently asked me, "What do you do with all that time?" I decided not to deluge her with my repertoire of activities and adventures. Of course, yes, part of it is routine work, like in any profession - cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, etc. But being in the middle of the country side gives me more scope for adventure. 

For example, two weeks ago, DH decided that his afternoon nap needed a bit more comfort and decided to switch on the AC. All was well until a few droplets of water came dripping into the room. Soon, ice-cold water collected in a pool on the floor. I went out to investigate. I poked an eerkkil into the vent and out came honey bees - the tiny non-stinging kind called cherutheneecha in Malayalam. Suspicious, I tasted a little of the sticky goo at the end of my eerkkil and yes, it was sweet! The service men came out last week and extracted this...

That is one end of my poking tool stuck in the wax. Fortunately, the hive had not become big enough to cover the cooling pipes or there would have been more trouble. This comes of not using the air conditioner for over eight months!

Yesterday morning brought home two workers bright and early. One of our coconut trees had succumbed to a rotting disease and lost its luxuriant head. For a few months it had been pointing an accusing finger at the sky right beside our gate. Passersby were careful to come in and tell us (another country life quirk!) that it was a hazard to the power line, our gate and our wall if it fell towards any of these. So our usual yard helper Vijayan Chettan brought along Mr. Mahin, a professional tree feller who in his heyday had worked in almost every district of Kerala. We also requested him to trim a bit of the jack fruit tree in the front and a cashew tree at the side, both of which were touching the house and were providing easy access for creepy crawlies and some creatures of the slithering variety to our upper floor.

One of my greatest hobbies in childhood was trailing around and being an assistant (read nuisance) to any skilled workers who came to our home - electricians, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, stonemasons - nobody escaped me. I would trail around them, fetch and carry for them and pester them with umpteen questions. I am sure that this habit has helped me with the home repairs I can do today. For example, in 2018, we got a kennel made for our half-grown puppy. The workers went away and after the required curing, we moved her to the new abode, only to find her jumping out through one of the several "ventilation" holes at the sides of the kennel! I bought some cement and tools, mixed up a batch with sand and used broken bricks to block the holes partially. Our Houdini was thus contained. 

Even today, I love to hover over specialized workers seemingly supervising, but in reality, gleaning new knowledge and listening to their professional lore. For example, all such workers will have at least one story of a miracle tool that was just perfect for their job. Mahin had one too. He recounted the story of a perfect bill hook he once had - he rhapsodized about the temper of the iron and the perfect condition he used to keep it in, only for some one to steal it from him. When he climbed the jack fruit tree to prune it, I cautioned him about my precious passion fruit vines that had finally deigned to give us fruits after four years of growth. He assured me that nothing would happen to them and here they are, intact...

Next he knotted a thick rope at 10-12 feet above the ground around the trunk of the coconut tree and had us assistants hang on to the other end after drawing it through the fork of the jack fruit tree. He was very careful in judging the angle and distance. Exhorting us to pull steadily on the rope, he hacked the base with an axe and made us tug experimentally once before cutting all the way round. Then he cut the other side too and rushed to us. We all grunted mightily and tugged with all our strength  (I forgot to yell "Timber!") and the coconut tree fell straight in to the sturdy arms of the jack fruit tree. The two of them used two thick trimmed branches of the jack fruit tree to lever it off from the tree's embrace. Mahin then chopped the tree into several parts and rolled them off to one side...

You can clearly see the top part that was rotted from the inside. Part of it broke off when it hit the tree as it fell. The marvel of Mahin's work is that no power tools were used - only rudimentary things like a ladder, pieces of rope, an axe, a bill hook etc. I really admired the way he sat down after each stretch of his job to use a file and sharpen his tools. So yesterday evening I hunted up my own file and sharpened my dull bill hook before hanging it up with a gleaming edge.

A homemaker's adventures do not stop there. I am trying a new crochet technique called tapestry crochet. For my first project I chose a bag that I saw on YouTube and purchased the pattern off Ravelry. It went along quite well till I reached the sides. The bag in the pattern's picture had chevron rows up the side, but mine was coming out in diamonds...

Usually I work with written patterns, but this had no color A, B etc. in the written part, only in the diagram. I couldn't make out where I went wrong. So I unraveled back to the point where the pattern began to look different from the picture and I can tell you, unraveling crochet in one yarn is a snap, but a headache with two yarns!!! Then I kind of made it up as I went along and now it looks like this...

That's more like it. Distinctly chevron-y. 

Culinary adventures are a whole another set. This month, I tried making Medu vada or Uzhunnu vada as it is called in Malayalam. All my recipes said "Use as little water as possible to grind the soaked grain" and I succeeded only in heating up my mixer. The resultant vada was perfect in shape, but also was tough enough to fell ripe mangoes from trees if need be. In my second attempt, I used my electric stone grinder and ground the dal very finely, but found that more than the stipulated amount of water is actually required to make the dough/batter fluffy enough to make soft vadas. This time, they were crunchy and tasty, but looked a little wonky...

But then as my DH says, tasty beats wonky every time...😁

So to answer my cousin and several other people who ask, "What do you do at home all day?" I would reply, homemaking is a never-ending adventure of infinite variety - if one chooses to make it so!!!