Yaay! She finished it!!!!

We interrupt the regularly scheduled program to bring you a story of triumph that is likely to get your heart to speed up and your eyes to tear up! 

At the heart of the story is a crafter who loves all craft and hoards supplies, but has a massive case of nonstartitis and procrastination. This May, she overhauled her craft room and in the process, unearthed an Anchor needlework kit that she had bought around... oh just 4 years ago? The autumnal colors had piqued her interest, but the kit had soon been interred in the pile that was in one of her craft cupboards. 

The crafter is inordinately fond of small projects that can be finished in a day or two. She had never been successful with a long haul that would need patient, incremental work day after day. "This time I'm gonna change that," she vowed as she had done several times before. I don't think she believed it herself because somewhere in her mother-in-law's house is a half-finished little doggie that was way more simple to stitch.

Anyway, she brought it down to her writing table and put it in a drawer, adding a pair of scissors to the kit. And as the room painting wound up, she tore open the box, and ignoring the recommended order of completing different colors, started with her favorite color red.

That was it for the first day. She found that it was easier to mark off the areas to be filled by a particular color with a pen so that she knew where to start the next day. She also, not very hopefully, decided to take a picture of each day's progress so that she could look back at it with pride one day - however far in future that would be... perhaps in the company of grandkids?

And then slowly the picture began to grow...

She set a goal of using up a particular length of thread that she was using that day, which took her roughly an hour. She tried to do it five days a week. Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she didn't. But as a couple of months passed, she found the canvas buckling a bit - no doubt due to uneven thread tension.

Our crafty crafter checked YouTube for a solution because she couldn't put the whole work into an embroidery hoop. After a weekend visit to the local hardware shop for supplies she made this in half an hour! 

Yes, a lap frame! From PVC pipe! And she didn't let her usual process of finding a hundred obstacles in her head to make such a thing stop her. She did all the measuring, sawing and fixing herself! Making snap-on PVC attachments daunted her, so she decided to attach the project to the frame with thread. She also found black cobbler's thread a better option than ordinary sewing thread. Don't ask how she happened to have cobbler's thread in her stash...just take it for granted!

Housework, travel, fatigue and illness interfered with the progress of the project. But she left it in sight on the unused end of the dining table, shrouded in an old towel to keep away the dust. Her eyes fell on it each time she passed through and it even drew her eyes to it when she curled up with a book on the sofa.

Even though she was still taking daily photos, the work left to do often overwhelmed her. In the little places it was difficult to make out where the markings for one color ended. Sometimes the patches in the picture didn't match those on the canvas. Sometimes the colors seemed too garish for her taste - perhaps she would have liked an autumn scene in pastels? She gritted her teeth and went on...

Uh oh! She ran out of dark blue thread for the water! No doubt it was because she was ignoring the instruction to finish each patch of color, snip the thread and then start in the next patch. She just dragged the thread on to the next patch. When she looked at the thread list, she saw that she had completed more than half the colors... That was good! 

Making a note of the shade she would need to finish the dark blue patches, she left them bare and went on with the other colors...

She even became bold enough to use long and short stitch when the kit admonished her to use only long stitches... Take a close look at the light yellow in the sky...

Meanwhile she bought a new skein of the dark blue. But nearing the end she kept finding tiny little patches she had missed out on when using another color. So each day before threading the usual length of thread for the next day, she snipped off little lengths of other colors to fill in those patches.

And last week she suddenly realized that she was down to the last color - white! Energized by the finding, she put in unheard-of double sessions for a day or two until day before yesterday, the last white stitch was made and a frantic search for any more bare patches of canvas ensued.... Then our crafter, forgetting her advanced years and the fact that she had only recently recovered from a bout of dengue, executed a few war whoops and danced around the dining table.

It had taken her just 3 days short of six months to complete! 

She asked me not to show you the next picture, but I think it will be good for her perfectionism. As I told her repeatedly, her work is not going to be submitted for a needlework competition to need an immaculate backside...

Readers, she is cringing with embarrassment. You will be happy to know that she was so chuffed by her accomplishment that she went straight to her craft stash and pulled out a quarter-finished project that she has had... oh only since 2006...

She started on the yellow flowers and realized why she had put it away years ago - the motifs are tiny and the stitches proportionately so. It makes her go cross-eyed even in  broad daylight. So she has decided to complete the current bird, and save the rest of the Aida cloth for some other freehand project.

But true to form, she has her sights trained on some drool-worthy counted cross stitch on Amazon since Anchor doesn't make them...

and this...

Happily what with exchange rates and import duties, they are currently out of her budget. So, with a sigh she has dismantled her PVC frame and put it away for the next project. Let us look forward to the framed Perfect Paradise and the two completed birds in their own gilded frames.

The crafter's name has not been mentioned because she wishes to remain anonymous...

Hampi 2

Why did it take me so long to get from Hampi 1 to 2? On the way I got attacked by a teeny mosquito and got dengue fever. Thus I have attained a hat trick in fevers this year, falling prey to viral fever, chest infection and dengue all in the space of 6 months. I must say from the expert's point of view that the dengue is the worst of all - it is making itself felt even after three weeks in the form of easily tiring, getting headaches when tired and aches and pains all over. I avoid going out as much as I can to stave off fatigue and further infections.

On to happier things:

Here is a bird's eye view of the royal enclosure at Hampi

The palaces built of brick and wood were destroyed and all that are left of them are the stone foundations and whatever was made from stone. And the ornamentation left on those plinths are enough to make us salivate thinking of the palaces as they had been...

Just look at the detail...

The grounds have a huge step-well...

 

A cute but scary underground passage that leads to a currently roofless chamber... I am still not certain whether Ani was clinging to my hand or I was clinging to his...

 We moved on to the Zenana quarters which had slightly more enduring structures. Like this one...

...presumably an overgrown gazebo for the ladies to relax in if they found the palace too confining!...

... even the "simple" gazebo has detailing like this over the arches...

And then to take your breath away, the elephant stables...

Do note that the domes on top are all in different shapes. If they'd lavished so much care and design diversity on the quarters of their tuskers, what would their palaces have been like...

Another notable structure is the Queen's bath... though I have no idea why it should be so far away from their living quarters...

It's all dry and prosaic now, but we humans have enough imagination to return the poetry to it, don't we?

There was an "underground" Siva temple where the royal family took spiritual retreats from time to time... but the place stank so much of bat guano that Ani refused to go into it, indeed it was a gloomy place...

Didn't I tell you last time that the landscape is dotted with old, unmarked monuments? Here is something that you might miss because they are found on the way side with no markers...

These depressions in stone - no two are alike - served as ready-made plates for the soldiers' daily meals and they stretch off in two rows for 300 meters into the countryside now, who knows how many there originally used to be?

That is all for the royal grandeur of the Vijayanagara empire's capital, but if you think that is all that Hampi is, you would be mistaken. I'll take you around Hampi the next time and you can see for yourself!

Hampi 1

One of the greatest pleasures that the denizens of Karthi indulge in is envisioning our next long trip. This time we were going somewhere special, a place that had always captured my imagination and that caught my family's attention when the movie Anandam came out. I for one, went into full research mode, reading up on all I could about the Vijayanagara empire's history and even buying a coffee table book off Amazon - Hampi - Discover the Splendours of Vijayanagar by Subhadra Sen Gupta and photographs by Clare Arni. 

Six months ago we booked tickets on the Hampi Express from Bengaluru leaving on the Durgashtami day. We got confirmed tickets, so were placid seeing the crowds on the platform as our train chugged in. We managed to find our seats and settled down despite there being several people standing around. Confident that the ticket examiner would chase away those without reservations, we went to sleep. When a call of nature woke me up at 2 pm, I reached for my sandals beneath my berth only to find 4 people lying on their sides on the floor between the lower berths. I hurriedly put on my glasses to see that the main corridor too was similarly filled by crouching and curled up humanity. I summoned all the Spartan spirit in my being that I could and lay back in my berth.

That is when I saw a bridge-like construction between the middle berths above me. An inspection revealed that there was a lady curled up into a question mark in the space left on our 9-year-old's berth and a gentleman was lying down on the opposite berth with his torso there, legs spanning the aisle and feet almost on the lady's face. The last vestiges of my Spartan spirit fled around 4 am and I decided to brave the crush to use the toilet, using the night lights and the edges of the upper bunks to navigate, planting my feet as far apart as possible to inflict least damage on the protruding appendages of the people under me. My brain brought back fleeting images of a Kathakali performance in which Duryodhana tries to navigate the illusory ponds in the Indraprastha palace. 

Fortunately there was no one sleeping IN the toilet. On the way to and from the toilet I heard a lot of vituperative language despite my care. Luckily for me the insults were in provincial Kannada and garbled by sleep, so I didn't understand a word!

All that was forgotten on our ride from Hospet to the ruined city of Hampi that was once the capital of a prosperous empire that ruled all of Southern India in its heyday. The gentle morning sun fell on fallen granite pillars and leaning structures that sometimes had markers, but more often seemed to efface themselves to blend in with their background. As we climbed the Hemakuta hill and then made a winding descent, the Virupaksha temple with the Tungabhadra in the background became visible.

All of the monuments of Hampi are situated South of the Tungabhadra spread out among the hills and valleys. The main things not to miss are the Virupaksha temple and the  Hampi bazaar in front of it that stretches to the foot of the Matanga hill, the Krishna temple, the Vitthala temple, the two "minuscule" monolithic Ganapathis, the Narasimha, the Royal enclosure, Zenana quarters and the Queen's bath. From now on, I will let the pictures speak...

The Sasivekalu (mustard seed) Ganesha

This is his brother, Kadlegalu (bengal gram) Ganesha. Don't you love the ancients' sense of humour?

ONE relief sculpture on the LOWER end of ONE pillar of the mandapa in front of Kadlegalu Ganesha. Minimalism was definitely not a designing trend in Vijayanagara!

The Dasavathara carvings at the entrance to the Krishna temple built by the great Krishna Deva Raya himself. My next ambition is to see the Balagopal icon that graced this temple, which is currently in the Government Museum in Chennai.

Ladies, ladies, green is a very unattractive color for your complexion, dontcha think???

The Narasimha. Now this guy has stared down at us from social studies text books for years on end, hasn't he? Along with the ends of his appendages, the Lakshmi Devi in his lap too has vanished, leaving just part of her arm seen near his left armpit.

No, you can't take out this nifty chariot for a junket around the parikrama path. The iconic stone chariot in the Vitthala temple. 

You feel, "Oh, what a beautiful shrine!" Wait...wait...

Now you see its teeny tiny place in the overall structure! Can you help believing the local legend that Lord Vitthala refused to be stationed in such an ornate structure and instead preferred to go back to his original, simpler home? 

 

A daredevil vyali rider!

A gnarled living tree in the  Vitthala temple courtyard seemingly carved out of and growing out of stone!

Can you imagine the number of chisel taps and the measuring and remeasuring it took to produce these perfect geometrical patterns? Such dedication!

At the end of a day of walking around and the architectural overwhelm, there is no better place to relax than the steps at the side of the Matanga hill looking down the Hampi bazaar street to the gopuram of the Virupaksha temple. 

Next time I will take you to the royal glories of Hampi... Ciao!

Be Ready!

On Sunday, I received a forwarded whatsapp image

With the typical disdain of an Anglophile, I was about to dismiss this image, particularly turned off by the mishmash that is supposed to be English in it. But the dates and the area of influence mentioned niggled me into doing a bit of research on this. You know how I feel about rumor-mongering if you have read this blog post of mine.

What I did find was an article in the Hindu - this is the link to the same  - regarding this Mr. Babu Kalayil and how he had predicted the 2004 earthquake and subsequent tsunami and how the Kerala University has a team of academics doing research with him.  The Hindu is NOT a tabloid rag and that lent the news some credibility.

Then I sat back and thought about one January morning in 2001 when the earth shook in my native town of Kottayam. It was a relatively minor quake and no one in my community was harmed. But I remembered standing still wondering what was happening to my glass of tea that was trying to dance across the top of the TV and my sister coming out of the bathroom clad in a towel shouting that the building is falling. Funny now, but how naive and unprepared were we?

Naturally I was concerned for my loved ones. DH, I know has mock drills for fire escape and such things on a regular basis in his office and knows what to do in emergency situations. But what about the kids, and their school? 

The next thing I did was to call Mr. Babu Kalayil himself to confirm whether the letter was actually written by him or whether somebody had used his name. He confirmed that it was his prediction and that he had informed the Chief Minister of Kerala as well as the meterorology department who haven't heeded his words.

The next thing I did was to meet the Principal of our kids' school and ask him about whether there was any disaster response plan in place. Predictably there was nothing. He had the grace to hear me out and accept a printout of the Himachal Pradesh government's emergency evacuation plan and mock drill directives for educational institutions that I had got off the internet. But he said he would not take any steps based on the information until a government directive is given.

I was disappointed. From what I have seen of governments so far, they are seldom proactive. The safety guidelines, regulations and directives are formulated and put in place always AFTER a cataclysmic event. The Principal told me that he was afraid that he would be the laughing stock of his staff members if he put a disaster management drill in place due to this warning!!! I told him that I had surmounted the same fear in going to meet him. It was only the thought that I wouldn't be able to live with my conscience in the eventuality that something bad happened and I had not done ANYTHING in preparation that helped me overcome the fear of ridicule. I also reminded him of the story of Noah who had been the butt of ridicule before the Deluge, and how none of those who ridiculed him had survived.

Earthquake prediction as a science is still in a very nascent stage. It has a lot of variables and when a guy says he is using extra sensory perception to detect it, the news is very suspect. But it will not hurt to be prepared. If nothing happens, I will be the first to laugh at my fears on New Year's Day, 2018. In the meanwhile, I will be educating my family on earthquake survival and making a plan in case we all are in different places at the time. And we will probably be avoiding the beaches for some time.

Here are a few good resources that could help you prepare: 

1. The US government's site: https://www.ready.gov/earthquakes
2. A video, "When the Earth Shakes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXxPTAhMGLI
3. The Himachal government's pdf on mock drills in schools: http://www.shimlamc.org/file.axd?file=2016%2F1%2FMock+Drills-+Guidance+Note+for+Schools+(29-03).pdf

Forewarned is forearmed and it NEVER hurts to be prepared. Until the 2004 tsunami hit Indian shores, no one knew that such a thing could happen. Until the ground shook beneath me in 2001, I didn't know earthquakes could happen in Kerala.

So, what are you going to do?

My Craft Room: Before and After

Let me dive right in:

Here is what my craft room looked like at the end of March

The builders left the walls painted in wall primer tinted a greenish yellow that showed the cement color behind the walls. It looked much worse than this photo.

One of the first things I did was to shift all my craft things and furniture to the next room. Please be warned, the mess is likely to startle and horrify! :D

Most of my stuff was pretty organized, but mostly in big, labelled totes that looked untidy on the shelves. After the laborious, multiple-coat woodwork painting, I first painted the walls with leftover white paint. And left a taped rectangle on one wall...

Why? I'll show you in a bit! 

So here is my craft room AFTER the painting! 

Tadaaaa!

That's my sewing machine on an old computer table on the left. And can you see why I taped that rectangle off? One coat of special paint transformed it into a blackboard where I can draw or write as the fancy takes me!

Of course I have a white board too...  one can never have too many boards!!!

What's that, you want to see how the cupboards are organized? Are you sure? Ok, here goes... Let me open the cupboard on the left...

I don't know how long this state of affairs is likely to last, viz., the super organized look. But at least I will know where to look to find everything. The rotating spice rack on the middle shelf came with me from Houston and sat gathering dust in my kitchen cupboard for a long time because, let's face it, we Indians do not use dinky amounts of spice in our curries and refilling the tiny plastic bottles was a huge chore. So now they hold my beads! 

And yes, those are recycled and reinforced shoe boxes on the top shelves. In fact the whole row of shelving on the top contain lots of cardboard boxes. I can never bring myself to throw them away. As you can see, they can come in very, very handy!

Here are the drawers beneath:

They hold my cotton yarns and threads of different weights. 

Let's see the cupboard on the right:

Those are my craft books on the top, they are two layers deep. The two shelves below them are full of jewelry findings as well as finished pieces. The right side of the cupboard is devoted to paper goods. Can you see Shamu there, guarding my paper goods? He's been with me from the time we visited Sea World in San Antonio back in 2003. 

One drawer below this cupboard is filled with craft paints and varnishes:

I have left the right drawer empty and the two large bottom drawers have extra boxes, an iron etc.

It's true what the decorators say, "A coat of paint can transform a room". I can feel the change in the energy when I go there to make things now. On my  wish list - material to make some nice curtains and a comfy upholstered chair on which I can put up my feet and crochet to my heart's content. I'll be getting the first soon and sewing up some cafe style curtains. Our downstairs sofa will have to make do for the time being for the second item!