Learning to relax
Posted by: Fats in: Katawan > Edward fans club > NeedleworksWoke up early today, around 6AM. Below is a photo I took of Edward last night. I have just finished one side of a crocheted bag and have started working on the other side. It’s based on a pattern called Princess Louise, from a book called Corticelli Lessons in Crochet, Also a Few New Designs for Knitting, Book No. 1. Florence, Mass.: Corticelli Silk Mills, 1916.
I noticed last night that I don’t breath normally and my shoulders hunch when I am working (or when I am excited about something, such as reading through the pattern instructions). I suppose I’ve always worked this way but never really noticed the pain it causes until I stopped doing too much work (especially after I stopped teaching in 2004). The resulting pain is chest pain that can get rather horrible. I hadn’t really realized it was the combination of shallow breathing, irregular (rather fast) heart beat, and hunched shoulders (almost like a tight spastic position of the upper body).
Now that I am aware, the next step is find a remedy to this problem. I must have been working like this for so many years that it has become like an instinctive process. Perhaps most workaholics are like this …
It’s past 3PM now.
Last night, I set up another website, this time Fortun’s Urban Gardening, maintained by my partner. I suggested that maybe he could also maintain “Maria’s Procedural Cooking” - in which I could contribute some recipes. I suppose George could contribute some jams and jellies recipe in Fortun’s UG website.
The Priscilla Book on Irish Crochet is astonishing. Now I am downloading their Yoke book. I am curious since it has patterns for Maltese crochet (hairpin lace). I would really love to be able to develop the hairpin lace crochet better.
I already got Beeton’s book on Needlework, which is also available through Project Gutenburg.
Curious about Isabella Beeton … from the Wikipedia entry:
Isabella (nee Mayson; 12 March 1836 – 6 February 1865) was born at 24 Milk Street, Cheapside, London. Her father, Benjamin Mayson, died when she was young and her mother, Elizabeth Jerram, remarried a Henry Dorling. Isabella was sent to school in Heidelberg,Germany,where she became an accomplished pianist. Afterwards she returned to her stepfather’s home in Epsom.
And, Mrs. Beeton couldn’t cook but she could copy.
Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead. How did she come to write the seminal book? “The answer is she copied everything,” Hughes said.
It took Hughes (Beeton biographer) five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.
But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. “Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator.” Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for. …
Actually, this somehow reminds me of our own local MOD Magazine and Women’s Home Companion. Both are weekly women’s magazines. I remember seeing them in our old home in Manila in the late-70’s and early 80’s because my auntie was a subscriber. When we moved to Quezon City in the mid-80’s, my auntie still had the magazines.
MOD started out in the early ’70s as the pioneer teenage magazine called Sixteen, which easily became a hit among campus teeners. But soon, these sixteeners grew up, left the campus, and started to become homemakers and career women. Thus, with them, Sixteen grew into Sixteen’s MOD Filipina which first came out in March 1974.
Nine months after, on December 6, 1974, the magazine came out in the 11″x13″ format titled Sixteen’s MOD Filipina, with then 20-year-old Babsie Chuidian, a Liberal Arts and Tourism student of Assumption, gracing the cover.
On October 10, 1975, the magazine first came out as MOD Filipina with Eva Abesamis, a Tacloban lass who was training director of a top savings bank in Manila, as Cover Girl. The magazine was now focused on the woman, her family, career and the world she lives in.
The publisher of MOD is Atlas Publishing Co. Inc. The company was first owned by the Roces family headed by Don Ramon Roces who appointed his daughter, Carmen Roces Davila, as president of the company.
In 1996, the company was sold to the Ramos family, the family behind the National Book Store chain. - MOD history from http://www.mod.com.ph/all_about_mod.htm
What was funny about these magazines was that they didn’t really contain much original content. Most were re-published from other English-language, mostly American magazines and books. At the end pages of the magazine are installments of passionate love stories written by popular novelists, and Reader’s Digest-type of true-to-life drama like “Stranded!” or “I was raped!” The magazine contained household tips, recipes, bits of news, horoscope, gardening, fashion and make-up, etc. Being a young girl and then teenager, I remember collecting their installments on handwriting analysis and physiognomy.
In the past 6 years I noticed they have started re-publishing texts and photos accessible through the Internet.
I suppose MOD and such similar magazines as Women’s, Miscellaneous, Mr. & Mrs (or was it Ms.?) did become a training ground for many local young women writers, insofar as they were allowed to contribute more or less original content. And because the magazine did have a wide audience (it wasn’t so expensive then for a weekly magazine), feedback from readers created that valuable relationship between the young writers and their readers (or fans, to some extent). I remember reading Jessica Zafra in one of those magazines, as a regular writer of a column with a growing fan-base, before she became the Zafra who writes books.
Anyway … these magazines have not gotten better, to be honest - they got worse. Homemaking intelligence (ala Beeton) has degenerated into celebrity gossip (local and foreign). Too bad.
Well, back to the crocheting. 
