Arts and crafts, birds, sunrises, Mehmet the sailor...

Well, our domestic life has become very bucolic. The absence of a TV (DirecTv to be installed next week) has sent us in other directions for evening entertainment. Also, after finally feeling we have a home worth going to the frame shop for, we brought out all those things we have been saving over the years to get them ready for the framer.

I am big on old textiles, so one of them is our treasured collection of Hmong hand-embroidered belts. Rather than belts they are decorative strips that are sewn on jacket sleeves, waists or collars... I fell in love with them first in northeast Vietnam, where I bought a couple, and last year in Thailand we hit the jack-pot in Chiang Mai and bought several dozen. They are embroidered in this incredibly tiny needlepoint, making very op-art type geometric designs in bright, happy colors, usually pink and green, like Mangueira samba school colors. That´s what they remind me of, but it´s a very cross-cultural reference...

This was the night before we received the carpets, which spent a whole month at the cleaners... The major thing still missing is the sofas, which are promised for the 30 or 31, we´ll see... for now we make do with our old sofa from the sale corner at Ikea in Izmir...

We will frame and keep about 24 of them in sets of 6 that are motif-related, and will frame and sell another couple of dozen individually.

We also have a couple embroidered pieces from Turkey, very old and super folk-cute, and our bugs on teak collection as well (all kinds of scarab-type bugs handpainted on little strips of old teak) , plus art from FAME (Fine Art Adoption Network) that I adopted from Nick Holliday and Sarah Nicole Phillips, plus watercolors of various Hmong and other tribes also from Vietnam, etc. etc. Now we need a new house with more walls, because this one is all glass everywhere...

The bucolic life means we wake up usually very early, often early enough to notice the sun rise. One such morning I got inspired and got out to take some pictures.



The birds continue to impress me. This one was part of a pair singing on my terrace for a few minutes. When I got up to get the camera it relocated to the window sill... Don´t know what it´s called, but it looks like a miniature penguin, with yellow...



"Harry´s Bar Mehmet" (in Turkey every Mehmet comes with a modifier) used to tend bar at --you guessed it-- Harry´s Bar in Kas. Recently he did the a modern-day version of joining the merchant marine, which is to jump on a cruise ship to see the world and make some cash. He stopped by Punta del Este yesterday, and Barbi spent a couple of hours with him.