Dream of Sheep

Some of you know that I'm obsessed with a wooden sheep that I saw at the New Brunswick Museum when I was about six years old. I was with my mother and she told me that she remembered that sheep standing in front of a yarn & wool shop when she was a little girl. Years later during a family trip with Beryl, Phil, Sandy, Julia and Sarah, I needed to find my sheep, so I got dropped off in front of the old museum on Douglas Avenue and ran up the stone steps in the rain. Inside, I found that the old building was now offices, archives and administration. No displays. All of the museum displays had moved to the new museum down by the newly touristy and splashy waterfront. (Sarah and I spent an afternoon there and it was awesome. I have a saber tooth tiger magnet on my refrigerator.) BUT the nice people there told me that the museum still owned the sheep and that she was in storage (phew-she's safe!)

Recently I tried to find out more about my sheep. And today I finally found a picture on the museum website!!! (So I "stole" it for posterity 'cause it wasn't there last time I looked.)

Anyway-I have included the caption from the site...

sculpture : The Davidson Wool Shop Sheep
Robert Graham
Canadian
c 1875
painted pine
78 cm x 32 cm x 104 cm
Gift of John Alexander Davidson, 1961 (1961.22)

So far I have only found a fragment of detailed information, but it's pretty cool. In a story from Ruby M. Cusack, a genealogy buff living in New Brunswick, Canada ("Whittling Away the Winter", published in the ESCAPADE Section of the Telegraph Journal on Saturday, February 17th, 2007), the children in the family had been doing some wood carving and they showed their work to their grandfather who "related to Dad an old tale told by Joe from Primrose about Tommy Moran accidentally decapitating the wooden sheep in front of Davidson's Wool Store on Union Street one night when he'd had too much too drink. If the story told by Gramp is true, the sheep had his head reattached, as I remember it standing on guard in front of Davidson's as a 'trade sign'. Carved by Robert Graham in or around 1875, it is now part of a New Brunswick Museum collection." So I learned a little bit about the man who carved my sheep and a funny story about my sheep's eventful life.

So-here's a neat article that I found during my quest: How fibre arts have developed in New Brunswick and around the world No wonder I'm all textiley!

And, in a totally unrelated tangent, here's a great quote from Robin Mckinley's blog:
"Please. Buffy isn’t television."

May Your Solstice be Merry, Merry!

Give it Some Heart, Art

My bleeding heart blossoms are fading very slowly thanks to the cool rainy weather. I have both the pink and the white varieties. Yesterday afternoon a little girl named Damaris spotted my white bleeding hearts in the garden bouquet on my desk and told me that her mother and grandmother - both native Spanish speakers - call these flowers "turtle" (or "tortuga" in Spanish.) I plucked a blossom off for Damaris so that she could show me. It took me a minute to see exactly what she meant, but she's right. If you look at them differently (try sideways or upside down), the hearts look like little sea turtles with flippers!

So last night I got obsessed with trying to find folk stories about bleeding hearts, specifically my favorite, Dicentra Spectabalis, which is the "old-fashioned" variety that many of us remember from our parents' and grandparents' gardens. I've discovered that my "Bleeding Heart" is also known as "Lady in the Bath", "Lady's Locket", "Lyre Flower" and "Venus' Car". Native to Korea, China and Siberia, it was imported to Europe from China by Englishman Robert Fortune in 1846, after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 opened up freer trade relations between Britain and China.

But What About the Stories?

I've told the story of "Princess Dicentra in the Bleeding Heart" from Sunflower Houses, by Sharon Lovejoy to Brook and Alice for so many years that I'm sure they can tell it themselves by now. I don't know if it's from folklore or if it's an original tale. In the story, a beautiful princess named Dicentra is imprisoned in a flower by an evil witch until a child, attracted by the beauty of the flower, sets her free. You can read a bit more in this article.

Here is perhaps the darker folkloric parent of the Princess Dicentra story:

"A long time ago there lived a beautiful princess named Dicentra. The prince in the neighboring country just knew he had to marry her. His mother the queen was very jealous, though, because Dicentra was so beautiful. On the day of the wedding, the queen turned Princess Dicentra into a flower so that she could never marry the prince. To this day, Princess Dicentra wears her wedding gown on the day she was supposed to marry. If you very carefully take the bleeding heart petals and pull them back as far as possible, then use some imagination, you'll see a Cinderella-type dress shape."
(posted in 2005 at NWHikers.net by jenjen - whose grandmother had a great garden full of nooks and crannies and used to tell lots of flower lore.)

If you don't have any blossoms handy to play with, it may be hard to visualize just how to use the flower parts to tell the story. But just the other day, Beth at Acorn Pies shared some nice flower photographs, including a great closeup of the Princess Dicentra.

I found another princess story that many people have heard. It's nice and gloomy, featuring both unrequited love and suicide. At first I wondered if - like the plant - it from Asia, but now I'm thinking that maybe it's just a Victorian story that includes the "Chinese slippers" as a nod to the flower's Asian origins. Heather presents a version with photographs of all the flower parts that you use in the telling. Cool that she uses the white "alba" variety. This is also the only other spot where anyone else has mentioned the flower's resemblance to a turtle (maybe I need to search the Spanish Internet?)

Here is a 7th-grade-student version of the story and here "Ann's Story of the Bleeding Heart" by Elma Lang, a modern story-within-a-story version posted in a gardening forum (gardeners talk about this stuff a lot!)

Last of all, I found an old Victorian weeper, The Legend of the Bleeding-Heart, by Annie Fellows Johnston. First published in 1907, there are lots of versions posted online. The one at Project Gutenberg is in an easy-to-read format, but the book's original pages have an interesting layout, so try this version if you have the patience. There's also a reprint available for people who are in a shopping mood.

Bleeding Heart Art

I drew a bleeding heart in 2005. I kinda like it.

I would someday love to have an antiquarian botanical print like this.

I also love these modern Art Nouveau-ish pieces by Jamie McCanless.

Someday I hope to gaze upon the fantastic Georgia O'Keefe painting that I've seen reproduced in books (I just gotta find out where it lives and see if I can go there.)

The three little Dicentra people in bonnets sitting on the branch above are from a vintage card in an article at HubPages.

Given people's fascination with this flower, it's no wonder that I found Dicentra postage stamps from different corners of the world (you've already seen the one from Korea above.)

Here's a cool book that is on my gardening wish list now. When I found it I became so excited that I started to have palpitations. Be still my heart!

Wash the Dishes, Aloysius

I don't make a lot of drawings, so I get as much mileage out of each piece as possible by scanning stuff when I think of it. This is just a little postcard-sized sketch with markers. I'll bet some of you remember seeing it before! This is an Iowa farm that Jeff and I found on a backroads ramble in May 2005. I also don't know what this has to do with washing dishes, but I'm fascinated by the fact that "dishes" sorta rhymes with "Aloysisus". Who would think that it's pronounced "Alowishus"?

What's the Score, Agadore?

Here is my "Hero's Journey" board game that I created this past spring. There actually isn't any scorekeeping because the object of the game is to tell a story. Players spin a wheel (Phil helped me make it) to choose a quest and then roll a die to move their hero along a rainbow path gathering adventures. Alice and Brook helped me test the game out. They had some really good ideas that have helped me a lot when I've played with larger groups of kids. And I got to use felt and yarn and blanket stitch!

Whaddya Know, Joe?

Welcome to my teeny tiny world. There are ten of you who receive emails whenever I create new posts here. I love you all and some of you I don't get to see very often. I promise not to go crazy with updating. This is just a little space where I can deposit some of my spare brain cells, so you can bet that the content will be minimal. If the emails become an annoyance, please let me know and zap!--you'll be off the list. So. I spent some time last week updating my storyvine. Looks good on the scanner, no?

Know What I Mean, Jellybean?

Happy day after Memorial Day.