KDW

How often, when shopping, do you pick up an item, decide you don’t want it, and leave it somewhere else on your shopping journey? The Ballard Fred Meyer store contains a lot of these juxtapositions, epecially in the book department.

Can you draw a relationship between these two?

It is well known that the common woodlands or garden gnome, Gnomius sylvestrus, hibernates during the winter in the upper latitudes, re-emerging shortly before the spring equinox to continue frolicking, digging, and lazing on giant mushrooms. But it is less well known that some members of this genus have taken seasonal employment.

These gnomes pass the mid-winter months by growing their beards and providing amusement to homo sapiens, the dominant species in their environment.

Fall and Winter in Seattle can be blustery, chilly, and gloomy. There’s a lot of natural beauty here, but no one wants to go hiking when rain is pelting down like spearsicles and it gets dark at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. But as a substitute, you can always go to the flagship REI store that’s just off I5 near downtown.

The property covers a long city block and in the front it’s landscaped to look like a trail in the Cascades where shoppers can test mountain bikes and other equipment they are thinking of buying. As you walk to the main entrance, there’s a stunning waterfall.

Along the balcony are clocks giving the times for different extreme-sport areas in the world. For example, if you are shopping and thinking of calling your buddy who is hunting sharks in Australia, by looking at the correct clock you can avoid waking him up in the middle of the night and cussing you out.

The handles on the entry doors are ice axes!

A glass-enclosed 50-foot rock climbing tower where you can test your skills (properly harnessed of course.)

And in the shoe section you can tromp up and down this miniature mountain to test different kinds of hiking boots.

In the children’s clothing section this treehouse and igloo tent call future adventurers.

Aunt Virginia taught us to make these gift tags when we were little.  I still make them.  She used pinking shears to make a decorative edge all around, but these days I have all sorts of crafty scissors.  It’s one way to recycle old Christmas cards and ribbons, and we were doing it way before it became trendy to recycle!

Candles, perhaps even more than macrame, were the craft item that epitomized the early 1970s. They came in all shapes, sizes, textures, colors and scents. My cousin Joan converted a room in the family cellar into a candle-making workshop, and I remember pouring wet sand into a bucket to make a mold for a sand candle like the tripod one on the lower left of the picture. And of course you could order kits.

(Notice the mushroom-shaped order form.)

Inspired by my older cousin, my crowning masterpiece as a junior candle artisan was an olive-green smiley face candle scented like peanut butter, which I impulsively and impressively gifted to my dad’s cousin’s family one Christmas. I’m sure it was a true WTF moment for them, though they reacted graciously. But then the wick is lit, and the candle deteriorates within minutes into a Boris Karloff  caricature…  how fleeting is the gift. For years, even decades, after the era you could see unburnt candles for sale, dusty and faded, at flea markets and thrift stores.

But the malleability of wax proved greater than its shortcomings. This candle is sculpted and layered into something like a Roger Dean landscape for a Yes album cover.

Click for larger version

Artisans seemed to vie with each other to create more unique and complicated forms. This candle actually uses a translucent shell which is created by pouring hot wax in a water-filled pan and then rolling it around a cylinder for a barnacle-like effect.

Stranger still were chunk candles, wax odds and ends which were put into the mold with hot wax  poured around them…made in a food can, with the right colors and shapes, the candle could look eerily like a DelMonte fruit salad (which sadly I spent three or four of my hard-earned dollars on at a church bazaar.) At the end of the seventies the candle craze ended also, the upscale taste of the decades since favoring tapers and tea lights.

But you still can buy waxy food! Without the wicks in them though.

Eschewing the work boots and belted tunics of days gone by, today’s gnomes bristle with attitude and the urban rhythms of the street. Don’t mess with these guys. They will run you over with a skateboard and spray paint your flowerpots.

Granny Square mania struck in the late 1960s and ruled through the 1970s. Afghans, vests, skirts, shawls — usually black backgrounds with multicolored yarms, to use up odds and ends from larger crochet projects. This is a rug.

Plain hats made a good canvas for pompoms and other trims. I like the berry bowl straw hat at right center. I totally would have worn it at age 13.

Snoopy goes up, up, and away with string art wound on nails to form a hot air balloon, cheesily displayed by a model in dire need of a hot oil treatment for her hair. But wait! Isn’t he supposed to be piloting a Sopwith Camel?

These dolls graced a thousand flea markets and church bazaars. The doll on the right looks like an alien about to perform an abduction of some poor sleeping innocent.

I’m the luckiest little girl in the world to have a yarn doll this big!

More surprises!

I think some people went just too far with the saving and recycling.

As pink, black, and grey were the colors of the 1950s, the early 1970s belonged to traffic light red, green, and yellow.

Poor Mrs. Hassenpfeffer! She was too butterfingered with crafts, couldn’t sew or embroider, and found knitting and crocheting too complicated. But there was  Artex.

Artex was sold like Tupperware by hostesses giving house parties, and distributed with catalogs like the one above. It was a sort of pen attached to a tube of paint the user squeezed onto stamped pieces of fabric, the colors delineated by a diagram (this one is for an Artex Last Supper)

Even for the early 70s the designs were hopelessly dated, with Flintstone and Ralph Kramden stereotypes (note how the housewife is General Manager of the house while her husband is a General Nuisance with an iron cord wrapped around his leg and a dripping baby potty seat in one hand), racial stereotypes mixed with Christian prayers, and lowbrow humor.

Shaggy pillows were in back then. The shaggier, the better, especially if they came in a swirly psychedelic motif, the influences of the 1960s lingering on like a bad LSD trip in a Doppler shift.

Ditto for the hand-hooked throw rug. Which to me looks like something in a petri dish.

And what do you use for these creations? Jonathan Linvingston Seagull yarn of course!

Aunt Jane’s wig makes a surprise appearance at my Dad’s birthday party! Wearing a pale blue floppy-brimmed sunhat no less.