Happy Birthday to me!

Today is my 56th birthday.  Hard to imagine I’ve come to this age, which isn’t old, but I’m feeling like I’ve had a life time of experiences and so grateful for each year I can add to them.  I’ve done so many things, traveled so many places, and seen such amazing things.  I’ve spent more than half of my life with a wonderful partner who has shared many of these adventures with me, but today, actually this whole weekend, he isn’t here.  Gone to Saudi Arabia, he can’t be here to help me celebrate, and coincidentally neither one of my children is available either.  My son is at guard duty all weekend, and my daughter happened to have a busy bunch of outside commitments, right now she is at CPR recertification class for lifeguarding.

It is all OK, I had all of my family around me for Mother’s Day.  And truth be told, if I could design my perfect day, it would alone, on my own schedule, eating the things I want, and doing and seeing the things I want to do and see, that no one else in my family, except for Brianna maybe, really cares about.

Yesterday was so incredibly glorious.  The world didn’t end, and I’m really happy about that, and the sun shone for most of it, after a week of dreary rain, I took advantage and sat on my balcony in the warm sunshine, listening to the birds and profuse wildlife that inhabits my yard, and totally appreciating my life so far.  I watched the breeze carry twirling maple tree helicopters, spinning wildly to the ground like glitter in the sunshine.  I drove out to the other side of the county to pick up some textile equipment an old friend was selling.  I wrote my article for Notions, the publication of the American Sewing Guild.  I was able to retrieve photos from my archives easily with the new computer system, and get everything uploaded by last night.

I played around with gauge for knitting a summer tank top from Noro cotton/silk yarn I got from a friend.  I worked on my coat/dress.  I cooked roasted vegetables over wine simmered tilapia for dinner.  I enjoyed my beautifully tidy house I paid to have someone clean for me on Friday as a birthday present to myself.

And this morning, I woke up early, chatted with my mom on the phone who called to wish me a happy birthday, and left for the city with a textile friend to spend the day in Manhattan seeing an exhibit that was on the top of my bucket list.  Thank God the world didn’t end on Saturday, since I would have been so disappointed to have missed this exhibit.

On the way into NYC, Jenny presented me with a small birthday present, assuring me that it wasn’t something that had to be dusted, that would take up any space at all, and that didn’t have an on /off button to frustrate me, and that required no care at all.  Her husband who is an accomplished woodworker and blacksmith, forged this lovely reed/heddle/orifice hook, I adore it and all it represents.  My perfect type of gift.  Thank you Jenny and to your husband Kevin as well.

Probably my favorite designer of all time, the late Alexander McQueen, is being memorialized in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibit titled Savage Beauty.  If you aren’t near NYC and can’t manage to get to see this amazing exhibit before it closes on July 31st, take 10 minutes or so and check out the link and watch the video of the exhibition.  I have to say, this is probably the most spectacular exhibit I have ever seen in any museum, even the Vivienne Westwood retrospective at the V&A in London didn’t come close.  The exhibit is thoughtful, reverent, brilliantly curated, and it has captured the essence of this remarkable designer, who clearly understood cloth and the body.  I am humbled and stand in awe.  It was the perfect birthday present.  My friend Jenny was clearly awestruck as well.  I was glad for her company.

She hadn’t been to the MET recently, and I was happy to take her to some of my favorite spots, and our other goal was to see the Andean Tunic exhibit in the Oceanic arts wing.  I’ve written about this wing before, including many photographs, it is probably my favorite permanent exhibit at the MET, and we quickly found the Tunic exhibit.  I’m not sure which of the two exhibits I saw this morning at the MET were more inspiring…  They were both so exquisite, so different, yet so incredibly similar.  The tunics shown in this exhibit were incredibly well preserved textiles dating back from 400 BCE to about 1400 CE.  The colors were intense, the imagery spectacular, and the fineness of the textiles breathtaking.  It helped that Jenny is a natural dyer among other things, and we had great discussions on which natural dye made which red, cochenille or a cousin of the madder plant.  And how about those greens…

As handspinners, Jenny and I were blown away by how fine the handspun thread was that created these intricate tunics, mostly tapestries, and that most of the fiber used was from camelids.  That would be fibers from the alpaca or llama, or maybe vicuña.  Apparently they held the color better, which makes sense, cotton fibers don’t take well to natural dyes.  We also appreciated not having to fight the crowds, who were all in line to see the McQueen exhibit on the second floor.  Thankfully we got there when the museum opened this morning, and only had to fight our way through a small mob to see everything up close.

Jenny and I had a lovely lunch together in the MET cafeteria, one of my favorite places to dine in NYC, and we headed home.  The day may be gray and drizzly, but the colors and inspiration I absorbed this morning will be with me for a long time.  I’m sorry my family isn’t around this weekend, but I took advantage and had a marvelous birthday in spite of that, and the day is still young.  There is a coat/dress calling me and the rest of the day to work on it.

Happy Birthday to me…