Birdie

I am stressed and I'm anxious these days. I'm a pro at both, but this is no competition and even if it were, being the winner would be a pretty dubious honor.
Right now I'm just happy about my furnace not having gone out since Mr. Heater was here yesterday, for a slurpy kitty to one side - Gundel is the loudest groomer ever - and another one feeling like the weight of a standard sandbag on my feet which beats a weighted blanket and a hot-water bottle (no, he's not really as heavy as a sandbag, but cats manage to change gravity, I'm sure, still remembering how incredibly heavy Ponder's head on my wrist used to be).

I have two personal solutions for being stressed.
Sleeping to block out the world. Too bad if it creeps into my dreams, but usually they are just very weird and not nightmares ... snippets of the one this morning are coming back to me right now which make me wonder when I got a dog? There have been cats, from my own to huge lions and of course black panthers in my dreams, also other animals like wolves, but never a dog. Interesting.
The other one is hoping for my muse to jump in and give me not only an idea - I have enough of those - but also the energy to work on something.
If you are wondering, I know about those people who fight stress with cleaning their whole house, but I can safely say no amount of stress or worry in the world has ever managed to make me do that, despite my half-Swabian ancestry.

As my blog is mostly about crafting, I will not go into my dreams in detail, lucky you, but talk about my last piece.
This is the second bead embroidery piece that started out on my embroidery hoop. It also inspired me to write another nostalgia post, but I'm still waiting for something to finish that one, just this much, it's about shapes, as is my pendant.

Give me a drop and I will see a bird body.
It has happened before, in my paint cabochon and Cantera opal bird pin for example.

And this time it happened with a labradorite drop. This time, however, I wanted to be a bit less neutral with my colors. So I chose a light amethyst for the head, gold accents, and a bright purple as a contrast to the body.
Yeah, and then I was stuck because I put the head on differently than in the pin and couldn't decide if I wanted to add legs or not. I did some hand embroidery instead, but kept coming back to my birdie apologizing for leaving it on that hoop for so long. Then I worked on the sparkly heart and apologized to my birdie for leaving it in a drawer for so long. I'm weird, I really do talk to my WIPs and I often talk to myself while working on something because it helps me think.

When I finally got the bird back out of the drawer, we sat down for a serious talk ;-)
In order to make a decision about the legs, I first had to think about the tail. Did I want it short or long? Why did I even have to think about it, everyone knows I can't resist a fringe! Having a fringe for the tail, though, meant that dangly legs were out and Birdie needed something to perch on.

I beaded a twig and added some embellishments in form of blossoms.
As I planned to make the tail pick up the colors of the head with golden seed and matte amethyst beads, I wanted the twig to be more subdued using bronze tone flower beads topped with tiny amethysts. Birds have so many different colors and sometimes they only partially have brightly colored spots to get attention; and I wanted him to get the attention, not the twig.
Also my first idea had been berries for the twig, but again I didn't want the colors to compete with the tail.

I guess Birdie is ready to fly!

Kitty ornaments

Ornament season has started!
Actually though, I won't be making Christmas ornaments this year, except if I want to give one as a gift.
After making so many for my advent calendar last December, but not wanting to take chances with putting any up here in the flat thanks to somecat, I may run into a space problem in my hallway, anyway ;-)

These two beautiful painted wooden cats made by Rachel from The Glass Cavern, however - you may remember her from the ammonite in this post - asked to be turned into ornaments.
You can never go wrong with stars, but I don't think they necessarily turn these beauties into ornaments specifically for Christmas, they are still suitable for being hung up throughout the year instead.

About once a year I try to send a parcel with items to a cat rescue for their charity shop and these two will be included this time.
I really hope they will find the right cat people to love them! I know I'm having a hard time letting those cute faces go.

Nostalgia - Nipper

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more interesting than others. So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.

Nipper has been living on my cupboard for many years since we brought him home from a fleamarket.

He was not a bargain, but we fell in love with him at first sight, went away from him, came back, circled him and finally gave up resisting his pull.
I have to admit not remembering where we got his little brother who lost an ear in an accident, no doubt cat-related.

There was a Nipper in our house before him, one the ex had also fallen in love with early on in our Steiff collecting times, only he wasn't called Nipper, but Electrola Fox.
He doesn't live here anymore, but I still have a picture of him.

No wonder he loved him, he's really cute, isn't he?

Who was Nipper, however, and how did he become so famous that there are loads of collectibles of him out there - and one or the other giant statue?!

Photo of Nipper

Nipper was the dog of Mark Barraud, a theater scene painter, born in Bristol in 1884 (Nipper, not Mark). Although he's often called a fox terrier (see Steiff), he really seems to have been a terrier mix and he got his name from his habit to nip people's legs. I have no doubt that he was still a very good boy, though.
He was good enough for Barraud's brother Francis, a painter, to take in Nipper when Mark died in 1887, but later Mark's widow asked to take Nipper back to keep her company and took him to Kingston upon Thames where the avid ratter died and was buried in September 1895.

Eventually Francis painted a picture of him (the building at 126 Piccadilly even has a blue plaque today) and registered it with the name "Dog looking at and listening to a Phonograph".
Some sources claim Barraud then offered the painting to Edison Bell for advertisement while others say the phonograph company was never specified in any remaining communication. Whatever the truth is, the offer was refused.
Someone suggested to put in a golden brass trumpet instead of the black phonograph horn for a more pictorial effect, so Barraud went to The Gramophone Company to borrow such a trumpet. He showed a photograph of the painting and was asked if he change the phonograph to a gramophone which he agreed to if the company bought the painting.

Photograph of the original painting with phonograph
(public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

After some back and forth, the company sent a machine round to Francis and history was made.

But did Nipper actually listen to recordings of "His (dead) Master's Voice" as you can often read?
Actually, sources don't agree on that information, either. It seems Barraud's niece said that Mark actually never made a recording of his voice, but that Nipper had often been sitting at the door like this instead as if waiting for his master.
There were also rumors that the shiny surface Nipper is sitting on is Mark's coffin, but all the sources I browsed or read agree on that really just being a tale.
So what about "His Master's Voice"? Had the creator of this slogan really being Francis Barraud or was it indeed the winner of a slogan contest? Who knows? There were even several people claiming to be the original painter.

The altered and final version of Barraud's painting
(public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Barraud painted several more Nippers for different company offices.

Speaking of different companies, you may hear more than one name in connection with the Nipper logo, that is due to developments and copyright transfers in the music industry - RCA in the USA, Victor in Japan, and EMI in Europe until they sold the trade mark to the independent HMV stories (HMV for His Master's Voice).

There are Nipper statues in different places connected with these companies, one of them looking very similar to mine, a 5.5 meter fiberglass statue at The Old Vinyl Factory, a site that used to belong to EMI.
And of course Nipper is on gramophone needle tins, needle sharpeners, key rings, fabric, matchboxes, pins, and much more, there are whole books on thousands of items.
Oh, and he's on magnets - on my fridge for example ;-)

Today RCA's Nipper even has a little puppy brother, Chipper.

If you want to dive in a bit deeper, I recommend the last publication in my reference list.

Sources:
London Remembers - Nipper (buried)
London Remembers - Francis Barraud & Nipper
Wikipedia - English and German
Erik Østergaard - The History of Nipper and His Master's Voice
My London article from July 14, 2024
RCA - Nipper and Chipper
The story of 'Nipper' and the 'His Master's Voice' picture painted by Francis Barraud - compiled by Leonard Petts (1973 when Petts was archivist at EMI)

Comfy, Cozy Cinema 2024 - Holiday

Comfy, Cozy Cinema is a collaboration of Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.
They have a list of movies to watch for September and October. I was late to the game and not having subscribed to any streaming platforms, I probably wouldn't have been able to watch everything, anyway - but even though they had chosen "Skylark" for today, a movie I haven't even heard of, they couldn't watch it after all. So instead they watched "Bringing Up Baby" with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Now as much as I love Cary, that's not one of my favorite movies. It's alright, but a tad too hectic for my taste.
I chose a different Grant/Hepburn movie instead, "Holiday", also from 1938.
 

From Wikipedia: The poster art copyright is believed to belong
to the distributor of the film, Columbia Pictures,
the publisher of the film or the graphic artist.

The movie begins right after two of the characters come back from a winter holiday in Lake Placid where they have fallen madly in love with one another, so madly that they want to get married as soon as possible - Johnny and Julia. We are informed about that whirlwind romance during Johnny visiting his friends, the Porters ... sorry, the Potters (that's an inside joke you'll understand if you know the movie).

There's just one little catch. Johnny has been working since he was ten after losing his father and is longing for a break to enjoy it while he is still young (Lake Placid was his first holiday ever) and Julia is a rich New York socialite who is used to status and of course money.
Unfortunately she knows about Johnny's past while she seems to have forgotten to tell him how very rich her family is. He only finds out when he gets to the address she has given him, a huge estate. Thinking she must be working there, he even goes to the back entrance!
However, Johnny is not even that concerned about Julia's money at first because he's so sure she will follow him into his dream holiday while she didn't even bother mentioning her money because she has already planned out his future like a business deal. Clearly they haven't talked very much.

So - will Julia's father go along with this prospective son-in-law? Will he say yes or no? Will it help that Johnny is working in the financial sector at the moment and the Setons happen to have a bank? Most important, will they find a common goal and will their love be strong enough?

Julia's older sister Linda is sure of it. To her, stuck in a life that makes her feel like a prisoner, living in a house like a museum, Johnny is like a fresh wind, and when he tells her about his dream of taking a holiday once he has enough money for it and go back to work when he's old, she loves the idea and is excited for Julia to have found a man who will take her away from her old life.

Ned, the youngest, forced to give up his dreams of being a musician and bound to a desk at the bank instead, thanks to the questionable honor of being the only male descendant, is more cynical about all of it. Despite having chosen alcohol as his personal escape, he is amazingly clear about the others' feelings at times.

By now you have probably already guessed that Johnny and Linda are really the main characters. Although Linda does everything to convince Julia that this is an enormous chance for her and that she and Johnny belong together, we already know how this is going to end, how this probably had to end, with or without Linda.
Two people falling in love with beauty and charm, but with very different ideas of life and not able to compromise. Mind you, Johnny gives it a short try, but Julia and her father don't want to move a step, so he decides he can't do it after all. What could a real compromise even look like, torn between total freedom and work/money?

Now (back) to two people I have mentioned only shortly, but who are not only important being Johnny's best friends, they also make for some of the funniest scenes of the movie. Sorry if I have given you the idea so far that this is just a sad movie because it isn't, but it's also no pure screwball comedy.
The Porters ... uhm, Potters both teach at university. They are witty and uncoventional, and from when they enter the "museum" for the engagement announcement party on New Year's Eve (held against Linda's wishes as she had asked to be allowed to organize a small, cozy party in the playroom, the only room in the house that actually looks lived in and where a few of the most important scenes are set), they seem to be very unsure about the future of this relationship. They really just want the best for their friend.

This movie starts out so light and happy and optimistic for the young couple. Coming home from a holiday, freshly in love, nothing can go wrong.
Then they start to find out about each other's plans for the future, plans that don't match one bit.
Linda, on the other hand, is torn between the love for her sister and the wish to escape that sort of life. It made me wonder a little how she and Julia seemed to be getting along so well in the first place despite being so different.

My heart breaks a bit for Ned. He's already too far gone and doesn't have the courage to even try and escape even when offered a hand. I can just see him sitting at that desk in the bank, drinking his life away bit by bit.

Despite the developments, however, Johnny has a lightness through most of the movie and sometimes seems childlike which is pretty amazing given he has done nothing but work for so many years already.
I think it's what attracts Linda - I'm sure by now you have guessed the ending - who is trying to conjure up her own happier childhood in the playroom her mother insisted on having in the house (it makes you wonder what her mother was like and if her death made the family fall apart like that). Does she fall in love with Johnny as a person or with the idea of Johnny? I'm desperate for happy endings, at least in movies, and hope it's the first one. They sail off into the sunset together and live happily ever after. Not sure if they will ever be able to come back to see the family (poor Ned) because something tells me Daddy Seton and Julia are not too happy about this, but at least they have their friends by their side.

Did I sound as if I don't like the movie? Nothing could be more wrong. I love it and rewatch it regularly. Maybe it's Cary Grant's optimism and his tumbling (which he did himself, after all he started out touring with a troupe of acrobatic dancers), maybe it's that even the sad parts are not just sad and that there's hope, maybe it's that I didn't find any of the main characters really annoying, not even Julia and her father, or that I loved the Potters.
Maybe I shouldn't even try to find out and just keep loving it.

The movie was based on a Broadway play, by the way, and it is a remake of a movie from 1930 (which I just saw is on YouTube, so take a guess what I'll be watching next!).

Sparkle heart

Some weeks ago, I explained why my blog suddenly seems to be all hand embroidery (my arthritic thumb joint), but also talked about having a plan for bead embroidery.
Now I'm back with the first piece resulting from this plan, but you wouldn't even notice without my saying it because it's just a tad different from my previous pieces.

In the blog post about how my thumb influences my work at the moment, I also mentioned getting myself an embroidery set with a second stand and exchangeable hoops in different sizes.
This made me wonder why I didn't just do my bead embroidery pieces like that, too?
I glued my cabochons on like always, then I put some thinner fabric in the hoop and sewed through both the fabric and my embroidery foundation when making the bezel for the cabs.
Making pendants has always been my favorite and the smallest hoop I can use with the stand isn't that small, so the plan was to work on two pendants and then cut them off together to finish them.
You know what? That actually worked rather well and although it didn't mean my thumb joint could rest completely, I avoided at least some of the movements it hates. Now I would just have to see if the fabric would be thin enough not to mess up my edging.
Spoiler alert - it was.
I'm sure the idea isn't new, I didn't look it up before trying it out, but all that counts for me is that it works.

Here's the first pendant which I have finished now, my muse is still thinking about the other one.
I didn't use a cabochon for this one, but a marble heart. It's really smooth but not shiny and still has kind of a raw, unpolished look to it which I wanted to counterbalance with a smooth look for the bezel, with a dark sparkle for the edge as opposed to the subtle light sparkle of the marble (which doesn't show too well in the pictures).
For the bezel I chose grey seed beads with a light shimmer of gold, blue-grey Delicas for contrast, and a row of tiny silver seed beads, the edging is from black crystals, also with a shimmer of gold, in combination with real hematite rounds and matching seed beads.

This pendant is off. You might not even notice right away if you just give it a quick glance, but if you look closer, you see it.
The stone is asymmetrical and I didn't try to hide that.
So the bezel is asymmetrical as well and also the crystal edge. I had to place the bail so that the pendant would still hang right and the two beads at the top - a button bead and a faceted moonstone - only sit kind of in the center.
The back is a real surprise in its bright berry color. Turned like this, you can also see the asymmetry very clearly.

Well, aren't we all a little "off"? One eye bigger than the other one, one ear a bit higher, one foot larger, or what else there can be, and sometimes there's a surprise on the back ;-)
I hadn't planned it that way from the start, by the way, it just happened by following the stone with the beads, but the more I worked on it, the more I thought that I finally seemed to be embracing assymetry, something I have always been struggling with very much, but haven't given up on. I find it's easier going completely wild with freeform.
Does it still make me a little nervous? It sure does, but I like the idea of someone wondering what is different about this piece and finding out step by step and maybe embracing it, too.

Now I need to find the next step for the other "hoop" piece, so I can finish it.
There's a nagging feeling that I have painted myself into a corner with that one, but miracles happen, so I'm not going to give up hope just yet.

Comfy, Cozy Cinema 2024 - Dracula

Comfy, Cozy Cinema is a collaboration of Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.
They have a list of movies to watch for September and October. I was late to the game and not having subscribed to any streaming platforms, I probably wouldn't have been able to watch everything, anyway - but even though they have chosen "Practical Magic" for their own Halloween which I don't have, they left the choice open to others participating on that day.
So my personal choice for today is an all-time favorite of mine and - surpriiiiise - its "sibling". I'm talking about "Dracula" and "Drácula", both of them from 1931.
Are you confused?

Illustrator unknown; Distributed by Universal Pictures.
Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from the original image, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86980777

Quite a few years ago, I decided to add some horror genre classics to my DVD collection, for example "Nosferatu", "Phantom of the Opera", "The Wolf Man", "Frankenstein", and of course my beloved "Dracula" which I had watched on TV before when it was on, but for some weird reason didn't own yet.
I had already bought the "Tombstone Edition", so called after the tombstone shaped box with four movies including "Dracula" when I spotted another edition with - huh, two movies?
Maybe you know - I hadn't - that talkies were not always dubbed for the international market in the early days, but instead there were multiple-language versions made often using the same set, crew, and costumes, but different actors who spoke the desired language fluently. Most common were versions in English, French, German, and Spanish (since after the war, Germany has had a huge dubbing industry which I found is often unusual to American friends of mine, but that's a different story).

Many of the export versions got lost, but one of those that still exist is the Spanish "Drácula" version.
I couldn't resist checking it out and got that box as well.

Distributed by Universal Pictures.
Scan via brandonsiddall.wixsite.com., Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89223507

I don't think I really need to say a lot about the plot of "Dracula".
Renfield, a real estate agent, travels to a castle in Transylvania to close the lease of an abbey in England to Count Dracula. Unfortunately for him, Dracula is a vampire who makes Renfield his minion, travels to England with him, makes his home in the abbey and does what vampires do best, enchanting his victims and sucking their blood, until being stopped by Professor Van Helsing.

So let's talk a bit about the differences between the English and Spanish versions. There are documentaries, interviews, and articles about that, so the following will just reflect my personal opinion which I'm aware not everyone would agree with.

The movies are based on a successful stage play which is of course based on Bram Stoker's book. I have tried to read the book once, but I didn't make it through. That was a long time ago, maybe I should give it another try, but from what I read I'm not alone in having my problems with the style.
Of course the play had to cut out a lot and the same obviously goes for this movie, even more so for the English version which is only 75 minutes long compared to the 104 minutes of the Spanish version (the extra 29 minutes fill some gaps in the story)!
Apart from that the scripts are mostly very similar from what I can tell as I don't speak Spanish and rely on subtitles.

The English version was filmed during the day, the Spanish version on the same set (but not with the same crew) during nights with a smaller budget and a tighter shooting schedule. It is said, however, that the Spanish movie benefited from the crew being able to see the results of day filming and therefore refine their own work in regards to lighting, blocking, and some of the effects.

I'm by no means a film expert and therefore couldn't tell you exactly the reason why, but I agree that the Spanish version looks more polished, has more flow, and is more dramatic in some of the scenes than the English one which is said to look very stagey, much talk, very slow, and not much action. I wonder what half an hour more would have done to it. Not that you could call the Spanish one an action movie, mind you, some of the dialogue was also very slow.
That didn't seem unusual to me at all, though. This was 1931 and movies were not made the same way as today. I'm okay with a bit of overacting, extreme emphasizing of single words (for example Renfield in the Spanish movie), and dramatic pauses in sentences. I don't understand why anyone would even want to compare this movie with the ones that followed.

The actors and actresses didn't make much difference for me. Both Renfields were amazing in their insanity (although the Spanish one got more time to show it off), the English Mina was not as interesting as the Spanish Eva (who also got to wear more revealing costumes), but the others didn't even get much of a chance to shine, not even the professor (except Martin, the ward, he's fun).

Why do I still prefer the English version, though?
One name - Bela Lugosi. Carlos Villarías was alright when others didn't know yet that he was a vampire and he engaged in polite dialogue, but while Lugosi had this ominous yet threatening look throughout, Villarías just looked deranged in his vampire moments, with his eyes wide open and a weird grin on his face which looked more silly than scary to me.
Lugosi, who had also been Dracula in the stage play and had been so desperate for the movie role that he accepted a very low pay offer (originally Lon Chaney was intended for the lead role, but he died in 1930), set the standard for what Dracula still looks like in the mind of most people today, the hair, the cape, the stare, even the accent which had nothing to do with Dracula himself, but was Lugosi's own accent because he only spoke little English at the time.

There would be so much more to say, about the set for example whose elements also became part of the vampire lore, long staircases, coffins, crumbling castles, bats, wolves, and spiders (and their webs).
I have no idea, however, why the oppossums and armadillos in the catacombs of the Transylvanian castle didn't catch on ;-)
Or I could talk about the ending which is rather abrupt and quite anticlimactic.

Maybe you will want to watch the movies yourself sometime to find out more yourself.
If you do, let me know what you think!
I wonder what a German version would have been like.

P.S. Of course Bela Lugosi is staring down on my bed from my fan wall of bead loomed portraits ...

Nessie sighting!

When my brother was still small, he had three books he absolutely loved. I can't even say how often we had to look at them. They were about UFOs, ghosts, and monsters - and the last one was his #1 favorite.
That was fine by me because I have been just as fascinated myself since childhood.

My favorite cryptid is Nessie. I love the thought of her swimming and hiding in that beautiful loch and I wanted to see Loch Ness so badly for so long.
In 2009, I finally got the chance. The ex and I went to Edinburgh and it was clear one day would be reserved for a day trip to Loch Ness. It was gorgeous and it still makes me smile to think of that day, but also a little sad because I'm pretty sure I won't be able to get back there again. If you want to read a little about the day and see pictures, you are welcome to check out "Edinburgh Day 2".

I'm sure we would have seen Nessie that day if there hadn't been so many people! ;-)

Well, if Nessie didn't want to come to me then, I just had to make her come to me now. Embroidery to the rescue! :-D
See, she does exist!

P.S. Never embroider if you are upset, though. Here in Germany we also say "einen dicken Hals kriegen" (get a fat neck) if we are upset and I think that has translated to Nessie just a tad ;-)