Comfy, Cozy Cinema 2024 - Blithe Spirit

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.

I do know "Blithe Spirit", though, which is the choice for this week.
I'm talking about the 1945 movie made after Noël Coward's play from 1941 which he wrote in six days with the intent to give the British people "a distraction from the war, a celebration of British life, and a reason to continue to fight for this life", and which was really popular both in the London West End and on Broadway although some critics did not think ghosts and death were an appropriate topic at the time.
There have been numerous performances of the play over many years.
Also, there is a 2020 movie remake, but it doesn't seem to be very popular. I didn't see it myself.

So, what is "Blithe Spirit" about (major spoilers ahead, so you maybe shouldn't read on if you haven't watched it, but would like to!)?

Enter Charles and Ruth Condomine.
Charles is a writer, Ruth is his second wife, his first wife Elvira died some years ago.
As research for a new novel, they invite a local medium, Madame Arcati, and Dr. and Mrs. Bradman to hold a séance. None of them really believe in séances and they are prepared to be amused rather than convinced that there is a spirit world.
After dinner, Madame Arcati starts contacting her guiding spirit Daphne, a little girl, and the small table is moving violently (as if we don't know the usual tricks how that is done, right?). It becomes even worse, however, after Daphne's voice is speaking through Madame Arcati who then passes out and falls to the floor.
And then Charles is hearing a voice that no one else can hear, so he claims it was just a joke. The dinner is over, the guests are gone, but one "guest" has just arrived - it's Elvira who has come back as a ghost saying Charles has called her.
Now the problems really begin. Only he can see Elvira and Ruth is by no means amused thinking he has just drunk too much until Elvira starts moving things around to prove she is really there.
Ruth calls on Madame Arcati telling her that she needs to get rid of Elvira again who keeps taunting her. Meanwhile, Elvira is trying to take Charles into the other world with her, but her plan goes wrong and instead Ruth dies leaving Charles being caught between two dead wives who are fighting all the time.
Madame Arcati does everything to send them both back into the other world, but all attempts fail - until she finds out that it was actually the maid Edith who had summoned them inadvertently and puts her in trance to send the spirits away which seems to have worked, but soon it becomes clear they are still very much there.
So Charles follows Madame Arcati's advice to go away on a long vacation, but has a fatal accident and ends up as a spirit himself, united with both of his wives.

That ending, which Coward was not happy about, is different from that of the play in which Charles is leaving.
Honestly, though, I think he deserves to be stuck with Ruth and Elvira, and I also think they all deserve to be stuck with one another because I don't really like any of them.
And actually that is what Coward intended, to make a story about death and ghosts that wouldn't upset people even in wartime, simply because none of them is nice.

Charles is best described by the title. He is a "blithe spirit" and seems to get used to the thought of Elvira hanging around quite quickly, even despite her behavior towards Ruth, he really just cares about himself not getting annoyed by it.
I wonder if I like him even less because I never liked Rex Harrison.
Ruth is effective and trying to hold things together, but seems rather dispassionate to me even when worried and upset. It has a bit of British stiff upper lip, you have a problem, you don't show how much it gets to you, you deal with it.
It makes me wonder what ever made them get together in the first place.
Well, and Charles and Elvira together - they weren't such a wonderful couple either which you learn quickly when they are trying to outdo the other by telling them with whom they cheated them during their marriage, constantly provoking each other.

So why do I love this movie, anyway?
It's Madame Arcati of course.
A while ago I read on a page something like "Margaret Rutherford may not be familiar to you from movies" and my first thought was that they can't live in Germany where her Miss Marple movies are still on TV regularly.
I love Margaret Rutherford and she was simply perfect for this role which she also had in the play, by the way.
Many people say she absolutely stole the show and she did.
While it's a pity that she was typecast for the eccentric old lady (not speaking about the story of her life which is sad and quite strange at the same time) as I'm sure she would have been capable of much more , it's how I got to know her as a child and I just love it how she filled those roles.

Madame Arcati is not what you may immediately think of when you hear "medium". Yes, she is a bit crazy, but instead of the turban you see so often there is a slightly messy hairdo, instead of an embroidered kaftan or dramatically flowing garments there are comfy granny dresses, and there's none of the stereotype drama at all.
Actually, she's rather down-to-earth for someone who deals with the supernatural.

So she mentions that little Daphne has just had a cold, poor child (spirits can catch a cold?), she loves bicycling (as did Rutherford herself) wearing one of the wonderful "Miss Marple capes" (I'd love to have one of those), she has a cozy little cottage instead welcoming her guests in a dark room with long curtains, and she's genuinely interested in solving the problem with the ghosts instead of dropping mysterious hints.
Thinking about it, she reminds me of a Swabian grandmother in the olden days, setting out to get things done, only that things are not a garden, dirty floor or making a substantial meal, but to deal with spirits. She doesn't give up to the end and she does it with so much expression and physical input and neverending optimism that she will be working this out.
I'd hire her for a séance in a second just to see that in person!

Now comes the big overthinking that I can't stop.
I wish they had explained the part with Edith, the maid. How did she summon those two ladies? Did she remember what happened? Did she avoid Madame Arcati from now on? Did she find a job with nicer people? What happened to the house? Did Madame Arcati keep trying to send all three of them back now? Did she tell anyone about what happened? Did she ever talk to the Bradmans about it?
I could keep going ;-)

Seriously now, though. Witty dialogue yes or no, without Margaret Rutherford I'm sure I would have dropped out after ten minutes.
Maybe I'll try to watch the German remake from the 60s sometime to see if or how that changes my feeling towards the whole plot and the people.

The hen and the egg

A few weeks ago, we visited the local pottery "Töpferei auf dem Jackenhof" where I also got my happy yellow mugs last year (and yes, I still love them so much and use them all the time). Although I was just the company this time, I couldn't resist to get at least a little something, in this case a small vase in a beautiful blue and shaped like an egg with a broken off top.
I showed a picture because I have friends who also love pottery and one of them said she wondered what hatched from it.
Now I found out! It's a little surprising, though, I had expected something bigger ...

Whenever I'm learning a new technique, my goal is to try and combine it with my previous techniques.
Obviously bead embroidery is the easiest one to mix with hand embroidery. Just throw some extra beads on there, right?
Like so many of my pieces, this tiny hen was completely unplanned. I had a small piece of linen and wondered I would like working without a frame. The inspiration to make a hen came from a cartoon I had seen shortly before.

Of course there are things I would do differently now. I would have planned in to pad the hen, so the silver edging wouldn't sit on the top even if they are size 15 beads. I would not have used the thicker felt to stabilize the linen and my hen would have got a beak that's more visible. My only excuse for making it ecru is that it was late at night and I just grabbed something without thinking.
After all this was just meant as a small experimental piece originally, I hadn't even thought it would come this far.

I definitely learned something from it. Maybe I'll find a pin small enough to put on the back and pin my hen to the collar of my denim jacket. Or maybe you have an idea?

Comfy, Cozy Cinema 2024 - Kiki's Delivery Service

I'm not a huge anime fan. My first experience with anime was "Heidi, Girl of the Alps" (Original: "Arupusu no shôjo Haiji), the 1974 series about the adventures of little Heidi after Johanna Spyri's books which first aired in German TV from 1977 to 1978. We were not used to this style of animation, especially the extreme display of emotions shown in the eyes and often huge mouths, and yet we were also kind of fascinated by it.
Somehow the style tends to overwhelm me at times and sometimes not at all. I didn't have a problem with Heidi which I'm quite sure I watched with my little brother, but I never got into Dragon Ball for example.
Only years later I watched a documentary about the worldwide Heidi phenomenon and learned from it, among other things, how much research the studio had put into this series. Included was, by the way, also Hayao Miyazaki, one of the Studio Ghibli founders ...

... which makes a nice bridge to the movie I want to talk about. Comfy Cozy Cinema 2024 is a collaboration of Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs. They watch movies and talk about them and this week they chose "Kiki's Delivery Service" by Studio Ghibli.
Why don't you visit them to see what they think about it?

I know two versions, the anime movie from 1989 (Original: Majo no takkyûbin) and the live action movie from 2014. Actually, I had never seen all of the anime, but caught the live action version one sleepless night (which was the reason I watched it at all, I'm usually not a fan of live action remakes, either) which made me finally get the original.

I don't want to talk about production, direction, critiques, you can read up on that yourself. Here's just how I feel about the movie.
"Kiki's Delivery Service" is about independence, about finding your way in life, finding out about yourself and your skills, trying to overcome self-doubt and obstacles, and to adapt to new surroundings and new people, those that you click with right away, those you have to get to know closer before you like them, and those who don't like you or whom you don't like - sometimes for no reason at all.

Kiki is a young witch who follows the tradition of witches having to leave their home once they turn 13 and live independently in a town for one year.
The only magic power that Kiki has is being able to fly on a broom and she's not even perfect at it.
Nevertheless she's ready to fly into the unknown on her mother's broom, accompanied by her black cat Jiji, and ends up in the metropolis Koriko (which is a mixture of different cities in a 50s flair, actually Miyazaki travelled to Sweden for research and used a lot of it for Koriko).

Koriko doesn't necessarily receive Kiki with arms wide open, but there are people who welcome her, one of them being Osono who runs a bakery together with her husband and offers her the spare room to stay after Kiki helps bringing a customer something she forgot at the bakery.
This also gives her the idea to open a delivery service.

From there on, the movie is about Kiki meeting more new people who influence her life in some way or the other, Tombo, the neighbor, who is fascinated by all things flying including her, an old lady called Madame who is very nice to her, Ursula who lives in the woods and is an artist, but also the old lady's granddaughter who seems very rude and ungrateful to Kiki after she delivers a pie for her birthday which her grandmother and Kiki had put a lot of work into.

In fact, Kiki is quite easily annoyed with people which I think is absolutely normal for a teenager. She learns that you have to give people a chance before judging them and for example becomes friends with Tombo after she had rejected him at first, but it's not easy for her to do and causes such self-doubt in her that it even makes her lose her power.
Not only can't she understand Jiji anymore who has been like her alter ego, who has been just as easily annoyed as she - for example at the neighbor cat Lili - and has been the perfect conversation partner for her to bounce her thoughts, ideas, and doubts off, but she also loses her ability to fly which makes her doubt herself even more.

Kiki's spirits lift a little when Ursula invites her to her cabin for a sleepover and tells her there was a time when she had self-doubts as well, but that you can overcome them if you try hard and then the magic can happen again.
For Kiki, that moment comes when she sees the accident of an airship on TV which puts Tombo in mortal danger. She wants to help him so much that her flying power comes back, not easily, but just in time.

In the end, you see how Kiki has become a part of Koriko, flying with Tombo who perfected the "air bicycle" he built. She writes a letter home to tell her parents that the year will not be a problem for her because she's really happy in her town.

The most important question, however, is if she can understand Jiji again (you know, me and cats), but alas, she can't. It made me think of the Mary Poppins book in which the youngest babies understand the language of the animals and even of the sun, but then they grow older and suddenly it's gone because they have entered a new phase in life.
Kiki doesn't need Jiji anymore to talk to him and Jiji has made a life with Lili, but that doesn't mean they are not friends anymore.

The movie may seem a bit slow, maybe that was why I enjoyed it very much. There is no big action except for the rescue mission at the end, but in each scene something important happens, each one is a small step in the journey of Kiki growing up.
I also love the little details, like the way Kiki's dress is shoved up a bit and her shoes are off when she's cleaning Ursula's floor as exchange for Ursula helping her with an item from her first delivery or the way Kiki put clothespins on her wide sleeves, so they are not getting in the way when she helps Madame with preparing the old wood oven for the pie because the electric oven was broken (only one example for the mix of tradition and modern life, by the way, just like Kiki's traditional black witch dress combined with a big red hair bow).

I want to mention the live action movie as well, but much shorter as the message itself is the same.
I had the feeling they tried to make it a bit more modern, showing how Kiki interacts with some of the other girls or how she has to face more intolerance from some of the people because she's a witch.
For example, she's getting suspected of having hexed the beloved baby hippo in the zoo which made it lose its tail and get very sick. The rescue mission in this movie is taking the hippo to a professor living on an island despite a storm, so he can heal it (balancing the missing tail out with a watch ... what?). That story was really strange to me, not mentioning that the CGI hippo didn't look good.
There's no Ursula, but a singer, that part kind of worked, but wasn't really exciting, either.
Kiki herself was not as bad as some people seem to think, but for me she missed the sweetness of the anime Kiki and at first reminded me more of a young wannabe goth witch brat of modern times.
Tombo and his friends were a bit too slapstick for my taste, but they didn't take up that much of the movie.
Nevertheless, it was quite a fun movie for one sleepless night viewing and I think the message came still across.

Splints

It's a bit weird that I strain my thumb joint working on something that is supposed to be helping my thumb joint, I know. Actually, however, it started to feel a bit better most of the time and I took enough breaks to not make it any worse. Maybe I'm learning after all, who knows?

I'm talking about the splints I got. I don't like wearing them, but if I have to wear them at night, they might as well look nice ... because who's asleep at night. Maybe it's just the feeling they are different.
It's funny, I chose black ones because they are the least flashy and then I suddenly decide they need some color, a lot of it.

I just learned fly stitch, but you can't see much of it here as I had so many shorter floss leftovers and couldn't stop myself. I wish I could grow flowers like that for real 😉
At the time I hadn't planned to embroider the strap as well or I would have tried to make it match a bit better.
The length of the strap obviously asked for some kind of vines or rambling roses, though, (even if they are rambling sideways), and still being obsessed with French knots and having acquainted myself with the feather stitch as well, the roses sounded perfect.
These actually used up all the colorful leftovers I had so far - you have to keep in mind I only just began this journey quite recently - and thus my Swabian heart was very happy 😂

I definitely wanted something different for the second splint, though, and since the splints are not specifically for the right and left hand, the strap on the right hand is mostly on my palm, so I had to come up with something that would work with the other side. Of course I can still embroider the second side of each splint if I should ever feel the urge for it.

Are you surprised that my mind went to cats right away? It's possible that des Dekan's funny little bunny feet were an additional inspiration.

What do we love about cat feet? Beans!

It was a good thing that I gave the one on the left a few black spots because that way it wasn't a problem to give it two more - after poking my finger with the needle for the third time without noticing before I had already bled on the paw!
Can you believe I actually wondered why there were two different pinks (the red had lightened to a dark pink on the floss) on the paw? 😂

Then I needed something for the part of the strap that's showing - another cat of course!
That one was really tough to do, especially the parts where I stitched over stitches over difficult background, so she's by no means perfect, but it was good practice and I think she's still rather cute.
If you wonder why the eyes are a bit shifty, sigh, what can I say - more blood I had to hide, but this time I pretty much ran out of the dark grey floss of which I only had half the usual length. I like to think kitty is winking at me.

I'll let you know if I ever do something to the other sides, but I have to admit that it was tough as this isn't exactly an easy surface to embroider onto, so I don't see myself doing it very soon if at all. There were all the little black bits sticking up, some parts were padded too thickly to even get through at all, some were a bit hard to get to or I could only get through using pliers.
Also there are so many other things to do!

The thumb and I

More embroidery?
You may wonder if that is a new craft/hobby frenzy. It wouldn't be unusual to go wild with a new technique that you have just discovered for yourself. I'm no exception although I have always tried to keep it mixed up, but it's hard not to succumb the excitement and adventure of new experiments ;-)

There is another reason for this flood of embroidery, however.
I have rhizarthrosis in both thumb joints, not that bad yet in the right one, but the left one has really been acting up for a while now. I'm right handed, but my left hand has to do a lot of the grabbing, holding and keeping tension which seems to be the harder part.
That meant more breaks, much shorter crafting sessions, days completely without crafting, and some things are right out at the moment, wire for example, and even beading makes my thumb move in the wrong way. It's frustrating and my friends are probably sick of my whining by now.
I haven't tried out yet how well bead looming will be working for me right now, but I have a plan for bead embroidery - well, and then there's the hand embroidery.

I quickly found out that holding my hoop is a bad idea, actually that's what started my thumb being angry at me. I know I should have taken more breaks a long time ago, but it's really hard for me to stop myself once I'm going.
When I purchased my course for the silk shading flower, though, it said I needed a stand for being able to use both hands freely, and that made a big difference.

It doesn't mean that I can have as long sessions as I used to, it also doesn't mean there isn't any pain at all, but there's no doubt, hand embroidery is the easiest technique for me to do at the moment.
So I got myself a second stand with different sizes of exchangeable hoops and used the smallest of them to make several pendants which couldn't be more different from one another.

1. At my jewelry forum, the Jewelry Artisans Community, we currently have a challenge with the topic "Music" going and I made a happy little musical pendant for it. Don't try to sing the tune ;-)

2. This was an experiment that came from a different idea that is still lingering in the back of my head.
I'm getting abstract 60s vibes from it which is helped by the shape, and I have to say it was fun making it as I could just let loose.

3. Yeah, not a big surprise here. We all knew there would be at least one cat pretty quickly during my embroidery journey, I just didn't know it would become kind of a caricature until I couldn't resist making really big eyes.

4. The last pendant has a backstory.
I have mentioned before that I live in Göppingen which is situated at the bottom of the Hohenstaufen, one of the "Drei Kaiserberge" (literally translating to "Three Emperor Mountains"), together with the Rechberg and Stuifen.
They get their name from the Hohenstaufen dynasty - the "Staufer" - of which Frederick Barbarossa is probably the most famous. They had a castle on the Hohenstaufen, but there is only very little of the foundation walls left (it is said that the city castle of Göppingen was partially built from stones from the castle ruins).
This is my hommage to our mountains and their long history.
Of course they don't lie that close together in reality (pictures under the link above) as in our city logo ...

... or in my pendant.

So yeah, I guess you will have to put up with more embroidery in the near future.
I will not drop the wire and the beads, though, and hope ice packs, splints, and more rest will be able to help me with that!

The mysterious decorator

I wonder who decorated this tree in the winter forest? We might find out if we followed the footprints in the snow, but sometimes a mystery is quite nice, isn't it?

Yes, I know it's early, but I got my metallic threads and just had to try them out on something!

Organizing

I'm not a natural organizer. I have storage boxes, but items tend to mysteriously move to temporary boxes, to drawers, to my nightstand - it is normal to have wire spools on your nightstand, isn't it? - my "working box" and to several parallel universes, no doubt.

When I started embroidery, I kept my newly acquired stash in the envelopes and/or boxes it arrived in because I had no idea yet what to put where and how.
Luckily the Royal School of Needlework sends their kits in big boxes with compartments!

So after I had finished my first kit, the box was empty and ready to get filled up with all my stash.
I really hadn't expected that the floss lot I had bought would take up that much space, I just managed to fit it in and this is about three or four layers high.
For now, there's not much left that there wasn't space for, and once I will have finished my second kit, another box will be waiting to get filled up.

Can someone help me do the same with my wires now? ;-)