plenty and crows

Trevor posted this on the "Plenty" blog about my window and me,
he is a lovely guy with a great shop that i have talked about here before
and
Northern Exposure is one of my all time favorite TV shows


One of the wonderful things about Plenty is that I get to surround myself with great food and goods that delight me. And these seem to attract people that delight me as well.

One of those people is Gillian Gravenor, a fantastic textile artist, seamstress, and creator of extraordinary things. She came into the store asking for a fair quantity of whole star anise and I imagined that she was making up a batch of something quite exotic. Gillian was using it in collages she was creating on cards. Soon we were selling those cards and I feel so grateful for everything Gillian brings in from her studio. We have some of her curio boxes in the store - whimsical match boxes filled with curated urban detritus - they are little palm sized galleries. We also have some of her tea cozies made with repurposed sweaters and in a month we’ll be bringing back her Christmas stockings (made from sweaters that are now fantastic as stockings but may have been a bit garish in their earlier form). Gillian has also brought in vintage aprons that she’s collected and aprons that she’d made from vintage tablecloths and repurposed fabric. Last Fall we featured a display of felted sculptures that are difficult to adequately describe but gathered together they looked to me like whimsically coloured sea squirts or perhaps a garden of fantastical squash.

Recently Gillian brought in an incredible wall hanging (pictured above) that features a crow made from shiny black buttons. It is currently featured in one of the display windows at the front of the store with some fabric crows, some incredible crow tea cozies, and some of Gillian’s aprons.

The wall hanging reminds me of one of my favourite Northern Exposure episodes that features a Raven Festival where Cicily was decorated with ravens instead of Christmas ornaments and Marilyn (Elaine Miles) shared a legend about ravens:

A long time ago, the raven looked down from the sky and saw that the people of the world were living in darkness.
The ball of light was kept hidden by a selfish old chief.
So the raven turned himself into a spruce needle and floated on the river where the chief’s daughter came for water.
She drank the spruce needle.
She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy, who was the raven in disguise.
The baby cried and cried until the chief gave him the ball of light to play with.
As soon as he had the light, the raven turned back into himself.
The raven carried the light into the sky.
From then on, we no longer lived in darkness.

I’m a fan of crows and ravens - intelligent and enigmatic and I think generally they’ve been given a bad wrap. Crows were recently the focus of a Nature of Things episode. The episode demonstrated that some crows are adept at using tools, they have complex social lives, and they can recognize the facial features of individual people. Of course, historically in many cultures they’ve been thought of not so much as bringers of light but more as harbingers of darkness, death, and doom. That’s my lead-in to mention a Halloween event that’s happening along Fort Street this Friday and Saturday: