Au Revoir, Noyerac

Due to visa issues and some other schedule shuffling, I ended up coming back to the States for a couple of weeks this fall, in between my longer stay in Dordogne and a final couple of weeks for conferences/visits in France and the Netherlands starting in early December.  So I won't be returning to our little village of "Noyerac" this year, but it's been a fun four months of fall.  Some end-of-trip memories: 

- Finishing up a dozen thread-lace snowflake ornaments for C and Y's French family Christmas celebration.  Blocking thread lace (previously soaked in simple syrup so they'll keep their shape when dried) requires a lot of pins. 

- The abundance of walnuts at harvest time in Perigord-Noir, a major walnut- and chestnut-growing region ("noyer" is French for "walnut tree", and "noix" or "nut" has the default meaning of walnut).  The local walnut liqueur has a lovely raisin-y flavor, and C used some of it to make one of the traditional  "tartes de noix" of the region.  What happened to the rest of the bottle?  Well, it was just sitting there in front of the fireplace...

-  The convenience store/market where you can pick up a cured leg of pork (unwrapped, hanging on a rack), a grave marker (totally serious.  The store has an accompanying garden/florist shop, and floral memorial tributes are apparently a big part of their business), or a jugful of local wine from a big box-barrel in one corner with a spigot on the bottom and a hand-lettered sign reading "Vin du pays, 1,5 euro/liter".  There are clean plastic one-liter water bottles in a tray on top of the box-barrel in case you forgot to bring your own jug.  I wonder if any of the wine is from the vendange or grape harvest that I saw going on at a nearby farm one weekend in September?

- Hikes with C and Y and the kids ("Peterama" and "Hanuman") in the hills and forests around Noyerac. Y made Peterama a bow and arrows from saplings (with nylon-cord bowstring, very inauthentic), and he's become pretty good with it, but you have to remind him not to point it at people.  Sometimes we'd find windfall walnuts and whack them with a stone on the road to crack them, and go on our way eating nutmeats. 


Here are Peterama and Hanuman on a knightly tour of a local castle after I left.  (Is knightly work daily or is it strongly weekly?)

Another Fine Furry Product

... from the Atelier Perigordien de la Couture Préhistorique.  (This is probably the highest level of activity in the manufacture of customized undressed-hide products that our village "Noyerac" has seen at any time in the last several thousand years.)

Y plays the bansuri or Indian bamboo flute, and he wanted a travel case for it so he could take it on fieldwork trips and play it in the caves.   (Since archaeological cave sites are generally not furnished with TV and internet, the fieldworkers have to amuse themselves somehow, right?)  Here's how it was made (photos courtesy of C).

1) We're not entirely sure whose skin this is: Y thinks it might be a goat or possibly a deer.  In any case, he thought the tail would serve well as a flap for the case, so that's how we laid it out and cut it.

2) The next step was closing the side and end seams, flesh side in, with blanket stitch.  (All the dental floss in the house has been commandeered by the Neanderthal Craft Club; I finally went to the supermarket and got some French dental floss so I could have some to use for its intended purpose on my teeth, instead of having to root around in my sewing bag for it. No, it's not a good idea to re-use a leftover piece from sewing for dental purposes or vice versa, although I won't say that the idea never occurs to me when I consider how much of the stuff we go through.)

3) The last part of my contribution was adding a snugging seam on the folded side to give the case a more symmetrical look as well as a closer fit for the flute.  Y finished it off with a thong and button for the flap.

And finally, continuing my previous practice of posting on the combined topics of skin sewing and baby quilts, here are a couple of photos of a project from last year that C took while we were visiting Frankfurt.

Generally, I like to use a somewhat more subtle form of documentation rather than making a separate solid-color label, but the backing and binding fabrics here are busy enough that you wouldn't really be able to read anything embroidered on them directly.

French Yarn: the Bande Dessinée version

In the spirit of the French taste for comic books or bandes dessinées for grownups as well as for kids, here is part of one of C's photo-comics of travel adventure featuring Susanna and me in Strasbourg:

Seeing France: The Protest-Marches-and-Yarn-Stores Tour

My sister Susanna had never been to France before this visit, although for some reason I thought she had (I knew she'd taken French in high school, and I apparently somehow transmuted that in memory into her actually visiting France).  But she took completely in stride (after a transatlantic flight, no less) my rather cavalier directions about taking the Metro to get to her train and finding a hotel to book us a room and so forth, so there may be some excuse for my thinking that she'd done it before.  Partly due to that misapprehension, I didn't bother much about arranging any canonical sightseeing or other standard foreign-visitor activities, so she ended up with a somewhat idiosyncratic tourist experience that C and I refer to as the "protest-marches-and-yarn-stores tour of France".

Susanna got to see something of Bordeaux, Strasbourg and Paris, plus a fair bit of French countryside from the trains connecting them, and more than enough interiors of train stations during our long waits to find out how la grève would affect our tickets and travel schedules.  There were several of the strikers' "days of action" during her visit, so I think she encountered at least one protest demonstration and/or its aftereffects in every city.   Bordeaux was having a day-long protest of at least, I would say, scores of thousands of people, so we wandered through town until we found the march and followed along with them for a bit, dropping out now and then to do a little shopping or tour a cathedral or something.  There were riot cops everywhere, but (or perhaps hence) the protest didn't seem to drift towards anything that I'd call "unrest".  It was a bit odd, in fact, to find a massive social protest right in the middle of a busy urban downtown going about its business, and casually incorporating the social protest into its business, with protesters taking a break from the march now and then to drop in to a cafe for lunch or a drink.  I don't know whether any local businesses were offering "specialités de la grève" to mark the occasion, but I wouldn't be surprised.  The Strasbourg demonstrations that C saw were apparently a bit more confrontational, with youths overturning dumpsters and so on, but personally I never saw anything that looked like real instability.

So although I feel a bit frivolous admitting it, I have to say that the protests didn't radicalize our perspective to the extent of deflecting us from our shopping.  Highlights of said shopping included a  nice store in Strasbourg where C and I sampled some French yarn, and a visit---well, more like a pilgrimage, really---well, to be honest, a couple of pilgrimages---to this place in Paris, which is world-famous for its elite merchandise and design (and prices to match).   One of its idiosyncrasies is selling yarns by weight rather than in prepackaged skeins or balls; I picked up some really nice silk and baby alpaca blends and matching beads that have been partially metamorphosed into a scarf, and I'm now trying to figure out what to do with the rest.

Discovering the Downside, Sort Of: The Strikes (yarn supplies fortunately unaffected)

You may have heard that they've been having some social unrest here in France, with oil refineries shut down and long lines at gas stations and so forth, and periodic "days of action" with work stoppages ("la grève") across a large range of industries.  More power to them; but I admit I felt kind of anxious on finding out that train  strikes of unpredictable duration and severity were planned for the very three-week period when C and I were booked to attend conferences in Strasbourg and Frankfort and Paris, and in addition I was expecting my sister "Susanna"* to visit from the States and travel around with me for about ten days.  For a while it seemed likely that civil society might break down on the scale of May 1968, with riots and economic paralysis and serious instability lasting for months.  Oooops.

What actually happened was pretty mild by comparison, although coping with the travel arrangements was a bit of a nightmare: you never knew until the evening before your scheduled train trip whether the scheduled train would actually be running that day, and how or whether you were going to get to your intended destination if it wasn't.  So we had to make some adjustments to the original plans; for instance, Susanna ended up never making it down to our village in the Dordogne at all, but met up with me in nearby (okay, not all that nearby) Bordeaux, and we rendezvoused with C in Strasbourg.  Fortunately, I decided to go to Bordeaux on the same day that Susanna flew in, because it would have been hard to get out of the village on the succeeding days due to train cancellations.  In fact, the trains were canceled on the day I traveled too, but at least there were a few buses laid on to replace them, and I managed to figure out which bus I could get and scramble a few clothes and my laptop into an attache case in time to get down to the station.

While waiting for the bus I was fairly pessimistic about my chances of success, since I wasn't entirely sure whether the bus schedule might change unexpectedly or where it was supposed to stop or whether I was supposed to have a ticket for it (we have no actual train or bus station in our village, just a whistle-stop location along the train tracks, so like the inhabitants of the famed village of Chelm, if we want to leave town we have to go to another town to get our ticket for departure.  In practice, we just buy our tickets from the train conductor en route, when the train's not on strike).  But in fact it couldn't have been simpler: I stood by the side of the road next to the train "station", and a few minutes after the scheduled time a bus pulled up and stopped, and I hopped up to the driver and said "Est-ce que ce car va à Bordeaux St-Jean?", and it was, so off we went.

It took about four hours on the bus to complete the trip that the train makes in less than two and a half hours (hence the remark about Bordeaux not being all that nearby), since the roads in the countryside are narrow and winding and not very conducive to fast traffic.  Not that I'm complaining, mind you: there I was rolling through picturesque village squares and harvest fields with the golden October afternoon light on the golden Perigord limestone, looking at swans on little rivers and flowers in little gardens, and enjoying being on a bus again.  And when we finally got to Bordeaux, there was no way to buy a ticket for the ride I'd just completed and nobody to collect it if I did buy it, so hey, free bus ride.


I must say that all the French train personnel I encountered seemed invariably patient, helpful and friendly in all the turmoil of travel during la grève, which may not exactly match up with our expectations or recollections of French train personnel in other circumstances, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em.  The major syndicats or labor unions that were organizing the strikes seemed to be doing their best to inconvenience the government without pissing off the people too much, and the friendly attitudes helped with that.  As far as I can tell, the French in general were fairly sympathetic to the strikers in the first place, since almost everybody is upset about the proposed (and now enacted) reforms to the universal pension plan that inspired the strikes.   The administration points out that the pension plan is underfunded so there have to be some adjustments somewhere to balance the budget so it makes sense to raise the retirement age.  The syndicats respond that the average French worker is unemployed by the time they get to retirement age anyway (unemployment levels hit the oldest workers and the youngest workers hardest in France), so raising the retirement age just means for most people more years with no earnings, and they should balance the budget some other way.  Disagreement -> impasse -> la grève.   The collective action seems to have dwindled back down to normal at this point, though; many people are still seriously disgruntled but nobody's doing much about it.  For now. 




* Note: All pseudonyms in this blog (with the exception of the unimaginatively named "C" and "Y") were selected by the individuals whose names they conceal, so if you want to know why they're called that, you'll have to ask them.

Tools and Projects

In the intervals of exploring caves and walking in the woods and shopping at the market and practicing  my cuisine du Perigord and even doing some work, I've got a few needlework projects finished (including ones on my Ravelry page and not posted here).

To start with, here are a couple of objects that were made (strictly according to authentic stone-tool techniques) for me, not by me, for use with future projects and just general coolness factor.  One bone needle (which I think will become a yarn needle for joining crocheted project pieces) with deer sinew thread, and one flint point.

And here are some things I sewed out of deerskin for Y, who added the bone buttons and deerskin thongs that make them look really nifty.  My contribution was a lot less historically informed, relying not only on steel needles and dental floss but also on "ficelle alimentaire" or nylon kitchen string (for things like trussing poultry or tying bouquet garni: food safe and resistant to heat and moisture, which makes it a good sewing fiber for skins). 

(1) Ruler case and (2) tool bag, before and after having red ochre applied to the seams:

And in keeping with the same early-human ethos of using scraps of things you've already got to construct useful other things, here's one of my patchwork baby quilts made from T-shirts of more sentimental than sartorial value.  The backing fabric is quite an eye-popper, huh?  The recipient is a tropical-climate chick, but nonetheless her parents may have to keep this thing locked in the car trunk as a sunny-day beach blanket, because it could scream the house down if allowed indoors.  But I still like the flamingos.

Paleolithic Implements

Spending a few months living and working with a colleague (C) and her family in a small-town vacation home in the south of France has basically no downside.  Well, okay, we are a bit isolated from the center of things, and it takes a few hours by train to get to anything resembling a big city.  But we have quite a good supermarket and a semiweekly farmers' market with lots of local specialties, so we get by just fine.  Especially considering that local specialties here in the Perigord-Noir region include pate de foie gras and truffles and cheeses and mushrooms and chestnuts and walnuts and grapes and figs and apples and tomatoes and pretty much any other kind of temperate-zone fruit or vegetable you can think of, many of which we can just pick up off the roadside trees and bushes when we go out for a hike.  With picturesque medieval buildings and breathtaking views over the valley of the Dordogne and fresh French bakery breads and our own little fruit orchard, what's not to love?

Of course, some people might object to the bones, pelts and flints all over the house, but that's not a bug, it's a feature.  The reason we're here in this gorgeous back-of-beyond village in the first place is that it's smack in the center of an unusual region characterized by karst topography resulting from the dissolution of layers of carbonate rock, which is geologist-speak for the fact that the whole area is as riddled with holes as a Swiss cheese.  The immense number of caves made the region a very desirable residence for various populations of early humans (in fact, looking at some of the natural caves and so-called "troglodytes" or caves enhanced with walls and stonework by human inhabitants in historical times, I wonder whether this area might have had a higher population density in the days of some of the cave-dwellers than it does now!). 

Consequently, the place is a magnet for paleoanthropologists who study early humans and their activities, including my colleague's husband Y.  Studying the activities of early humans naturally involves reconstructing the activities of early humans, which can be a bit far removed from the activities of contemporary humans, but often turns out to be surprisingly handy or just plain cool.  There may not be much of a career future for professional flint knappers nowadays, but when you're out for a hike and happen to need a cutting edge for some purpose, it's remarkable how convenient it can be to have someone in the group who's able to spot a good piece of flint by the side of the trail and shear off a flake of it with a hammerstone (and those flint flakes are pretty darn sharp even before they're professionally knapped).

But today's culture of technical specialization means that even many skilled modern flint knappers don't know much about sewing, which is how I got recruited into the Neanderthal Craft Club.   It turns out that raw deerskin is comparatively easy to sew (although it was a bit painful while I was doing my first project, a deerskin thimble, but now that I've got the thimble it's much better).  For lack of the proper tools I've been sewing the skins with a steel crewel needle and waxed dental floss, but I've been promised my own stash of sinew and a bone needle with sharpening flint as soon as Y finds a good piece of sandstone to grind it.  I've also been promised an authentically prehistorically-crafted fossilized mammoth bone crochet hook (size G), which I feel confident will automatically make me the coolest person at the January Meetings Knitting Circle even if somebody is successfully proving the Riemann hypothesis in the same room at the same time.

And in fact, I'm finding out that there are things modern needleworkers can learn from the Neanderthal Craft Club, besides how to make things out of untanned deerskin.  For example, I was losing my temper yesterday evening over the absence of a fabric marking pen or tailor's chalk or any other substance  that would let me make visible but removable and non-damaging marks on knit fabric to trace with chain stitch embroidery (T-shirt baby quilt project, pix may follow).  Even if I knew where to get a  marking pen or tailor's chalk in a French village, I wouldn't know the French word to ask for it.  Tonight,  though, it occurred to me that the red ochre (hydrated iron oxide pigment, found all over the place in the form of dirt) that the early humans used in lots of their paintings seems to show up pretty well on a lot of surfaces.  And although Y tends to leave a trail of the stuff wherever he goes, it generally seems to wash off with little trouble.  So I borrowed a chunk of ochre from Y's toolbox, mixed it with water to form a sludgy liquid the way I've seen Y do it, and applied it to the fabric with a pointed stick to trace my embroidery lines.  What do you know: it works great.

(10 November: Corrected post title.)