Correct Me If I'm Wrong:-) Semi-Bilingual Sewing

I added a new spanish word*
to my knowledge-base-
while enjoying the historic
pictorial street signs I
encountered,
walking through Madrid

When we share an enchantment for sewing, whether or not we speak the same language, we still want to communicate about our passion with the needle, the thread and the tela.

I may not be fluent in languages other than English, but it doesn't keep me from using them when I get the chance. Sometimes, of course, I mess up. But I can communicate with others, and often follow simple, or even more complicated, directions using pictures and words in context. For any of you who've ever helped a child learn to read, that's how you begin to read, or read things that are beyond your level. And, of course, it's how we can continue to learn as adults.

My spanish isn't fluent, but I use it whenever I get the chance. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, many people speak spanish, and it's just plain fun to make the world my language professor. Who knows when I'll get a chance to shop for material in a Latin American country or go back for another visit to Spain?

Here are a few words and phrases I find useful when it comes to chatting about sewing in spanish.

(la) costura(1): sewing, couture, fashion
costura, puntadas (2):seam
sin costura: seamless
sentar las costuras: press the seams
(el) bordado: embroidery
* bordadores: Embroiderers (profession)

alta costura: high fashion
la costura italiana: Italian fashion

At the Store

yarda: yard (of fabric)
tejido,tela, fieltro: fabric
material de uso o de adorno: material/ material for use or adornment

Tools of the Trade

maquina de coser: sewing machine

las tijeras de costura: sewing scissors
(el) hilo: thread
ua aguja e/y hilo: a needle and thread
hilo de algodón/nylon: cotton nylon thread
hilo de hebra: silk thread
hilo de bordar: embroidery thread/silk/floss

necesser de costura: sewing kit
el cesto de la costura: sewing basket

The Process
to sew or do needlework: hacer costura (also referred to simply as labor - as we might say in English when we say I'm taking my work to do while I'm listening at the meeting)

ester a punt de reventar pro las costuras: When a garment is bursting at the seams (hummmm.... how could that happen? :-)
Enctonces/ Then we need to.....
soitar una costura: let out the seams

confección: dressmaking

Another nice sample from Collins Spanish English dictionary that puts a few words together

Una chaqueta con cordoncillo azul en las costar: A jacket piped with blue at the seams

     (Náut)   seam

Listening Practice

Mi Tiempo Entre Costuras/ My Time Between the Seams (a Video Log/Vlog) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b41HNA_E3b0

My Time Between The Seams - I'd love to find an episode of this show to watch!

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-11/spain-beautiful-seamstress-another-era-has-created-sewing-revival

~ ~ ~

Resources

http://dictionary.reverso.net/spanish-english/costura

Highway Five (haiku)

Central Valley Way

Fruit, Nuts, Cotton, and Chavez.

Vital world food source.

 ~ ~ ~

Resources

Cesar Chavez Short Bio of an Important Labor Leader http://www.biography.com/people/cesar-chavez-9245781

History of CA Agriculture : http://harvest.mannlib.cornell.edu/node/11

Why is the Central Valley in California so Important?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California)#National_Farmworkers_Association_.28NFWA.29

Major Languages Spoken: English, Spanish, Hmong, and 27 other languages as well

English-Spanish Dictionary Links for Agriculture: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/eesc/how-to/english-spanish-agricultural-dictionaries

National Hmong American Farmers http://www.nhaf.org

About Rich Language Mix in Central Valley http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1104&context=bjalp

Aqui Tiene Café - Linguistics Lesson Mid-Stream

Click on the illustration above, por favor,
To enjoy more of the beautiful details

We do fine together. in English- the two men who are adding on 250 square feet to our house. They are totally bilingual. 

But they also share a special lingo. It's one that reminds them they are both comrades and cousins. I feel honored to share it, just un poco, with them, when I fill their water jug with  agua y hielo or bring out café in the morning. I've learned a new idiomatic phrase over the last few weeks - Aqui tiene cafe  (Here you have coffee). 

I provide the drinks, and they provide impromptu Spanish lessons. 

Gracias professores!

Indian Summer at Edgewood (No. 3): Rose Hips

Indian Summer Rose Hips

Edgewood County Park, San Mateo County, CA

Previous Segments in this Mini Story Series

Indian Summer at Edgewood

1.  Creekside 

2. Indian Summer: Oak Apples

After the Ohlone folks had finished their dye-making, fishing, and berry gathering projects we all settled down to a spot of relaxation and recreation in the late afternoon sun. A big-eyed girl I took to be about twelve years old marshaled three younger children into a sort of impromptu performance of different kinds of animals. 

The littlest girl, probably three or four, was adept at bouncing of her haunches and wiggling her nose like a rabbit. Of course she got got the loudest murmurs of appreciation. The two other kids, both boys, switched back and forth between pouncing like a cougar, or maybe a bobcat- onto the rabbit, swiping down fall berries - that was obviously a bear, and yipping and howling like a coyote. The also put on quite a very credible show involving a Western fence lizard (I recognized those push-up motions), and what was obviously a rattlesnake surprised in the act of devouring what I thought might be a gopher. The gopher, in this case, won. It had to win since it was the tiny girl doing her best. Nobody in her clan was going to sit idly by and watch her be turned into rattlesnake fodder. Even the rattlesnake seemed relieved when she got away.

Then the older girl began to emit a kind of buzzing noise and began to flap her arms about a cleared section of the creek. She did a lot of dipping and diving in on the older of the two boys who sat in mock stoic silence, giving every impression of an animal at his wit's end, unwilling to give in to persecution. At this point, I was starting to have a little trouble following the story line, as dictated in a sing-song voice by grandmother. 

I suppose my confusion was obvious because the small band took pity on me and the director stopped her humming to give a direction to the older boy. I'm pretty sure she told him something along the lines of, "Let's move it along, Bud." 

The boy came to life and began to snap, yip and growl at the irritating creature who was clearly making his life a misery. Before she'd had a chance to respond another buzz, pitched much higher than the big-eyed thespian, began to sound just above our heads. 

When the jewel-toned throat of the Anna's hummingbird came into view everybody began laughing, pointing back and forth between the tiny bird and the oldest girl, who had resumed her darting, buzzing dance.

By the time coyote had consumed the pesky hummingbird, who of course didn't let that stop her fun, dusk was beginning to settle creekside.

It was time for me to hop into the closest time portal and head home.

* * *

Here's a link to an English version of some Ohlone stories, like the ones I heard down by the creek. There's one about Coyote and Hummingbird, which might be something similar to the one I heard that day. I still think the Rumsien version, and the acting talent I witnessed in past times Edgewood Park was the best version!

Indian Summer at Edgewood (No. 2): Oak Apple

 

Edgewood Oak Apple
Please click on the illustration above to get the full picture 

Yesterday I wrote a journal entry about the beginning of a trip back 300 years in time,  to visit with a small group of Ohlone people in, what is today called, Edgewood Park. (Indian Summer at Edgewood (No. 1): Creekside.


Having slid through the time portal on the seat of my pants, I dusted the leaves off and greeted the small group working along the edge of the creek. Though busy fishing, foraging for late berries, and cutting sedge, they still seemed glad to have a visitor drop by.


Unfortunately, I'd forgotten my iPad with it's Rumsien dictionary pdf download at home. Luckily, I remembered how to say i (yes). We smiled a lot too.  


Though the creek is low it had produced a few steelhead trout. Have you  noticed that fish tastes better when somebody else cooks it? Somehow the berries tasted sweeter than the modern ones too. I'm pretty sure that if you add a beer that would be a nutritionally complete meal. 


Some of the women were gathering up oak apples( which you maybe call oak galls) and smashing them with pestles, using a big flat rock to pound them against. About the only thing I've ever seen anybody use oak apples for, was the time my friend Suzanne painted a bunch of them as ornaments for her holiday craft booth. She never made those again, after she hung the leftovers on her warmly lit Christmas tree and the gall wasps started hatching out of the little manager scenes. I don't think she ever went back to that particular craft fair to hear what happened to the ones she sold either.


Turns out the people by the creek weren't making manager scenes. They cooked the busted up oak galls in a very tightly woven basket of water and rocks made intensely hot from their fire. When I saw the clan grandmother begin to stuff dried sheaves of sedge into the deep black liquid that emerged from the galls, I finally understood how they were using the galls.


Grandmother saw me looking, smiled back, and pointed at the dark design on the container holding the last of the blackberries. She said something in Rumsien that was as clear to me now as English, even if I didn't understand the actual words she spoke. 


Did I think the gall dyed sedge make pretty baskets?


I grinned back.


I, absolutely i.

Indian Summer at Edgewood

Part 1: Creekside

Part 3: Rose Hips

* * *

How to make black dye from oak apples 

Ethnographic Records of Ohlone, Chumash and other California Native Languages

A bit about the Rumsen/Rumsien Language

There were other Ohlone langues in addition to Rumsien. They include Mutsun, and Chochenyo. There are people speaking these languages today.

A bit about the Ohlone People

¿Por qué no a little culture right where we live?

. . .

This little girl and her chihuahua live close by. 

I didn't have to travel to distant lands to meet them.

. . .

Oh -Yeahhhhh.... Listen In on   

My Pick-of-the-Month,

The Simple Romantic singing the  traditional American spiritual , Train is a-Comin' 

My Pick-of-the-Month  is Better than a Starbucks Pick-of-the-Week, cuz I brew it myself

. . .

I needed a break from my self-guided review of everything I’ve learned about Objective C (my apps writing class starts next week). So I walked over to the Menlo Park Farmer’s Market. The lovely-smelling narcissus from Bert’s Bulbs were all sold out by the time I got there.  Good for Bert! I wandered on to a vegetable stand that had a few daises and chrysanthemums left. While I was waiting in line with my two bunches, yellow and red always make a nice combination, an elderly man passed by on the other side of a table full of red and white carrots. He was clearly one of the vendors at the market and was carrying large plastic pails back to one of the trucks parked behind the stall I was visiting. The pail-carrying man’s skin was a similar pasty-color to my own – a hue that is typically called ‘white’ or, around here, ‘anglo’. His first language is likely English, as is mine.

The man accepting money from the market goers called out to him in Spanish and pasty-face nodded his head in agreement. I wasn’t paying much attention, I can’t always follow quickly paced Spanish phrases, but I think he said something about checking for more of a certain type of produce in the truck.

Another elderly man, also pasty-faced and wearing a blue jacket, was standing nearby  as the pail-carrying fellow walked past. “Did you understand any of that stuff he was saying”, this man called out loudly in a voice absolutely dripping with sarcasm. The elderly man heading towards the truck simply gave him a long look and continued on with his pails.

I turned my own head in the direction of the speaker. “¿Por qué no? (Why not?) ” I asked. Yes, it is pleasant when the right riposte comes to mind at the right moment! Especially when it comes to mind in a second language.

It was my turn to pay. The money-accepting man and I spoke only in Spanish. It isn’t that hard to remember how to say: How are you? Two (bunches of) flowers, thank you. Yes, that’s all, and finally, hasta luego (see you soon). The guy works at the farmer’s market. We both knew that he could have communicated with me quite easily in English. We just both wanted to make our point.

Here’s what I wonder about Señor Blue Jacket. Has the guy ever traveled out of the U.S.? Menlo Park is a wealthy area, and he looked pretty well off. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he’s gone more than once to another country. And I would bet you dollars to dinero, he’s gone to some place where people spoke a language other than English. What do you bet that he went because he wanted to have a cultural experience? Maybe he wanted to see something different and go where people didn’t act, dress and talk EXACTLY like they do in Menlo Park.

Hey, here’s a novel thought. He could have a cultural experience right here where he lives, if he had enough culture to try. He could listen in on the islander kids at the library. They like to put Tongan and Samoan words into Rap music. How many places do you hear that happening? He could go to Nak’s Market and ask about how the owner cooks up his supper. Maybe he could even learn a little Spanish and have a discussion with the produce seller at the farmer’s market about farming methods in the Salinas Valley, compared to those in Senora where the other man comes from. Those talks lead to other culturally-enriching discussions. Plus it’s just fun to learn to be friendly. And he wouldn’t even have to plunk down any money for a ticket out of here. Because we’ve got quite a lot of culture right here where we live, if he just opens his eyes and ears and appreciates it.

I suggest that we create a new day to add to those lists of things to celebrate like: Dolls Day, Teacher’s Day, Administrative Specialist Day and National Pie for Breakfast Day (that’s the day after Thanksgiving, my sister-in-law created it). Let’s make January 16’th “Speak Some Other Language Day”.

Let’s show a little culture.

Time Travel Trip Planning: Russia Bound (part 1)

Please, click on the picture to fully enjoy it's Russianesque roots

Judy Дорогая моя,

I found my old spiral notebook from Russian class when I was cleaning out my closet today. Gospadee Boza Moi! Isn’t that what we used to say? It’s been over thirty years and I’ve forgotten so much of what I learned. That notebook had a Peter Max design on the cover. I’d forgotten how much I loved him when we were in college. Remember the poster of his we put up when we were freshmen, and what that gross boy down on the second floor wrote on it? I’m so sure he’s either incarcerated or else working for the prison system now.

Of course these days, nobody even thinks twice when somebody says something like that.

I loved our Russian teacher, Anya. Do you remember how much fun she was? And her little girl, Annychka? Holy Moses, Annychka must be almost 40 now! She used to have so much fun drawing all over the back of my old greenbar printouts. Do you remember when I took her down to the computer lab and showed her how to use the keypunch machine? She loved those IBM punch cards! I bet she’s working at Facebook or Sun now.

Bernadette, she was so awful, always made fun of Anya’s clothes and hair style. I don’t think there was anybody else at the university who dyed their hair in those days, and Anya’s was that brilliant, shiny coppery-red that just glittered in the sun.

It’s so funny to think now, how we were all into those seventies ultra-natural styles, and there was Anya, freshly arrived from the Soviet Union and feeling fine with herself. All the women students were wearing earth shoes (remember those God-awful things?), earth colors, and those boring skirts that hung down almost to our ankles and were shaped like feed sacks. Next to us, Anya, in her sixties era neon polka-dotted mini dresses, with her hair shingled like Mary Quant, looked like a psychedelic flower.

Secretly,I loved her clothes because they were straight out of a Peter Max graphic. But I never had the nerve to stand up to Bernadette and tell her so. At the time, I thought that maybe Anya hadn’t had access to modern clothes in the Soviet Union during the actual sixties, and that she was determined to make up for it when she managed to get out and come to the U.S. Now I think she just liked her pretty, brightly colored clothes. Being a little older myself these days, I wear what I like now. And no, I don’t have any earth shoes or feed-sack skirts in my closet.

I wonder what Bernadette is doing now? She was always telling me to eat my alfalfa sprouts, because they were full of protein. I still hear her voice in my head when I tell the guy at the sandwich shop to leave the hay off my turkey and rye. What do bossy people like that end up doing? I suppose they develop nuclear power plant security systems, teach or get m.b.a.’s Remember that really, really rude phrase that the gross boy on the second floor made up to fit the m.b.a. acronym? OK, that really was funny.

The other person that my notebook reminded me of was Piotr. He wasn’t that good at learning the Cyrillic alphabet but he was a hot musician. He was such a nut with that balalika at the Russian store in San Francisco, when we went up there on that fieldtrip to the orthodox church, the one with the gold onion dome. I wish I had a recording of him playing it with me when I sang Katyusha for our Modern Languages-Department End of Term Talent Show. Расцветали яблони и груши!

I certainly hope Piotr didn’t end up developing nuclear power plant security systems. I bet he’s a crocodile wrangler or maybe a rodeo clown.

Anyway…. What I really wrote to tell you about was that my parents gave me a gift card for Period Pilots! I’ve been saving it for a really special trip. When I found that notebook I was thinking about dropping back in on Russian class, just to say privet to Anya. But then I remembered Bernadette. Still, that book’s got me in a Russian mood, so I’m thinking I’ll be heading off in the general direction of Krashnaya Ploshitts.

I’ll write again soon and let you know how that trip turns out. Желаю всего хорошего!

Larisa