Movies, opera and sketching

Art quilt-wise, at the moment I am working on my house for the slice quilt our online group is doing. It is harder to keep going than I imagined. That might be partly because we let the timescale drift a bit. I did numerous samples for the windows, and I wanted to include something you could see through the glass, like a cat, a blind, or a vase. But the scale is so small, that I abandoned that idea. Next I tried several methods, upside-down applique, piecing and fusing. I preferred the fusing, because the UDA distorted the corners the most, and the piecing gave too much bulk. Would probably be fine on a larger item.

At the moment I am doing the decorative relief plaster that is on my sample photo of a large building on the waterfront in Willemstad, Curacao. I will do the flower shop part separately and attach it at the end, in case of disasters. I have some great fabrics with flowers on, which I hope I can fussy cut. When I get my embellisher back tomorrow I will also try attaching some using that. Oh my god - MORE samples!

Despite my best intentions of starting stitching at 8.30 this morning, I have passed a couple of hours looking at a DVD I rented of Fitzcarraldo. I saw this Werner Herzog movie years ago, and it had a huge impression on me. Since my boss is going to Manaus in a few weeks, I looked for it to check out my memory. Instead of watching the movie, I watched the interview with Herzog et al on the making of the movie. Honestly you get to see all the pivotal parts of the story, plus his tales of the making of it are actually more amazing than the original story. If you don't know the story, a manic Irish guy in Peru decides to build an opera house in the jungle, and that involves dragging a steamboat over a mountain to a different tributary of the Amazon. To make the movie, it took them 3 years to build two identical boats, one to drag and the other to sail about. Their camp, which took a year to build, was razed to the ground by hostile natives. Money was a constant worry and only came in dribs and drabs. Everyone though Herzog was crazy and it would never happen. There was only radio contact from the filming site to Iquito, and all supplies had to be brought from there. They used native Indians from logging areas to act and actually drag the boat (using winches and stone age wooden cranks). They used dynamite to try to improve the gradient from 60 degrees to 40 (plus a caterpillar machine that they shipped in). Half the time there was a drought and no water in the rivers, and the rest of the time there was too much. In the final scenes where the boat goes through rapids and gets damaged, they actually sent the boat through twice, once with a few people on, and once with none. They had to carry with them a few ladies of the night, to avoid problems with the crew and cast having to spend 8 months in the jungle. They had tense relations with the native Indians as it was, without incursions into their villages looking for women. There were lots of near accidents, and a few actual ones. One Indian got bitten by a very poisonous snake, and not having time to get to the antiserum, and knowing his heart would fail in less than 3 minutes, he cut off his own foot with a chainsaw! He survived. Kinski, the lead actor, was almost impossible to work with, having serious tantrums every day. He was certainly mentally unstable, which made him perfect for the part of Fitzcarraldo.

The interview was one of the most interesting I have ever listened to.

A lot of it was shot as in nighttime, with low level light, which had amazing effects. The native Indians have very prominent bone structure and I tried to sketch one man, who was wearing a headband with a few blue and orange bird feathers incorporated into it. Their faces would be great for a portrait quilt.

Now, it really is time to stitch!