Bonjour from French Upholstery School

Salut!  Je suis en train de faire un programme de rembourrage artisanal.  Quel surprise!*

*Surprise!  I am an upholstery school student!  In French!

huh?

So it's been a little while since I updated the ol' blog thing here, but let me be the first to say that this is indeed a strange turn of events in my life.  If you had asked me at any point in the past what my future goals in life were, learning to be a professional-grade upholsterer would not have been anywhere near the surface of my mind.  I have somehow stumbled on a life situation that would equally mystify my 7-year-old self and myself of 18 months ago.  So how did I get here?

A: Quebec, Canada.  Grâce à Dieu!  

This time last year, I was dutifully trudging off to my provincially-sponsored language classes four nights a week, wishing to speak French better but struggling with an incredibly dull core curriculum of basic grammar and vocabulary related to banking and doctor's visits.  The program is meant to help adult immigrants integrate into Quebec socially as well as linguistically, and our homework involved things like learning to write a note to the school requesting they excuse your child's absence.  I tried to keep my eyes open and stay alert, but the bizarre maladies I inflicted upon my fictional children in order to keep myself entertained had begun to depress me, and only seemed to confuse my classmates and instructors.  I didn't want to give up on French, but I also did not want to go to class anymore.  

Boredom might have gotten the better of me, had Tyler not come home one day talking about how he wanted to go to furniture school.  He had just attended an information session on other local training programs open to students who spoke French well enough to join the classes.  Furniture school?  Is that a real thing?  We went to check it out, and sure enough, you walk inside this anonymous-looking school building, and down on the basement level find an entire floor dedicated to the shop class of your dreams.  Furniture all over the halls and chair frames hanging on the walls, cool/scary-looking tools and a work table for every student!  We were totally into it, and agreed that the upholstery program was our top interest (the school also offers programs in wood-working and finishing, but upholstery involves textiles and sewing, and both of us are enchanted by the idea of giving old things new life).  I was both nervous and excited about the prospect of language immersion.  I figured if I could get in the door, I would be a lot more engaged with learning the language if I could also learn a hands-on skill at the same time.

Et voilà! Check me out, hands-on learning:

I am delighted to share that so far the theory has proven true.  I was so relieved when I passed our first test!  Yes, this is like a real program with written tests.  Intimidating, but on the plus side there are also very clear benchmarks to show me that I am progressing just fine, even in my second language.  I might not be error-free in my speech, but I am communicating and understanding more easily every week.  My francophone teachers and fellow students have all been incredibly encouraging.  It's proving to be a great environment for me to realize my language goals!  Plus, there is the benefit of learning a whole new trade as well!

So are you curious about the upholstery part?  Here's some basic French upholstery vocabulary to study, in the form of sample materials I mounted on boards that I also "upholstered":

And here's my first completed functional furniture item, a sweet little seat for my very own stool at school:

It's a humble-looking item, but that little seat took more than two weeks to finish!  The first several months of school, we worked slowly and deliberately through a lot of training exercises, building familiarity with the tools we use and learning a lot of theory related to materials, structural elements, all the bones of the trade.  Our teacher has been extremely exacting about our sewing technique, which initially meant that every time I touched one of the sewing machines for anything, I had to pick out stitches and redo things 8, 9, 10 times... phew!  Frustrating much?  Yes.  Worth it?  Also, yes.  As a home-trained seamstress, I had a lot of pretty awkward methods I was used to.  I can definitely say that my techniques are generally cleaner and sturdier than before, and while I still go very slowly to avoid mistakes, I can see how with time I could become pretty speedy now that I am working from a stronger base. The industrial machines at school were initially intimidating, but now I enjoy using them more than my home machine.  They have a very satisfying heft, kind of like the ker-chunk of keys on a typewriter rather than the tippy tap of the computer keyboard.  I can't wait to have our own industrial machine some day!

I do still really enjoy hand-sewing every chance I get, though.  One of my favorite exercises was our sample square of capitonnage technique.  I don't know what this is called in English actually, but it's the thing where you sink a bunch of buttons into the padding to create this diamond pattern of pleats in the upholstery fabric, like so:

Cool, right?  I kind of always associated this look with things a little bit more antique and stuffy, but actually doing it was so fun that I kind of fell in love with it.  Also, it's surprisingly comfortable to sit on, at least in my version here.  So, for our first whole-sized furniture item, I am planning on incorporating the technique!  More on that in a bit.

Here's my completed boîte à rideaux... you know, the box that hides the curtain rod?  I will come out of this program knowing how to make these things, but not how to name them in English.

I like these pictures because you can see above all the chair frames hanging around the wall, just like we saw when we first saw the workshop.  There's one along the wall in another part of the room that's got my name on it, I've already torn off the old coverings and can't wait to get a chance to refinish the wood.

But before we get to refurbishing old furniture, we're all as a class embarking on our first project ensemble, creating individual takes on the same brand-new frame.  Here's Tyler with his:

And here's mine, covered in test materials!

We're all super excited to get started with the hands-on work, but first we have to create our plans to work from.  Our teacher has opened the door to any possibilities we can reasonably conceive of... which has several people in the class planning some pretty ambitious final products.  This is one of my absolute favorite types of classroom experiences, seeing how different people interpret the same problem in radically variant ways.  It's going to be amazing to watch these totally unique chairs grow out of the same basic frame!  

Myself, I've had about seventeen different concepts for my own chair, and spent literally hours at the local fabric shop fingering all their samples.  At one point, I had a theoretical design that I liked involving bright stripes of color, but no fabric to match, and it was time to start getting serious in the classroom.  So I changed tactics, and decided to let the fabric talk to me.  What do you think of that amazing pink feathery print fabric that I made my curtain box thing out of, and which is draped over my chair frame in the picture above?  To me, it looks like a Miami-inspired hair salon circa 1990, but I almost went with it.  I don't even know why, but I do kind of love it.  I kept draping that big swatch over my chair and staring at it.  But then I brought a sample home to our apartment and just really couldn't picture living with it.  Plus, I would probably spill my dinner on it, and that light pink would be all stained and sad-looking pretty quickly.

So I went searching again among the fabrics at school, and when I pulled out a couple things I liked  I suddenly found a perfect match!  When we were first planning our projects, I made a pinterest board of cool chairs, and the very first one I pinned was a beautiful gold velvet chair, with a cat on it, surrounded by lush green plants.  I love the image, but it is the plants and the cat that really sell it. (Tyler, by the way, has taken his cue directly from the cat and chosen a fabric with cheetahs on it... it's going to be so awesome!) When I pulled out this roll of gold velour and this deep forest-y green fabric together, I pictured them on my chair with the green wrapped around the gold interior, like the plants around the chair in the photo.  And because a tiny piece of me couldn't quite get over the pink idea, I found a bit of pink patterned fabric that I mentally think of as the bloom on one of the plants.  I want to sit in this chair on a cold, snowy day and feel like I'm under the steamy dome of a hothouse.  Take a peak inside my imagination and see if you can dig it:

So that's all I got for now, but wish me luck putting this thing together!  I have a feeling even if it turns out to be an ugly beast, I will love it forever, just because I made it.

Brain Scan

 Here are the results of my recent brain scan:

As you can see, it's mostly a jumble of string.

We've been in Montréal for over six months now… what happened to a half-year?  It takes a lot to move to a new country, even one you "automatically" have citizenship in.  We needed new furniture, new health cards, new driver's licenses, new passports, new doctors, new library cards and new bank accounts… not to mention une nouvelle langue.  I've spent a lot of time reading maps, navigating in the car, learning the metro system, doing French word searches in the paper and reading aloud to myself from the same to practice pronunciation and try to maybe understand a thing or two about my new world.  We waited six months to bother to get the internet at home.  All that time, I was trucking to and from the library or a café or the nearby park, making myself pay attention to the many other people of my new city.  Making myself order in French, even when the server says "Bonjour, hi!" and I know they speak English fluently.

After a while, I realized I rarely consult the map that I nonetheless carry around out of habit.  I progressed into the "intermediate" level of French class, which means sometimes when I try it out on people in the store or the library they genuinely chat with me, and sometimes they still switch to English.  In other words, exactly as might be expected.  This city contains such an amazing mélange of language identities!  It's fun and fascinating to be a part of.  When people say, "But you don't have to learn French to get by in Montréal," I feel sorry for them that they are completely missing the point.  It's an opportunity!  But the many-sided debate grows fuzzy as a snowflake forming: what about the immigrants who are dutifully enrolled in French language classes, but can't find jobs because they don't speak English?  My language privilege has followed me north… and yet, I feel baby-tongued next to my many, many new neighbors who frequently have two or even three native languages. On this issue I am convinced that more is better, but apparently at least one native Montréaler wonders if her half-anglophone/half-francophone heritage has actually stilted the creativity in her writing by depriving her of a more deeply-rooted sense of one, single mother tongue.  Moi?  Je pense que non, but how would I know? That's exactly the thing I've been blessed with, so naturally I would overlook it, right?

My horoscope says it will be a fruitful year for learning new things.  Good, because that's all I can be bothered with!  

My next challenge, learning to sew myself a house!  Here are the plans:

I will make this, in a pretty plaid that will hopefully replace an old, ill-fitting flannel.  I bought a hard copy of the pattern, but I like to trace my patterns onto parchment paper before cutting them out, so that if I totally screw up or need to alter them or retrace them in a different size I haven't damaged the original.  Plus (and this is the real bonus), I feel like an architect or an engineer when I trace the plans.  Thus, the illusion that I am sewing myself a house… but really, isn't it a lot like that?  I am going to make it, and then wear it around as protection, armor, decoration, comfort, warmth.  A temporary, washable home.  The pages curling up look like this birch tree peeling it's skin:

Speaking of which, I recently read Nicholas Basbane's On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History, and it was fascinating!  What was of primary interest to me, throughout, was the fact that paper as a recycled material is actually old news, not a modern invention born of the necessity to curb our excesses.  Once upon a time, almost all paper was made from recycled rags, and many of the world's finer papers are still made from recycled fabric or industry by-products from textile manufacturing.  And/or, paper can and has been made from pretty much any plant product imaginable, and it's only our modern industrial process which has created the monstrous problem of deforestation for cheap, easy, middle-grade but predictable paper products.  Mass-production strikes again, that's all… 

I have been birthing little mini-goals for the myriad new things I should learn, therefore, in this year of horoscopically sanctioned learning.  Here is a sample list of what I will do if all my dreams come true: 

-Take a workshop in woodblock printing on fabric

-Take a workshop in yarn and/or fabric dying with natural dyes

-Sew more clothes

-Knit some stuff

-Make a homemade loom and weave something

-Hopefully grow some plants

That's pretty much… it.  Everything I am thinking about: fabric, string, paper, string, cats, string…  At last, we are at the part of the post where I share pictures of kitties!  This sweetheart stayed with us for one glorious weekend:

We would love to invite a muffin to share our apartment with us, but it isn't quite time for that.  Instead, we volunteer once a week at a cat shelter, and hang out with the likes of Gloria and Gordon:

We are the world's best cat sitters.  Send us your cats.  Actually, don't: love your cats, give them a good home, and just invite us over for dinner and we'll pet your cats.  Speaking of which, any far-away friends want to come over for dinner?  It would be very nice to see you.

Spring

Early spring in Montreal.

It looks a little bit like Antarctica:

Except for all the plants.  Frozen under, sprouting through crusts of ice and squelching in the mud: so many plants.  So much chlorophyll, waiting for the sunshine.

Some of the animals are already into it before the snow thaws.

Others, like this raccoon, seem to need a little moment to gather themselves.  He was standing three feet off the cross-country ski path, blinking blandly and looking like he might need a cup of coffee.

No coffee necessary for the waxwing; he's already dressed for the party.

Ditto the great blue heron, the redwing blackbird and the pileated woodpecker… all spotted within Montreal city limits.  

I think I'm going to like life in Quebec.  The people, like those year-round resident birds and early returning migrants, don't seem to stand on ceremony when it comes to celebrating the season.  The first day the thermometer crept up past freezing, our unknown neighbor, red-nosed and mittened in the still-brisk air smiled at us broadly on the street and proclaimed, "Le printempts est ici!"  Or anyway, that's what I think he said… I've got a long way to go on my French.

After securing ourselves an apartment in our new city, Tyler and I spent several weeks in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine, watching spring unfold further.  It started with the skunk cabbage, and quickly proliferated from there… oh, the plants!  The plants of spring!  How can anyone bear so much green and yellow and color?  Suffer brightly with me:

We watched the forest blossom, blueberry barrens buzzing with bees, the tiger swallowtail butterflies clinging to the northern bush honeysuckle.  The columbine, the fringed polygala and the lady slipper peeking from between the umbrellas of the wild sarsaparilla.  We ate several rounds of fiddleheads, powering up with forest nutrients, and then cracked the guidebooks, trying to learn about everything around us.  One month ago I could name only a dozen wildflowers, but in the weeks since, I have listed 50 or so from around the midcoast region of Maine.  The names of trees are coming more slowly, perhaps because I have to look up and away from the wildflowers to study them closer.  The birds are all hidden in the foliage, and we took to lying on the dock and staring back up at the canopy, waiting for warblers to hop briefly between perches.  A glimpse of bright yellow almost always meant a Yellow Warbler, but closer looks occasionally reveal Pine Warblers or Goldfinches.  In lieu of definitive glimpses, we began to get better at identifying bird calls.  The most ethereal bird call in the entire forest is the Hermit Thrush.  For weeks, they haunted our hikes, sounding like magic flutes beckoning us deeper into the forest.  Then, Julia and Schuyler came to visit, and Julia, who is normally busy cramming her brain with the finer points of grammatical structure in ancient languages, confidently identified the Hermit Thrush as the only bird she knew by song.  The Ovenbird, the Eastern Wood Peewee… we know a few now.

And in between studying bird calls, botany and French, we went swimming.  

I Went to the Great Northwest and This is What I Saw

First impressions of my new country: everything in the Canadian Rockies is bigger and craggier than anything south of the border.  Everyone is so dang friendly.  The air smells clean and I like it.  We spent several nights in a lodge in Yoho National Park.  Half these photos were taken around Emerald Lake, and the other half at Lake Louise.  Sometimes the smaller trees have curly tops.  Sometimes you are driving along, and suddenly you see a tree that looks like it has a gigantic marshmallow on top, but it turns out to be a hunk of snow.  Watch out for chutes and avalanches!  We saw so many pretty winter birds: a Three-Toed Woodpecker, some Nutcrackers, and our old friends the Snow Buntings.  AND.  We finally heard the American Dipper sing his most sweet and amazing song!!  Is there anything like rounding a corner and finding a tiny, rotund bird with his feet planted in a freezing cold stream, singing away with all the joy in the world?  It is entirely different from swinging your headlights into a parking lot at night and spotting a herd of lady elk hunkered in the snow drifts, which is instead a scene of awesome quietude.  I am happy to accept either experience in the course of a day, thank you world.

We have journeyed, slowly, up the coast from San Diego to Vancouver and then east to Montreal.  Several years ago, I drove the opposite direction from Vermont to St. Louis and then eventually Portland, OR.  I thought I knew what to expect, but somehow I was still startled seeing the topography in reverse.  And mentally, there is a really curious thing I am finding about seeing what is here in Canada, instead of the Unites States… its like I never really imagined Canada to be anything but a hat of land sitting on top of the country I grew up in.  But Canada!  Gee whiz.  I had no idea, not one single clue.  And I have been here before… it just feels totally different now that I can stop anywhere I want and just live there if I like it.  Some farm town in Saskatchewan.  Some forest in Manitoba where the Great Grey Owls hang out.  Some French paper mill town in Northern Ontario.  Wherever!  

We're stopped here in Montreal for the time being.  We'll get ourselves signed up for some free French classes and see how that goes.

Look who else we saw:

Also, this is a rabbit print in the snow: