Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Knotical


Last year Linda and I went to a garage sale up in Falmouth, Maine. The garage was really a newly built barn, with pulleys and hanging canoes and kayaks, snowboards, skis, etc... of a very outdoorsy family. Mixed in with some newer furniture and knick knacks were some old camping equipment and these intricately knotted, awesome, immense macrame rope hangings. The man told me they were made by his late father while at sea as an officer in the Navy during World War II, during the down time, as knot practice. These are the type of beautiful, cool, handmade, one-of-a kind things we love finding, and as much as we would've liked to have kept the pair together, at 20 dollars each, both were unfortunately out of our budget, even for masterpieces of American maritime craft (it was a lean year). So we chose the more intricate one with the three baskets, and drove away, my face symbolically pressed forlornly against the back window. 
Then, as luck would have it, a few weeks ago the same family had another sale, and the other macrame was still there, draped over a canoe, apparently unwanted by anyone but us, and this time for 10 dollars- a nice reward for spending the past year on the widow's walk.

4 comments:

My name's Haley said...

yayyy! i'm glad that they can be together again.

lintmag said...

Really nice work - I have been thinking for the past few years that macrame is going to make a huge comeback - I guess not yet, though. Next time maybe you could get a cool old photo of the guy who made these.

g/d said...

Wow, these are incredible, I gasped aloud to see them. Glad for the uniting of the pair. Destiny is awesome.

Ouno Design said...

Yay! Someone other than me loves these things. I have a secret pile of these, as well as some that are all shells (which is wrong, I know, but they didn't know that in 1969). But these ones are unusually well-done.