Last Thursday, we hosted the annual High Tea fundraiser for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison. We spent a lot of time in the last month re-arranging our art, objects and textiles to showcase everything to its best effect.
Mark decided that he would hang one of our favorite fiber pieces — a large tsutsugaki boro noren — from the edge of the roof across the front of the teahouse. I bought Mark this Japanese shop sign as a 60th birthday present and it hung on our library wall for a long time; though lately it's been rolled up in acid-free tissue paper and stored under the bed. You can see for yourself that it fits the tea house perfectly and makes a beautiful garden feature look even better.
The next big project is to do the fine carpentry work needed to finish off the interior of the tea house. This is something that Mark is considering hiring a professional woodworker to do; someone who will perhaps let Mark assist him.
Mark is still undecided about how to complete the doors and windows of the tea house, which you can see are currently framed in with plastic sheeting. That part of this long-term project will require some looking, some reading and planning, to say nothing of the actual construction work for those entities. And he needs to deal with the water and electric lines which are marked as "off limits" by two pairs of bamboo pyramids.
But in the meantime, Mark decided to take advantage of this special occasion to get a rough idea of how the interior will look once it is all done. He brought out a few of the objects that will eventually call the tea house home to display them in place — if only briefly.
Even with no floor matting in place and lots of fine detail work still to be accomplished, I was thrilled at the impact these few furnishings provided. And it certainly gave all our visitors a glimpse of the next stage in the garden's future.
