Fabric

Nine years ago, Jay and Nancy Guyther were supervising the construction of their custom-built townhouse in Fells Point while still living in Manhattan. Their initial idea for the 3,600-square-foot residence was to rent it out. Circumstances, like construction plans, are often subject to change. When Jay Guyther was transferred from radio research media company Arbitron's New York office to its Columbia site, the couple sold their condo in the city and made plans to move into the Baltimore property themselves.

Costume designer Melissa Webb keeps some pretty strange company, all of her own making. There's a Swamp Nymph, a Ghost Bride, a Grassman and a Topiary Woman, all looking like something out of an especially Grimm fairy tale. There's a Death Dance Bird, a collection of feathers on taffeta that is the stuff of an ornithologist's nightmare. And there are four Uppity Ladies, 8-foot-tall women swathed in silk and lace who, physically and emotionally, look down on the rest of us. "They're dramatic, they create drama," Webb, 34, says of her fabric creations, a mixture of earth-toned wariness and unexpected whimsy on display at South Baltimore's Gallery Imperato through Sept.

The first week of Wimbledon was played under sunny skies, much to the disappointment of workers at W.L. Gore & Associates, but they finally got what they were wishing for this week when the skies opened up and it started sprinkling. That's when a new retractable roof - made of fabric created by Gore workers in Cecil County - was closed over Centre Court at All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, making for indoor play for the first time since the tournament began in the 1870s. "We were praying for rain and it finally came," said Tom Kelmartin, a product specialist for the company.

The recent news that another memoir - Angel at the Fence by Herman Rosenblat, who claimed that he met his wife at a concentration camp but recently admitted that they met in New York City after the war - was at least partially fabricated left me both angry and sad. Angry because such trickery in the story of a Holocaust victim violated the unwritten contract between author and reader. A memoir carries a premium because readers often form an emotional bond with the author. That reaction goes much deeper than appreciating a writing style or plot twist.

Eric Roth won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Forrest Gump. It would be cosmically appropriate as well as overwhelmingly deserved if he won another one a lucky 13 years later for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This movie turns everything on its head, including time, cliched notions of luck and destiny, and conventional notions of the art of adaptation. (Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, it opens nationwide on Christmas Day.) Benjamin Button takes little from the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story beyond its hook and its title.

Because of budget issues, I have to use in my new home some clunky furniture upholstered in brown-and-dark-green material. These pieces are overscaled in the new home's small living room, and the fabric is worn and needs replacing. What should I do? Maybe give the white walls and wooden floor a different treatment? Reupholster? There's no single way of visually reducing the size of a piece of furniture that's too big for its surroundings. One technique might be used for a piece that's out of scale with others in a room, while a different approach might be taken in the case of a sofa, say, that's of a style not consistent with the overall look of an interior.

The master bedroom of our new house has a 9-foot ceiling and a 13-by-15-foot floor space. We'd like to buy a four-poster bed in a contemporary style. But will it fit comfortably in a room with these dimensions? If so, can you offer some guidance as to what a bed of this kind should look like? The four-poster with a canopy and bed hangings is experiencing a big revival, with contemporary styles now even more popular than the traditional model. The treatment for a bed of this sort is much more important than for a simple box-spring mattress and headboard combination because a four-poster does dominate any room in which it's placed.

The firefighter who reported finding a knotted rope and a drawing of a noose in an East Baltimore station house is in the process of being fired for unrelated issues, Fire Department officials said yesterday. Donald Maynard, a six-year veteran who reported the discoveries, acknowledged last week that he was the one who brought the items into the station house. Even before that admission, Maynard, who is black, had been suspended without pay for failing to complete emergency medical technician-intermediate training or making any plans to do so, said Roman Clark, a department spokesman.

I'm tired of looking at the floral-patterned rug and the damask silk-covered sofa and chairs in my living room. Its overall color scheme is gold, red and blue. How can I give the room a more contemporary look without getting rid of everything in it? I especially don't want to redo my dark wood floor. You probably won't need to toss the whole setup in order to achieve the effect you want. But you certainly should replace that rug and re-cover your furniture. Choose a neutral color scheme - possibly consisting of off-white, beige and camel - for the larger surfaces and for the covers of the sofa and chairs.

The Bay Bridge road surface you might be driving on next summer lies in stacks today in a weedy, open-air storage area on the sprawling Sparrows Point steel mill complex. It is there that a contractor for the Maryland Transportation Authority is fabricating the immense sections of bridge deck that will be put aboard tractor-trailers and barged down to the Bay Bridge, where they will be put together as if pieces in a giant puzzle. The transport operation is expected to begin in the middle of this month.