Tapestry

A place to draw, that was the goal. After scrambling over marble remains of what was once the mighty Roman seaport of Ephesus, I wanted a drawing that told part of the city's story.The previous day I sat before huge, carved fragments of the Temple of Serapis, an Egyptian cult figure. The jumble of blackened column segments and voluted ears of pale Ionic capitals there moaned in silent dignity. Even the silly blue and yellow faces of wildflowers couldn't break the spell.The cult bespoke of times when Ephesus, lying halfway up modern-day Turkey's Aegean coast, had trading links with much of the known world including Alexandria, Egypt's main grain-exporting city.

William Morris, a leader of the 19th-century arts & crafts movement in England, was a polymath who created designs for textiles, wrote poetry and published magnificently crafted, illustrated books. During his lifetime, he was something of a contradiction: a well-born aristocrat who championed socialism, a Renaissance man of the industrial era and an unapologetic romantic who drew much of his inspiration from the Gothic art of the Middle Ages. Now Morris' wide-ranging interests are highlighted in a small but delightful show of his designs for fabrics, wallpaper and tapestries at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The show includes many beautiful examples of Morris' elegant woven woolens, block-printed cotton fabrics and floral designs inspired by Near Eastern and Asian art. As an interior designer, Morris aimed to create total environments that would surround a home's inhabitants with beauty.

Darryl Savage shoots photographs from peculiar angles. While riding a ferris wheel in Paris, he snapped a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Then in Nice, he held his Nikon camera out the window and took pictures of trees as he drove by. "I try to take photographs from angles no one else sees," Savage said. Savage took his hobby to the next level when he opened his first show - an exhibit of about 50 photographs that depict New York City and Europe - at the 49 West Coffeehouse in Annapolis.

Unlike Britain, America isn't known as a country of needlepoint mavens. But a new mail-order business in Ellicott City is launching an effort to change that.Ehrman Tapestry -- an 18-year-old needlepoint kit company based in London -- opened an office earlier this month on Dorsey Hall Drive, its first office outside London.The office -- and the six Howard County residents who work there -- are key to the company's plan to market its kits in the United States, officials said."The market in America is a very good one," said Marjorie Adams, Ehrman's U.S. branch president.

Unlike Britain, the United States isn't known as a country of needlepoint mavens. But a new mail-order business in Ellicott City is launching an effort to change that.Ehrman Tapestry -- an 18-year-old needlepoint kit company based in London -- opened an office this month on Dorsey Hall Drive, its first office outside London.The office -- and the six Howard County residents who work there -- are key to the company's plan to market its kits in the United States, officials said."The market in America is a very good one," said Marjorie Adams, Ehrman's U.S. branch president.

Nothing symbolizes the humanitarian efforts of Baltimore's newest nonprofit organization, Lutheran World Relief, more vividly than the hundreds of thousands of quilts it delivers each year to communities in need around the world.Made by members of 18,000 Lutheran congregations, often at old-fashioned quilting bees, the bedspreads provide warmth for victims of wars or natural disasters in areas such as Kosovo, East Timor and earthquake-stricken Turkey. Beyond that, their handcrafted quality sends a message to recipients that someone, somewhere, cares about them.

Stained and tattered, the letters came from young women from as far away as China. They touched on suffrage, Prohibition, world wars and world travels.Stuffed in a worn black binder and discovered in a cardboard box in Des Moines, the letters are part of a chain of correspondence spanning almost five decades. They provide snapshots of the lives of Goucher College's Class of 1903 and a compelling glimpse of history.The letters were written because the Class of '03 did one thing most people only promise to do: They kept in touch.

In a lush, sensuous dreamscape that fully exploits the cinema's potential for virtually wordless emotional communication, Martin Scorsese has taken yet another experimental turn with "Kundun," his interpretation of the early life of the 14th Tibetan Dalai Lama.If his 17th film seems to resemble a meditative tone poem more than the pulsating, kinetic paeans to mob life for which he is most famous, "Kundun" (the title refers to the name used to address the Dalai Lama) still bursts with the love of movement and color that marks Scorsese's best works.

The number of people killed in Baltimore this year has exceeded the count from all of 2011 after a violent Wednesday that saw at least one stabbed and three shot - including two near the same corner where a 16-year-old was killed a day earlier. Less than 24 hours had passed since the fatal shooting of teenager Daniel Pearson on Greenmount Avenue when two more men were hit by gunfire in almost the same spot. Another man was killed in Northwest Baltimore, and a boy was taken to the hospital after being stabbed on his way to a school.

In January 1936, William Faulkner had just completed his latest novel and begun his latest drinking binge. He handed the new manuscript to a friend and said, "I want you to read this. ... I think it's the best novel yet written by an American."It sounded like the bourbon talking, but Faulkner was right. Still is. The fellow whom Faulkner had met while working for Warner Bros. held in his hands the world's only copy of what would become - after some revision -"Absalom, Absalom!", the publication of which should have by now settled the question of what is The Great American Novel.