making it all up
Some have asked where in the world I am.
I am still on the planet.
But on a different continent.
Pictures are available for viewing over here.
Reports of crafty adventures, diatribes about gallery design and experimental cartography may arrive here someday. Maybe.
Nestled in the couch with housemates, my drop spindled, and dyed Polwarth locks, it seemed that nothing could possibly be more pleasant.
We watched Slam, written by hip hop artist Saul Williams, and it was so good that I couldn’t crochet…I couldn’t even eat cookies. It was just damn compelling. It’s like the DC version of South Africa’s Tsotsi, if you’ve seen that one.
Both occupy that border zone between pain and beauty.
I took some photos of stitch-resisted silks that I dyed with natural dyes. The trampoline in our backyard is just about the only place that gets good light and isn’t covered in woodchips, so I bounced around and tried in vain to keep the fabric from blowing around everywhere. There are more photos up on flickr.
I love the process of taking the stitches out of the fabric after it’s dyed, never knowing whether or not the resist(ance) was successful until it’s been destroyed. The texture persists long after the stitches are removed.
I found these little ninja star-like things at my favorite hardware store. On a little strip of neighborhoodliness in Noe Valley, in between the wine store and the cheese shop, I like to dig through the random washers and other assorted hardware pieces at Tuggey’s. As I’ve already mentioned, I’m always impressed with the old school overalls-wearing proprieter who adds everything up on a bona fide calculator. Often assisted by a hip employee blasting hipster music on the soundsystem. The customers always seem to be real people actually working on their very own houses, which is a nice little shift from contractors and their laborers at a soul-sucking big depot stores.
I like how they look like bike wheel spokes. And ninja stars, reminiscent of my knitting-ninja costume with needles sticking out of my head.
I’m working on spinning it into yarn.
Progress reports:
-The sock is at the heel turning part, and I’m trying to decide what the stitch pattern should be on the leg and whether or not to reduce by a few stitches around the ankle.
-There are many newly dyed fabrics to discuss.
-My first pair of felt boots were born today.
I’m working on some paper. (And at work i’m working on paperwork, but i’m also working on getting a job in a different line of work…). The paper of the moment is made of silk — kind of a blend of useful paper and artsy paper. Some of it will make very cool stationery. Some of it might become pages in a bit of a concept book. There are sticky wet pages scattered throughout the room. But shiny, pretty things are definitely allowed to be scattered around.
No pics of the silk paper just yet, but here are two of my favorite little books. A pair of friends and I start off the year every year by making books together out of various found materials. On the right is the one I made 2 years ago and used as a planner last year. The pages are Berkeley Bowl bags. The cover is 6-pack cardboard reinforced with duct tape. The spine is an old pair of jeans (with the handy zippered pocket on the front cover), and the red fabric is a bandana I found somewhere. It’s all glued together with homemade wheat paste.
On the left is this year’s book, currently serving as this year’s planner. I made a list of some of the attributes missing from previous books, and this one incorporated most of the ideal traits for a book: pretty bookmark (handspun indigo-dyed yarn), external pocket, internal pocket (large enough to carry around postcards for correspondence-related emergencies), a place to hold stamps, and handles. The handles were leftover from the paper bags one of my bookmaking-mates used for his pages.
The satisfaction of making books makes it worth the hours of effort, sewing together all that potential for writing and reflection, memories and things to remember….plus glueing things together is always fun.
Hello, roving. This is a pile of roving I photographed when working on my Penland application. The black background is a trampoline, which was the most convenient monochromatic surface I could find at the time. Photography on top of a trampoline is of course its own bouncy adventure.
What’s roving? Essentially a bundle of unspun fibers — wool, in this case - more specifically Blue Faced Leicester (don’t let the complicated spelling throw you off - it’s common pronounciation is “LES-ter”). Blue face generally comes from England, is easy to spin because of its long staple length (the length of the wool lock on the sheep), and is pretty soft as far as wool goes as well as pretty sturdy. This particular roving has been combed, so all of the fibers are lined up parallel to each other.
I love the colors, and am thinking about embarking on a project i’ve dreamt of for quite a while: spinning and knitting knee-high socks. It was dyed with indigo and other natural dyes which, as I’m happy to discuss with anyone who asks, was of paramount importance to the British empire and involves a mystifyingly complex process to function as a dye.
Here we have the first felted laptop cozy i ever made, for my very own ibook. It fits perfectly and turns the otherwise recalcitrant computer into a cuddly, hug-able friend. Plus, it’s water-resistant. And did i mention soft? And seamless?
Please, if anyone out there knows of a reasonable way to bike from SF City College (Ocean Ave campus) to the rest of SF (mission, civic center, etc) please let me know so I don’t have to continue these life-or-death experiments.
Another Tuesday, another attempt to get home after class at city college in SF. Last week I looked around, realized I didn’t know the neighborhood at all, but there alongside the BART station recognized San Jose Ave. Aha, i thought. I’ll just cruise down that until I get to Mission. No problem.
And off I went. San Jose Ave offered up a nice sloping hill, and even a bike lane. And all of a sudden, the bike lane stopped. And 2 lanes of 60 MPH traffic merged in from the right (leaving me in the middle of it all). And did i mention it was dark? And terrifying?
This week I tried again. I took San Jose Ave for the bike path part, then turned right and got to Alemany, which was quite mellow and had a bike lane. A quick consult with a map at a MUNI stop indicated that I could just take Alemany to Mission. And, again, I ended up on some freeway-like thing, possibly the 101 or maybe just a huge street, which dumped me out in the parking lot of the Alemany Farmer’s Market. It’s my favorite market, but not where I want to be at 11pm. At that point it seemed apparent that I’d somehow overshot Mission, but there hadn’t been any opportunity to turn, so I kept going. I’d once walked from 22nd and mission to the market, so i held out some hope that the territory would become more familiar. Instead, I ended up on Bayshore — I know that strip fairly well, but again, not what I was hoping for. Soon it all turned into the 101 except the far left lane which goes through a creepy underpass and turns into cesar chavez.
At this point my tire went totally, completely flat. And i walked from Bayview to the civic center to meet my friend.
I’m stunned at how many segments of roads were marked as bike lanes only to stop abruptly and become 5-line highways with absolutely no warning. Though after reading this week’s article in the Guardian about bike theft I feel lucky to even have mine.
Well I just discovered that wordpress doesn’t save drafts, so accidentally clicking on the wrong thing doesn’t work out so well.
In short, an attempted (photo) shooting at 2am yielded murky blobs and the smell of burning hair. The culprits included the gimmicky camera in my ibook, the awkwardly tall halogen lamp, and an otherwise dark room.
The sock is well on its way. I made it to my anklebone within just a few days, but want to check out one possibly deformed stitch before moving on to the heel. Thus it’s been sitting in knitting purgatory for a few days. Along with the sweater that i threw into the corner in August.
That sweater panel, a marvel of modern logic, has 4 stitches per inch all the way across it’s length. It has 93 stitches. It is 26 inches long. That’s a few inches longer than (93/4)=23.25. Gaaa! Perhaps it has grown smaller in its old age and deserves another check-up after its 6 months all alone.
It’s rainy. It’s wet. Is it over yet?
Luckily my cabin fever energy is turning towards little projects. Like baking an apple crisp at 6am. It was finally a texture that I was pretty pleased with, and a simple formula: roughly equal parts butter, flour, brown sugar, and oats. Plus some cinnamon. And a bit of vanilla. It ended up being quite a bit of vanilly since I was trying to keep the little jar clean while my hands were covered in butter goop and ended up kind of dumping some vanilla in. Oops. As far as things I’d like to have accidentally dumped into my baked goods, vanilla is pretty high up there on the list. The apples were granny smith with some meyer lemon squeezed on top.
In other domestic news, I am well on my way towards making a sock that I’ll actually like. I abandoned my recent obsession with knitting theory. No hand drawn charts, no hamster-wheel thoughts about whether to first design the stitch pattern or the yarn. Just a pile of rovings, dyed with similar values and somewhat related colors. I’m spinning it all on my Schacht drop spindle, plying it, and knitting away.
I’m trying, really trying, to get myself to put the knitting down every few rows to take some notes. If I end up with 1 sock that I love, perhaps I’ll be able to make its matching mate.
I’ll let you in on my adventures at the post office. But first, a few fun and free (or cheap) events.
1. The illustrious Extra Action Marching Band, among many others, will be playing at a sliding-scale benefit show today (saturday) at 12 gallaxies in san francisco.
2. Matmos will be speaking at the Hearst Mining Building at UC Berkeley on Monday at 7pm, followed by free food and music at 9! The details are over here.
3. Remember, valentine’s day means pillow fight at the embarcadero.
The Penland application is in, and I am now able to let you in on a few secrets of last-minute application submission:
1. USPS express overnight mailing takes 2 days when you’re sending things to small towns. But you still pay the 1-day express price.
2. FedEx doesn’t ship to PO boxes.
3. When you need to overnight mail something to a PO Box in a small town, you’re in a pickle. A very sour, well brined pickle. Even if the application doesn’t make it there in time, I must say that I love the post office, and was delighted that my favorite postal worker (always witty and charming) was there today.
4. Kinko’s copies now makes you pay by credit card, which adds precious seconds to these last-minute adventures.
In other news, a piece of felt and silk went into the onion skin dye pot, turning the signature earthy-orange hue that looks like a redhead sheep or a 1970’s garage or something. And my energized-single sock, which has sat in relative purgatory for nearly a year, is now an inch longer than it was about 10 months ago. It seemed a bit loose so I cast it aside, but I started to spin the yarn a bit tighter which helped the fabric shrink up for a better fit. The roving, unfortunately, seems to have felted itself together a bit in the meantime.
In a last minute dash to get together an application, I gathered a few photos of things laying around my room. Behold, my laptop case, handfelted with hand dyed wool. And a dye line of blue faced leicester wool painted with natural dyes. And, of course, las legs are featured in my map dress. In which big bend and grand teton take on new meaning.
I also managed to stop by the hardware store on 24th street in San Francisco. I deem it the cutest little hardware store ever, in which a cute little old man helps everyone and calculates prices on an old-school adding machine. They have an excellent selection of pretty washers, for people who, like me, thing that stuff it just cool looking.
It was a good morning. Staring at all these fun fiber things helped me get over the fact that my cell phone got stolen. Then I got in the car and things seemed a bit more displaced than usual. Because, in a separate incident from the cell phone debacle, it had been broken into, smashed windows and all. Gaaa!
But honestly I find cleaning up shards of glass to be far more pleasant than dealing with Verizon customer service. The first time I called, when I pressed “0″ to speak with a livehuman I got disconnected. That was just the beginning.
Ah well.
Looks like I can’t figure out how to put those pictures up here just yet. Pardon my computer illiteracy.
Greetings from the basement of our dear house, while the raindrops drip outside and the fan whirs in here. That’s right, our house has no heat, it’s raining, and I’m running a fan full blast.
Because it’s Wednesday night screenprinting time! A friend is designing a clothing line for her daughter, screenprinting her daughter’s art onto awesome quirky clothing and then embellishing it with handstitching. This stuff looks great.
I, in the meantime, am trying to prepare a last-minute application to Penland.
Tuesday at 2am is as good a time as any to launch, I suppose.
Maia’s dutiful photodocumentation of the spin-in at Brooke’s inspired me to get my hands out of my various projects for a moment, set aside my hesitations about blogging, and sit on down here in front of ye olde laptop. Now, given that I lead a camera-free lifestyle (by virtue of not having one, not related to any clear philosophy), this will necessarily be a text-only kind of blog. At least for now. Other than dark, murky photos taken in my shadowy with my computer’s built-in camera.
Coming soon: I learn to make links more gracefully.
and we’re live! yay!
