Two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood... I Was Having Doubts About The Colour Palette Last Night, But I

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood... I was having doubts about the colour palette last night, but I feel a lot better about it this morning. I'd say this is just over a quarter done.

This one's P. mountmellick stitch. Te big stitches are Rhodes stitch. In execution, mountmellick stitch is sort of half way between Dutch knot or Sorbello stitch, and an inverted feather stitch (guess which stitch is next?). And a shot of what the whole thing currently looks like, too.

Day 72. I took a few days off because I need to buy more thread and needles, an because of our minor heat wave. I do not function well in heat.

As you may recall when I posted about it before, Anchor have changed the dye lot for their red 19 colour. It is visibly different, and useless to me.

And it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to find the old one, and I reckon I need at least 12 more skeins.

So, here’s the deal, if you have...

Geometry is a beautiful thing.

This was my mini-relaxation project last night, and a test piece for some quilt designs. Pretty annoyed at how wonky a couple of the lines are, but that was a mix of: canvas distortion due to embroidery hoop when drawing the lines in the first place, and my fabric pen being too erasable. By the time I got around to the last lines the marks were pretty much gone.

I think the next step would be to set up the fabric on a square frame and prick the design instead. Or maybe I should just hand-sew it, instead?

So… This is the kind of thing I have mixed and complicated feelings about.

I’m not going to say “that isn’t art” because my position is that art is in the eye of the beholder.

But I *will* say that this is something that hundreds and thousands of knitters and crocheters the world over do ALL THE TIME. It’s called frogging. It’s just efficient. You find something that’s not going to be used or worn, but where the yarn is still reasonably undamaged and you frog it. You store the yarn for a future project.

Like I said, I’m not going to claim this isn’t art, but what I don’t understand is why it gets acknowledged as art when two white men do it in a gallery-space, and not when hundreds and thousands of (mainly) women do it every single day in their own home.

If Lernert and Sander are unaware that this is common practice amongst yarn-based crafters then their research is piss-poor and they should do better. If they did know, and just chose not to acknowledge their indebtedness then they’re just appropriative assholes.

Yes, frogging finished items is a beautiful thing and it’s art, but it was art already when everyone in the yarn-based craft community did it. These two men doing it doesn’t magically make it art when it wasn’t before.

I feel this is the sort of thing that they should have written an ‘academic’ (whatever that means) article about, acknowledging the actual community engaged in this practice and then discussing what makes it such a beautiful phenomenon, rather than just plagiarising a community’s common practice and getting praised for it because ‘omg, men working with a material stupidly designated by society as being for women, HOW AMAZING.’

I also have issues with this relating to necessity/thrift/class/wealth, but I cannot brain well enough to articulate those right now. But there’s definitely something insidious about taking a practice based on reusing and saving money and ‘making do’ and importing it into the corpulent, lucre-obsessed art world. And the act of importing it devalues the concept/practice in the same way private collectors devalue the work when they rip a Banksy piece of a wall and store it in their private galleries.