So This Is The Kind Of Thing I Have Mixed And Complicated Feelings About.

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.

K, L Q, R K is Dutch knot, L is French knot, Q is sorbello stitch, R is French cross stitch. I really like puzzling out how I'm going to group the different types of stitches within the whole sampler. Sorbello stitch is very similar to Dutch knot (the difference is 45 degrees), and French knot and French cross stitch are also similar. All four are types of knot stitch.

Stitch play. Originally I was just intending to try out the thread itself, to see what stitches the variegation would work well with, and then I just ended up playing with stitch ideas I'd had in my head for a while. Unfortunately, this thread wasn't really the best for some of the chain stitch variations, so I'll probably do those again on another sampler.

This one will scan (in person) using QRdroid for android phones, but none of the free iPhone apps I had (Qrafter, Scan and QRreader) can read it. This one (R) is done in a composite stitch - French knots pinned in place by split cross stitch (the two strands of each arm of the cross stitch fall either side of the French knot). I couldn't find this stitch in any of my stitch dictionaries, but I'm sure someone must have thought of it before. For now I'm calling it French Cross Stitch, but if anyone knows another name for it, I'd love to know.

I looked up from my work for a couple of seconds to watch the kittens play, and when I looked back down this little punk was crawling over it.

Day 74.