Die Nase. I've Been Writing Fragmentary Bits Of Pattern For A Crochet Face For Years Now, And Finally

Die Nase. I've been writing fragmentary bits of pattern for a crochet face for years now, and finally put hook to yarn and made a prototype nose today. Here are my "pattern" notes, which also function well to show why I don't write patterns: Dec, Dec, inc, inc, Dec Dec Inc inc Plain x 3 Inc inc Plain x3 Sl, ch2, dc2tog, ch2, sl Dc flt Sc3tog The next challenges are figuring out eyes and lips, and then, of course, integrating them into one pattern. (Eye holes are easy enough, but sculpting the curves of eyelids a little harder).

Good luck with the firings, it looks amazing. :O

Coming to life

If ONE MORE PERSON says “What if they’d medicated Van Gogh!?” I think I’m permitted to set things on fire.  If they’d medicated Van Gogh, he’d either have painted twice as much, or he’d have been happy and unproductive.  And you know what? Starry Night wasn’t worth a terrible price in human misery. It’s neat. It wasn’t worth it. Sometimes I wonder if being an artist makes me jaded to ART. Because it’s not magic and it’s not mystical, it’s just paint or pixels.  And it can do amazing things! But you don’t owe humanity to be miserable just so you can move paint around in interesting shapes. Jesus.  Art is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas bargain where you agree to be miserable so everybody can go “oh! Neat!” for 5 minutes.

Ursula Vernon, dropping the mic.  [x] (via magdaliny)

Right and below the needle: 8 stitches in five different threads, all in the wrong place. -____________________-

Don’t tell me embroidery is relaxing.

“By the eighteenth century embroidery was beginning to signify a leisured, aristocratic life style — not working was becoming the hallmark of femininity.” (The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker, 1984: 11)

Women’s work as an oxymoron: if women do it, it cannot be work. Women cannot work, so anything a woman does cannot be work. Therefore, embroidery, actually called ‘work’ by women, cannot be classified as work. It is instead, a leisure pursuit -- assuming one is not paid for it. And one cannot be paid for it because it is not work, cannot be work if it is produced by an upperclass woman. To try and pay her for it -- for her to try and sell it would be to undermine her husband’s fragile masculinity by implying he cannot support her. But all of this is to say nothing of the women who did do embroidery as work, as a living, who did sell their labour. 

I think this is one of the reasons I get irritated by people telling me it must be so relaxing to sew. I don’t find it relaxing. It is work. It is labour and it is my job. I don’t tell other people that their work, their job, the thing they do everyday must be ‘so relaxing’ because that would be an absurd assumption to make. Maybe they do find it relaxing. Or maybe they enjoy it, but don’t find it relaxing because actually it’s hard work and concentration. But it is not my place to assume these things, and of all the questions one could ask about another’s job, whether it is ‘relaxing’ is a strange place to start. What are people implying when they tell me I must find embroidery relaxing? That it’s easy? Unskilled? Requires no concentration? That it’s not work. 

Some people find embroidery relaxing because they do it as a hobby. They do it as a thing which is not their job. Just as some people take up wood-carving as a hobby. But do people tell the professional carpenter that their job must be relaxing because it is considered by others to be a hobby? 

Don’t tell me my job is relaxing. Don’t tell me my job isn’t work. 

This afternoon I am giving a talk at UCL about the Stitched Iliad. It is open to the public, if you happen to be in London at around 4.00pm