Category: Hand Stitching

The nodes know

1/30/2026

Hope empowers quirky denim objects

I’ve had this exchange a few times this past week:
You’re so busy. What are you working on?
Uh… hard to say.

It’s hard to put into words this curious crafty endurance with a deadline. Better to just hold up my needle-scarred fingers and gnarled hands. Hand-work stuff. For exhibition.

I have only myself to blame for spending these glorious foggy-sunny mid-winter days indoors cutting out seams and waistbands from discarded jeans and stitching them into quirky little coils and nodes. But they want to emerge, like characters in a novel that surprise even the author. They want to sprout like spores out of a knotted network of denim created back in the months before the global pandemic lockdown.

Resurge started as a compulsion during the first tempestuous Trump administration and soon after the release of an alarming report on climate change and rising sea levels. I fell into a daily rhythm of knotting and braiding a pile of discarded jeans, for the simple satisfaction of bringing new life to this particular abject material. The work revealed itself as a ground-zero eruption, an unstructured sprawl of frayed tendrils and rivulets of global brand logos in a very West Coast marine palette.

But now Resurge wants to rise above its heaviness, no longer limited to the floor but installed at a vantage point that suggests topography: a whole new world.

I didn’t overthink the urge to needle up a population of nodes to insert into a tumultuous water-scape. Instead I’m immersed in the material and the method, allowing the swirl of ideas and responses from local and global realities to infuse and entangle. The making is irrepressible, eclipsing my weekly writing time, as I make one benign conical object after another. Soon — hopefully — a critical mass will emerge that must be reckoned with.

In 2019, this slippery, shapeless sea of knots held space for more layers of meaning. In 2026 Resurge offers regrowth and resilience, from the fracture. I hope it will resonate in these perilous times.

(Cross-posted at https://carlynyandle.substack.com/)

UNRAVEL, Mixed media works by Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki, Amanda Wood and Carlyn Yandle runs from Feb. 3 - March 14, 2026 at Seymour Art Gallery, Deep Cove, B.C. Reception: Sunday, Feb. 8, 2 - 4 p.m.; “From Conversation to Practice” Program with Amanda Wood, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2 p.m.; “Hearth” social stitching event with Carlyn Yandle, Sunday, March 1, from 2 p.m.; artist talk with Tatiana Mirkov-Popovicki, Sunday March 8, 11 a.m.

Quilting and connecting

9/7/2025

If you stitch it (in public) they will come

An artist-instructor friend advised me, as I was preparing my portfolio to apply to art school, that if I was planning to include images of my quilts and rag rugs and mosaic’d vessels, I should group these as Craft Use Objects.

I’m sure she didn’t mean it but the word ‘craft’ seemed to have a stink to it. And the fact that these items were for actual use (as opposed to useless?) was also a bit whiffy. I spent the following six years of fine-arts studies needling at the question, What’s the use of art?

I eventually found two good uses for creating exhibition-type paintings, sculptures, floorworks and fibre installations: making use of used, disused or misused materials instead of consuming new materials; and growing community through the gathering of those materials. I monkeyed around with job-site debris delivered by construction workers; broken toys from my sister’s kids and her friends’ kids; old embroidered linens, doilies and buttons from my mother’s friends and other artists; jeans from my brother and others; old paintings from my father; burlap coffee bags from the coffee-roaster; pennies from friends; and businessmen’s white linen shirts from, well, businessmen.

In the end it all boiled down to one three-word artist statement: Making is connecting. This is not an original idea and maybe a little obvious but it’s been my roadmap for creating ever since.

Which brings me to “Shatter”, the title of my latest virtually/almost/nearly finished not-at-all-stinky Craft Use Object. (After many decades of making quilts I’ve decided that any quilts that are not direct copies of a pattern, that have taken on a personality of their own, deserve a title just as much as Artwork.) This one has emerged as a field of shattered circles, a project that shatters any expectations for this quilt and this quilter. It also relates to the times of its making, November 2024 to June 2025 — need I say more? “Shatter” is a cozy, slightly chaotic project that embeds silks and satins gifted by friends, as well as hours of focus, frustration and endurance, all in the service of creating the many meanings of comfort.

Hand-quilting detail, Shatter quilt, 2025 (Carlyn Yandle)

The sunny, warm weather this past week made it possible to take “Shatter” to the park to spread out for a few hours of the victory lap in quilt-making: encasing the mess of batting and threads in a precise frame of binding through hand-stitching. We made it! And it’s square! -ish!

AN OUTDOOR TRADITION: When there’s no room indoors to spread out a queen-sized project, quilting is necessarily a seasonal activity. (Carlyn Yandle, 2003)

“Shatter” is an attention-getter. The pie-piece blocks of satin and gold top-stitching shimmer in the sun against the matte midnight-blue cotton background. It compelled some park visitors to comment as I bent over the binding. Nice quilt. I love quilts. Did you make this yourself? My grandmother was a quilter. I would love to learn to quilt. I found a great vintage quilt. Do you fix zippers? (Please stop asking me if I fix zippers.) By the end of the day “Shatter” was also the site of a long discussion with a friend broken up by her break-up. When all was said and done we stood up, hugged and I rolled up the quilt, the equivalent of seeing someone out of the office.
It remains rolled up, ready as another sunny, social setting or a cozy, tears-absorbent spot to stretch out on or curl up in.

MAKING IN PUBLIC: The neighbourhood park on a sunny, dry day is the perfect/only space for hand-stitching a large project.

Originally published on Substack earlier this summer.

Taking it Outside

5/1/2025

Escaping the dark world of scrolling the socials

“Take it outside” was a standard parenting directive back in the 1900s, shouted at the kids when pro-wrestling or trying to extricate a running shoe from the dog’s lock-jaw or whining for no reason. Taking it outside is harder to do if you live in an apartment tower but there’s no alternative if you’re a teenager hoping for a social life.

My old high school was surrounded by condo towers and mid-rise apartment buildings that are now being razed for higher towers. Hanging out indoors was not an option for many of my friends who lived in one-bedrooms with a single parent. Instead, we migrated from one friend’s building to another, buzzing intercoms to meet them in their lobbies and then go harass some other friend on shift at the Shoppers Drug Mart or hover in front of the fish-and-chips place to try to get the cute server to notice us. We mingled outside at the mini parks and the beach until we were old enough to get inside the clubs.

The club life is a dim memory but I am still compelled to take it outside. When the pandemic lockdown hit, I switched from working in an art studio to hand-stitching a large project on my porch. As the weather improved, I brought any old small thing to stitch to the neighbourhood park, two metres apart from others. That evolved into an improvisational mobile, outdoorsy art practice that begins with a piece of found linen, usually an old stained tablecloth that nobody wants.

Before heading outside I set the linen in the hoop then do a little table work, diluting paint with water and dropping it on the linen to watch the pigments spread through the taut fibres. Sometimes I sprinkle on more water or more undiluted pigment to saturate the colour or increase the bleed, or throw on some salt or soil or a slop of my coffee and observe those effects. I let that dry. I repeat all this in different sections of the linen, maybe including some of the tablecloth design or stitching, then decide which section could use some embroidery embellishments. I cut out that one preferred area, then choose a palette of embroidery floss. My mobile art practice is ready to go wherever I go.

Embroidery-painting essentials: one 8-inch hoop with ongoing linen project, small primary-colour paint set of liquid acrylics, a mechanical pencil, one small paint brush, fold-up scissors, a bag of a embroidery floss and two embroidery needles. (This art go-bag has passed airport security many times.)

Taking it outside the studio has become my way of working when travelling or during these months of long daylight hours. It is my summer work: some are working, some are not (har-har). No matter; it’s all just practice — practice in learning embroidery stitches (heather and blanket, french knot, woven rose), traditional sashiko patterns, and the personal and social histories of found linens. It is in learning mindfulness, by breaking the habit of scrolling through the socials or fixating on iPhone games and engaging with the world.

Inside is for the wintery work of queen-sized quilts and hooked rugs. For the next six months the art studio is simply a storage facility for the large-scale stretched painting canvases, fibre-art hangings, and the clutter of tubes of paint, rags and brushes. This is the season for shedding all that bulk, reducing this art practice to fit into a toiletries bag that lives in the daypack that I take on bike rides all over the city. I pull it out in ferry-passenger lounges, on long bus rides, at park picnics.

An evolving mobile, outdoorsy art practice confined by materials and method.

Inside is where all the screens are, the source of the unfathomable, dark news of the dismantling of democracy and political extortion. Outside is where all the social and political action is. That includes the global Mend in Public Day last Saturday, April 26, a Fashion Revolution creative action to resist the cycle of excess, through repair and reuse. This year in Vancouver, that was at the Main Street and East 21st Avenue plaza and Granville Island.

Resistance can be beautiful

4/6/2025

Hand-making outside the dominant economic system

The news is inescapable. The Trump tariffs announced last week will “rupture the global economy,” warns the Prime Minister. This is on top of the inflationary wallop on 45 per cent of Canadians who reported that rising prices were “greatly affecting their ability to meet day-to-day expenses in the spring of 2024, up 12 percentage points from two years earlier,” according to Statistics Canada. Further, almost one-third of Canadians are “experiencing financial difficulties,” up from 18.6 per cent in 2021. It’s all led to a “gradual deterioration in life satisfaction” especially among younger adults and those with financial difficulties. On top of all this, Canada is in the throes of a snap federal election.

Yet life goes on. That robin outside my window is still doing its 4 a.m. wake-up call. The cherry tree it perches on is about to burst into pink snowballs. Below the tree canopy the Amazon vans still roar through the neighbourhood and the UberEats drivers still double-park to keep up with their orders.

Maybe, and I’m just spit-balling here, we can be like the blossoms and flourish independent of the consumer economy and the attention economy, that battleground that has us in a near permanent state of distraction. I searched how reverse life dissatisfaction and received this AI Overview:

“To reverse life dissatisfaction, focus on identifying the root causes, setting realistic goals, practicing self-care, engaging in meaningful activities, and seeking support when needed.”

Even this banal Google-bot response on the general theme of self-reflection begins with the word ‘focus’, followed by ‘practicing’, ‘engaging’, ‘meaningful’, ‘activities’, ‘seeking’ and ‘support’ — words in direct opposition to ‘distraction’, ‘escaping’, ‘frivolous’, ‘inertia’, ‘ignoring’ and ‘undermine.’ There are no Tips and Tricks in the AI Overview for reversing life dissatisfaction through retail therapy, no easy instructions to move fast and break things, or buy bit-coin, self-medicate, move somewhere else or to hang on tight to your privilege.

The beautiful thing about having a number of ongoing art projects is that there’s always one that fits the moment. Right now that’s Hearth.

Social making sessions resulted in this first installation of 'Hearth.' (Carlyn Yandle)

Started back in the beforetimes of 2019, Hearth is an infinitely-expanding grid of log-cabin quilt blocks that began with an idea: What kind of art-making would be engaging and easy enough to attract a diverse population, a big-picture zero-waste project that would cost nothing? What could create the chance to learn a new skill, meet people beyond one’s usual social circle, that would include the joys of giving and receiving, all toward a gallery exhibition?

Over the next six months, dozens of friends and friends-of-friends, neighbours, colleagues and people just happening by gathered at art studios, porches, around kitchen tables and living rooms. In groups from two to a dozen, we hand-stitched log-cabin-style quilt blocks from strips of donated fabric in improvised spirals around a central (“hearth”) square.

Some early stitching sessions (Carlyn Yandle photos)

The blocks were eventually all installed into a massive wall installation as part of my MFA thesis exactly one day before the university shut its doors for several months. We didn’t give up our will; we organized contact-free fabric swaps and took the project online, sharing ideas and stitching instead of drinking.

Socializing at a distance: a Zoom stitching session (Carlyn Yandle)

When the lockdown rules relaxed, Hearth was instrumental in rekindling social activity. Any in-person awkwardness dissipated as we focused on hand-stitching or just dug through the heap of fabric strips to create a pleasing palette, for our own blocks or to offer someone else.

RE-START: An early post-lockdown session with MFA colleagues

A street-front gallery show in the early post-pandemic; interior detail

It takes about two hours for anyone who can hold a needle to stitch a block, about the same time as any social visit. The makers, many of whom learned that in fact they could sew a straight line, were free to take their finished piece home, maybe to use as a cushion cover, placemat or the beginning of a quilt top. Most contributed their blocks to the Hearth project so their own handwork would be a part of a gallery show, with due credit.

As normal daily activity resumed, I moved the one bin of fabric strips and the other of finished blocks into deep storage. But just as sure as that cherry tree outside my window will burst into bloom, that project is coming back out for a show of its own. It’s a new chance to focus on practicing engaging, meaningful activity designed for those seeking connection and support outside this dominant, volatile economic system, away from forces screaming for our attention. In these perilous times we’re creating something bigger than our individual selves, one stitch, one block at a time.

Letting go and getting on it

3/22/2025

Our job as artists is to imagine different futures

(Originally published Feb. 23, 2025 on Substack)

I made a bit of a scene when Friedrich Irrgang confirmed that he was retiring after 62 short years in the timepiece-repair business. And just what will become of my wristwatch that he’s been bringing back from the dead on an irregular basis?, I asked him. The inner workings are falling apart, he said in the kind manner of a veterinarian examining someone’s geriatric bag-of-bones cat. True, the watch was a gift for my 30th birthday which was not yesterday or even this century but to let go of the watch and this neighbourhood shop at the same time? That, Herr Irrgang, is a brücke too far!

I know; this reaction was unbecoming for the full-grown woman that I am but the little personal losses are piling onto the big public losses like, say, faith in the future of democracy. It’s harder to counter the latest attack on societal norms with “At least” replies but I know I must stay positive, even when it comes to the small stuff! For example, instead of getting alarmed at my thinning hair, I can just go outside and brush out all my falling-out hairs for the birds to use for their nests! Or like when I spiral-fractured my arm but then turned the plaster cast into a model for sleeves I fashioned from dyed doilies. Lemons to lemonade!

Above: “Coverup No. 2”, 2019: Found doily, plaster cast (Carlyn Yandle)

I’ve also found some buoyancy in reading over-privileged tourists’ one-star reviews of exotic travel excursions. (“The glow worms were disappointing” is a standout.) And I’m always making something with my hands to stop myself from wringing them, so there’s that.

Above: Recontextualized disintegrating polypropylene rope found on a West Coast shoreline plays with ideas of ‘pretty’ and ‘pretty disturbing.’ (Carlyn Yandle)

Even my own painting disasters can bring me joy when I allow myself to fuck aroundexperiment with materials and ideas.

Above: “Regrowth”, 2019: A 24” x 24” acrylic-on-canvas painting from 2013 re-emerges as wall sculpture attached by sewing pins. (Carlyn Yandle)

In summary: Less teeth-gnashing over what is lost or becoming lost; more creative engaging with materials and people; more investigating ways to transform the truly terrible; more joyful making in these perilous times.

The future is fungal

1/18/2025

Mushrooms and more for troubled times

When you spend a good portion of your winter cowering from the cold and the rain, it’s hard to fathom the fiery desert winds that are obliterating entire neighbourhoods just a three-hour flight south. In the near-real-time images and video only chimneys, mangled metal and concrete driveways hint at what used to be.

But then you notice the vestiges of palm trees, bougainvillea vines, laurel hedges, tufts of sisal and succulents. Before the last tendrils of smoke dissipate and the insurance battles begin, these plants hold the promise that buds and leaves will sprout and new colonizer species will emerge, boosted by an ashy soil. They are a reminder that whether it’s our perilous planet or our own contorting guts, flora heals.

This front line in ground recovery is below the surface, a mycelium network of fungal lace that can erupt in reproductive spores, most noticeably after wildfire as a bright orange carpet of tiny caplets.

Mapping entanglements: Crocheted cotton, acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)

Mycelium is all the rage these days, embraced for its regenerative properties. I may be a little disturbed by the tiny fungal ecosystem flourishing in a dark corner of my damp art studio, and mushrooms on my tongue may feel like phlegm balls, but I get excited at the news that mycelium is being explored to fight cancer cells and alleviate physical and psychological trauma.

The earth-sustaining potential of mycelium is unlimited: just one bus-ride away from my studio, at UBC’s Biogenic Architecture Lab, bricks and other building materials are being made from edible fungi like oyster-mushroom mycelium; the late actor Luke Perry’s final wish was to be wrapped up in mycelium embedded in a Mushroom Death Suit for his green burial. (And he was.)

Mapping entanglements II: acrylic on panel, 12”x12” (Carlyn Yandle)

Mycelium spores, unlike seeds, are resilient to toxic compounds, high temperatures, drought and radiation — food for thought as footage of those Los Angeles homes, typically composed of and containing a wide array of synthetic polymers, go up in poisonous, cancer-causing smoke.

Spore: Acrylic and mercerized cotton thread on found linen, 12”x 9” (Carlyn Yandle)

I see mycelium as a pattern for social regeneration after natural and unnatural disaster and scorched-earth policies. Its spreading network of tendrils mirrors our innate need to connect with one another, finding and nurturing our common ground despite divisive forces. Those thickening entanglements bring comfort and joy because we are pack animals. It is in our human nature to come together; we can see it right there in the aftermath of LA fires.

We may be on shaky ground but I can feel the rumblings as we emerge/erupt/bloom, mycelium-like, when the conditions call for fresh energy. Bloop! Bloop!

Beyond a cozy retreat

1/10/2025

Handmade quilts of found fabrics layer up multiple meanings

The squirrels that inhabit my head have been threatening to start a roller derby so I’ve shut it all down by doing something constructive: I’m literally wrapping myself up in my ongoing Perfectly Imperfect quilt project.

I’m a construction team of one these dark days, bound up in binding together found satins, brocades and denim with cotton batting and mattress ticking. In this inherent need to make, I am a lady-in-waiting, making myself useful while the MAGA/Trump/tech-oligarchy snarl takes hold later this month.

Hand-stitching around design elements that are more sawtooth than circular in the Perfectly Imperfect quilt.

I made my first quilt out of old bedsheets and pillowcases as a teenager for my little sister shortly after my mother gave me my first sewing machine and before I knew what I was doing. When my skills were adequate, I advanced to birthday and Christmas gifts and my own homey items like table runners and cushion covers, then moved on to crib quilts for babies, many of whose names I’ve forgotten and are now in their 30s, and for weddings for couples who are still together or have since divorced.

Many moons ago an aunt gave me a spiral-bound notebook with a picture of a quilt on the cover so I used it to stuff in all the photos, notes, design sketches and written correspondence related to each project. I see this book now as a personal history of learning about pattern, colour and cloth. I try not to wince at the early projects in the way that you should not berate the kid you once were. That bulging notebook is as multilayered as the under-construction Perfectly Imperfect quilt. Both are useful, improvisational objects embedded with explorations in form and function, and memories of the endurance, joy, frustration, satisfaction and an acceptance that the maker herself is a work in progress.

Laying down the layers for basting in place. An added border of string-pieced satins and silk echo the inner design and bring the quilt to my preferred dimension of queen-size.

By the time I left the newspaper and started art school the notebook was full so it felt like the end of those life chapters. I relied on some of those skills to lead hand-stitching sessions during post-graduate work but it took a pandemic lockdown to see the connective power of quilt-making. Friends and strangers found ways to share unwanted fabrics via drop-offs and pickups through social-media groups and met up online for hand-stitching sessions that opened up a safe space for talking through these curious times.

For those of us without a long-arm sewing machine, ‘in-the-ditch’ machine-stitching a queen-sized quilt is an endurance test.

I finally bought another spiral notebook and started gluesticking in photos and design sketches from my more useless quilt-y artworks. Then two years ago last Fall, after increasingly difficult weeks caring for my brother, I pulled out a stack of six-inch-square blocks in a pale palette of aqua-blues, creams, greys, and pinks left over from my 16-year-old nephew’s crib-sized quilt. I grounded the palette by adding twice as many matching blocks in earthy browns and navy blues, stitching them all into rows and then into a queen-sized quilt top. I call that one Rough Patch, fittingly unfinished.

A quilt makes its mark at births, birthdays, seasonal holidays or political moments, marriages, friendships, illnesses and in remembrance. I like the idea of a quilt for a new human who isn’t here yet or may arrive after I’m gone. Imperfectly Perfect, composed of unstable, slippery, fraying fabric scraps and made during the time when Americans fell for the grift of the century, feels like it’s for that person. I hope they like it.

'The unknown' is a monster

12/14/2024

I'm betting its bite will be worse than its bark

Lately I’ve been asking anyone I come across: Is it just me or are we all sort of in a calm-before-the-storm, high-alert mode? So far, the score is 100-per-cent ‘Yes.’ Although in retrospect those affirmatives could mean, Yes you’ve asked me that already many times or Yes it is just you please let me pass.
My state of mind is somewhere between what former Village Voicejournalist/author Laurie Stone noted the night before this writing: “Everyone I know feels the edgy nothing” and satirist Samantha Bee’s last post: “Things are about to get fucking WILD.”

Anecdotal evidence through reading rational opinion reveals that countless numbers of engaged humans are not waiting to exhale but bracing for impact of the incoming turbulence in the Divided States of America — and beyond. The unknown is unnerving. It’s also intentional and we’ve seen it before:

Above: That other lying Donald, back in a 2002 press conference spreadingthe Big Lie that launched the catastrophic war in Iraq.

Living in the unknown has already taken its toll as seen during the global pandemic. Heightened fear and paranoia have morphed into the cultish desire for a strongman/daddy figure to fix it and us. And the geo-political trend shows no nation is immune.

To anyone prone to dismissing me by using the C-word (catastrophizing — what were you thinking?), consider this pre-emptive journalistic self-censoring under Trump 2.0: the two MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts apologizing on air last week for possibly offending Fox News. (See “‘Morning Joe' Sorry David Frum Made Forbidden Joke About Fox News, Please Don't Hurt Them!”) To be clear, this is a left-leaning cable TV network obeying in advance by apologizing to “one of the most malevolent corporations in all of America, whose decades of lies, propaganda, and racist brainwashing are perhaps more responsible than any other single entity for America’s current slide into brain-damaged ethno-fascism,” in the words of the managing editor of Wonkette. Frum, a Canadian-American former Republican and speechwriter for George W. Bush then took issue with its apology in The Atlantic with the kicker: “It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease.”

Suffice it to say this is an early-warning signal that the way things are now won’t be the way things are after Jan. 6. But how to proceed until the big hammers come down on respected, fearless journalists and all the other perceived enemies? Is it more helpful to read Robert Reich’s latest, “How Trump could bring on a second civil war” or bingeing How to Become a Tyrant on Netflix? (True, there is no mention of the American meddling in the making of some of those dictators but the playbook tracks.)

I’ll think on that while I continue to do like the kids and live in the moment, channeling creative energy, even — or especially — the negative.

“The Unknown”, embroidered linen on hoop, 2021. Felt-pen drawing (inset) and words by young nephew Kaleb.

Tips for tired women

11/25/2024

From rolling your eyes to sinking in sawdust

Like a dream it was: A half-a-million-strong pink procession on Washington, a sea of singing, shouting, laughing people, surging forward in the shared pursuit of basic human rights, in their hometowns and around the world. There was hope in the organizing, joy in the making. The resistance was too fabulous to be ignored.

Memorializing the moment: Embroidered cartoon by Bob Krieger and Carlyn Yandle, 2017

Things are different in Trump 2.0. Social justice advocacy groups are stunned, fractured, unorganized. Those who led the last charge are feeling defeated and tired.

Screengrab of story in The New York Times

I’m running from the worst that this state of affairs can bring on: apathy. I’m so busy busy busy painting my studio floor, constructing a queen-sized quilt here, reorganizing rooms there, making so many plans! No space in this head for intrusive thoughts of how this is all going to shake out under the trifecta power of narcissistic, vengeful billionaires and Project 2025.

It is tiring work, all this busyness, but on the upside I get things done and sleep like a log. I realize it’s not sustainable. Luckily for me there’s a handy Globe Mini Mag for that.

Searching for answers from one of my Great Aunt Ivy’s many Mini Mags and Dell Purse Books.

After my Great Aunt Ivy died at a few months’ shy of 105 (and in her right mind until the end), I found some of her Mini Mags and Dell Purse Books. You see, kids, back in the 1900s, before checking socials or scrolling TikTok was a way to pass the time, there were these ubiquitous inspiration booklets, pumped out of publishing houses in New York City and Boca Raton. Women bought them on impulse at the supermarket or drugstore checkout, to be pulled out of a purse at some kind of waiting moment. For Ivy that would be in a waiting room or while waiting for her bus or on the bus waiting for her bus stop. She and millions of others would have found inspiration and tips from any one of the hundreds of titles, from Instant Beauty Tricks to Household Hints to 1970 Financial Horoscope to Fabulous Low-Calorie Desserts.

Ivy was 88 when Why Women Are So Tired (Globe Mini Mag #287, published 1996) caught her eye. She was retired from her job as a longtime companion for a rich lady but was still taking the bus here and there and walking down to the Seniors Centre to volunteer hand massages which was maybe tiring and why she was compelled to take the quiz at the start of this booklet:

Quiz: How Tired Are You? Score 20 statements from 0 (never true) to 3 (usually true)
“1. My eyes are strained and tired.” Beside this statement there is a small, faint “3” written in pen.
“2. My legs are tired.” Another, wobblier “3.”
“3. My attention wanders easily.” This is left blank, which could be your answer right there. Ivy went no further on the quiz, maybe because the hairdresser was ready to see her now, or she had reached her bus stop.
Having abandoned the How Tired Are You quiz she would have missed out on the score that determines her level of tiredness and there’s no hint as to whether she skipped ahead to helpful tips like, Eat a banana (Page 16) or “Sleeping Tip: 1. Eye-Roll.” (Page 60). “Take a Nap” is listed as a “preferred method of stress management of high-powered luminaries of all professions, including (long list of men).” Some other sleeping tips include “Try sleeping with your head at the foot of the bed.”

I reflexively eye-roll and feel energized already.

She must have picked up a tip or two, because this four-foot-eight, what they used to call ‘spinster’ was indefatigable and freakishly strong. (I once humoured her on this hand-massage business she mentioned and stuck out mine for a demo, wincing at her Kung Fu grip.)

More tips: “Say to yourself: ‘My eyes are twinkling and sparkling.’” (Page 34) and: “Rub It Away” (Page 37): “All you really need for a rubdown is a massage book, special sponges and hot oils, a flat surface, and your own two hands.” Or “Take an Enzyme Bath… a steaming elixir of sawdust, rice bran and enzyme powder…. No one disagrees that the bather feels great after soaking neck-deep in a tub of the stuff.” (Many intrusive thoughts here of rubbing and sawdust and hot oils and special sponges and my Great Aunt’s penetrating hands. Do those drapes need ironing?)

Page 45: Get a cordless phone. “Imagine being able to feed the dog, fold the laundry, iron — and talk on the phone at the same time.” (Alternative tip title: Prepare now for your 21st-Century state of permanent distraction.)
Also, “Memo pads: Lots of them — everywhere. In your purse, in your car and even in your bathroom. Use a spiral-bound type for your purse, and sticky notepads for leaving ‘can’t miss’ messages to yourself and others.”

This is very much not helping. Maybe I need to eat a banana.

“Take chances. The risks can be small — like… getting embroiled in a political debate.” Oh, those lazy-hazy Clinton-era days of this book’s publishing, when First Lady Hillary made that historical “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights” speech in Beijing and her husband signed into law Biden’s bill for a 10-year assault weapons ban. Judging by my trip to the US over this election, any audible political discussion is not at all considered a small risk.

Final tip for this space — and I’m paraphrasing here — if the problem is a lack of stimulation your mind is on the slippery slope toward full hibernation. Go get a new haircut.

Major score: A Dell Purse Book #4080, published 1969

Luckily Great Aunt Ivy had a purse book for “The Busy Beauty.”

Fleeting thoughts of granny squares

10/25/2024

The Wet Coast is no place for this fuzzy fantasy

The trees are sun-kissed radiant red and gold as I hunker down to write this, in that little sliver of crisp and dry days between the months of dumb-dumb flipflops and the damn rain boots. Not that I’m complaining about life-giving precipitation in these drying times but by the time this is published we on the Wet Coast will most likely be entering the seven months of sog. So just for today, I’m loving this:

I don’t actually own an outdoorsy sweater. I have various rain-repelling jackets and coats and pants and some base layers spun from plastic pop bottles: ‘outdoorky’ gear, mostly in sensible black. Yet it occurs to me that since I have competent needleworking skills I could design something completely unique and unsensible: a vibrant visual statement! A colourful conversation-starter!

I’ve knit several sweaters in my time while commuting by bus and SkyTrain across four municipalities during four years as a reporter at a suburban newspaper. They were mostly derivative of the ‘Doctor Huxtable’ sweaters, more not-bad than bad-ass, for my man at the time. They were not keepers.

I have just one of my own: Logo Sweater, made in the months before the 2010 Winter Olympics here, to test the extents of corporate copyright and appropriation of the traditional Cowichan sweater design.

‘Logo Sweater’, 2010, made with the assistance of my mother, a truly competent life-long knitter, and modelled by my brother.

What I’ve decided after those years of increasingly complex sweater-making is that knitting, as a creative action, suuuuuucks.

In my hands, the knitting needles are tools trying to perfectly emulate what a machine can — and does — do: create perfect loops upon perfect loops on rows upon rows, stuck in a matrix, so mindless you can do it blindfolded or watch movies at the same time, which I guess is the appeal. It’s a laborious endurance; you can binge every Grey’s Anatomy episode and you still might not get that baby blanket done.

I’m with the hookers. Could knitting needles have created the hyperbolic-crocheted Spore from a 24-foot-by-28-foot deteriorating plastic tarp I dragged out of the forest? Or this other version in found fibre-optic cable? I’d like to see knitting needles try working up these tight mathematical models of hyperbolic growth.

Two crocheted objects in the “Fuzzy Logic” series. (Carlyn Yandle)

Just one agile hook is all it takes to create fast, improvisational and three-dimensional objects. It can be a meandering journey through rows of neat little stitches that erupt into large saggy loops before settling down the side in thick ribbing then circling back to the beginning. How about a curly lettuce frill here? How about stitching up a rose?

How about a few Roses Against Violence? Since that fun little project was introduced by an Austrian artist in 2018, crocheters have been tagging street infrastructure all over the world with purple roses with a message to stop gender-based violence.

Collage of Instagram posts from around the world (@rosesagainstviolence; #rosesagainstviolence). Austrian artist Claudia Grünzweig’s started the crochet-tagging in 2018 to call for the end of gender-based violence.

How about hooking up an alternative to the bland Barbie universe?

Work by Xenobia Bailey: “Her Royal Flyness”, part of an overlooked “Funktional Design” movement, “Poke In The Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture”, Seattle Art Museum, August 2024

Or a human-sized frock of funk fantasy?

(Garment, 1990s. Single-stitch crochet: acrylic and cotton four-ply yarn, “Xenobia Bailey: A Childhood Dreamscape In the Aesthetic of Funk Almost Deferred”, part of the “Poke In The Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture” exhibit, Seattle Art Museum, August 2024)

I am inspired by this outrageous aesthetic overlooked in the West Coast crafty counter-culture of the late last century. It has me mining my own memories of a fuzzy milieu of crocheted granny squares and afghans.
I googled “duster” and “granny squares” and there it is:

So much inspo: u/Birdfin on the r/crochet sub-Reddit; dreamcrochets.com

Not a word of a lie: As I type this last sentence, a loud crack of thunder rattles the place. I unplug the laptop.

Wait — is this grandmacore? Comes a time when the specialness of the old-lady look is lost when it’s worn by an old(er) lady. Any attempt at personal flair might read more ‘picked out of my seniors’ centre lost-and-found.’

So grandmacore is to be avoided. Also cottagecore, a baffling combo of simplicity and clutter. And definitely not the froufrou fairycore as there is no occasion when I will be attaching little wings to gauzy day dresses. Apparently (according to a handy online quiz) I relate mostly to the earthy goblincore. I do appreciate swamps and lichen and tree-trunk hidey-holes. But mushrooms have the feel of phlegm on my tongue so I will not be adorning my clothes or livingspace with any manner of those.

I was still visualizing a calf-length duster of earth-toned granny squares when the rain started firing against the windows like birdshot. So much for sweater weather.

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