Category: Buttons

From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

5/15/2015

There is really no way to know whether a blanket covered in brightly coloured buttons will read until the very end of all the work so I wanted to build in the likelihood of failure. That's how I came to decide on "The devil is in the details" as the line of text that would appear on a QR code reader. If it didn't read successfully at least it would prove the rule.

But it wasn't as simple as that. The details that bedevilled me began with my big idea to use masking tape to indicate the grid instead of tailor's chalk (too dusty), disappearing-ink marker (fades too quickly) or basting (tedious).

That tape plan might have worked if I had removed it in a timely manner, like within a few days or even weeks. But when you pull masking tape off of fine white cotton sheeting after 13 months you are left with a hard, yellowed embedded adhesive residue. You scrape it, scrub it, attack it with solvents and still it does not un-adhere. In desperation, you ball up the entire quilt and chuck it into the washing machine, despite the raw edges and exposed batting. When it comes out in a tight mass of threads and shrunken batting you curse your hare-brained impulsiveness. You let out a little scream when you realize that the colours from many of those buttons have inexplicably run, bleeding all over the white cotton. (Lesson 2: Research your materials.) At this point you roll yourself up into a little ball and go fetal in a corner somewhere until you're ready to rejoin humanity.

I knew going into my second QR Quilt project that there was a very good chance that after sewing more than 1,000 buttons into three layers of fabric the pattern may not be recognized by the QR code reader. But I also knew that I had a fighting chance after the surprising success of the readable QR Quilt: After Douglas Coupland. My quilt version of his painting, I Wait and I Wait and I Wait for God to Appear proved that a quilt composed of scraps of coloured business shirts and scattered buttons could contain a message as easily as the typical black and white grid. After several weeks of piecing over 1,000 squares together into one queen-sized square I stood back, aimed my phone at the quilt, and prayed. The sentence appeared, like a message from god.

I wanted that euphoria again. I needed it. (Lesson 1: Avoid great expectations.)

You eventually decide that the title has suddenly gained poignancy (Lesson 3: Embrace unexpected results) so you pick away at the binding selvedge threads from the quilt-ball until you can hang the wet, lead-apron-heavy slab of fiber and plastic to dry for several days. You start to notice that the sheeting is puckering from the shrinking and is sagging from the weight of all that hard plastic in this queen-sized quilt of the damned. Turns out some of those buttons were of some early plastic vintage that were painted after they were fabricated. (Who knew?)

You attempt to find salvation from a bottle of stain-remover -- Out, damned spot! Out, I say! -- but it looks worse. The next time you have the nerve to look at this fabricated failure you notice that -- praise the lord -- the bleaching agent has worked -- sort of. You stipple-quilt out the sags and bags and the rest of the discolouration disappears -- also sort of. You trim it square and bind it in black with a devil-may-care attitude. After it's finished you realize that the stippling was essential for creating enough rigidity to prevent the buttons from sagging when it hangs. You like the resulting topography. (Lesson 4: Innovate solutions.)

Then you air the whole sordid story on your blog, knowing that sharing the anguish is part of the process, though you regret you don't have any images that would give the full impact of the horror story. (Lesson 5: Photodocument the process, even failure.)

The title of this work is Discomforter (The Devil is in the Details). It's a cumbersome title befitting this project that took me to the edge of my sanity, or at least close enough to see that there is in fact an edge and I know I can't go there again.

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Nothing new on halloween, and that's a good thing

10/31/2014

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What do you do when one of your closest friends is in the hospital with complications and the weather outside is the perfect visual for seasonal depression? You make!

And so I devote this column to the silly business of making and make-believe in trying times.

First, let me say that Halloween is my kind of holiday. It is an intoxicating cocktail of glue guns and spontaneity, material-hacking and thrift-store-hopping, laced with peanut-butter cups and just a smidge of anti-consumerism.

It all sounds a bit contradictory but after a lifetime of costume-making I've pretty much found the place I need to find a little meaning in this sugar-cranked occasion.

It starts in late September, that one time of year when the little people in my life are willing to share their full-throttle imaginations (before their emerging Inner Critic begins to outshout them).

Then I strike out for my usual haunts (thrift shops, ReStore) with an opportunistic eye. My rules for costume-making have been distilled down to one: 'nothing new.' Except for tools and fasteners (glue, thread, pins etc.) all the fabrics and bits must have already finished their first use. There is more than enough stuff already in existence without creating a new market; it's just a matter of moving goods from their past use (clothing, construction scraps, bolt-ends) to my costume purposes.

Finally, there is the fabrication stage, which may or may not involve the tykes in question, depending on age. I encourage them to at least draw something about the costume they envision, or be 'in the manner of' to help me conceive it. I will make a portion of the costume early on for them to play with (business types would call this a progress meeting) and revise as I/we go.

For the price of some semi-toxic treat from their loot bag, I will ensure the costume will be durable and comfy enough for dancing and leaping around during their sugary highs.

To wit, we have three-year-old Mimi's costume this year. She showed me that she needed to be a lock-kneed, arms-extended robot so I scoured the second-hand aisles in search for a way to create the all-important illusion of stiffness. A small bundle of metalic-polyfiber pipe insulation found at the VGH Thrift Store on Broadway and Main fit the bill, coupled with a metallic girls' sweater and silver shoes from the nearby SallyAnn. I found the other bits around the apartment: a couple of unlistenable CDs, metal washers, jar lids, orange wire nuts and silver buttons she selected from my button jars. (Not shown: the extendable treat can made from accordion air duct tubing.)

Dem bones get another daylighting, on another nephew. (Yandle family photos)

I invest some effort in my costumes so that they are durable enough to be passed on to some other kid and have even spotted my handiwork worn, often in new ways, by neighbourhood kids I've never met.

Not a Halloween goes by when someone (always a woman) will say to me, "You have too much free time." It's one of those jokey putdowns but now that I've embraced making full time, I see that throwaway comment for what it is. Mister Rogers sang it to me when I was a kid and I sing it when I'm making with kids: I like to take my time.

My costumes have nothing to do with perfection or approval but are a maker's way of engaging with kids to play in a whole new way before they are fully seduced by the marketing complex.

Like the Mister says, you can think about things and make-believe; all you have to do is think and they'll grow.

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QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

3/21/2014

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After three months of sewing one donated button after another into a giant QR code, the big moment arrived this week: time to stand back and scan that baby with a reader app, translating this quilt-thing to read, "The devil is in the details."

Except it didn't read. Don't panic!, I thought, then spent the entire next day working with a photo image of the QR Button Blanket, Photoshopping in more buttons and darker buttons and bigger buttons, trying to add the minimum amount of density for the software program to register the pattern and work its magic to produce the punchline. No luck; even a sliver of white in one button cluster puts a wrench in the wholecloth works. I filed this one under the category of Epic Fail, not worth finishing it as intended, framing it in black bias binding. I do not want to create something that is 'still' good; I want the thing to be good, full stop.

Failure demands confronting the why. Why conceive such a laborious, risky project in the first place? Why endure the painstaking process when half-way through it was becoming abundantly clear that this was not going to 'read'?

But there is another power here, and that's tied to the process beyond the product. The achievement may lie in the endurance (in an increasingly A.D.D. world) that is not necessarily attached to the product after all. It may be in seeing it through, without the promise of a sure result. The power may lie in the humble, everyday materials and the community of women who contributed all those bits of plastic saved from the waste stream. (There should really be a global ban on production of billions of plastic buttons. Plant-based plastic, bone, wood, and leather- or fabric-wrapped tin buttons eventually return to the earth.)

But what's really starting to click in for me is the cultural reference of this button-grid design. A decade ago, it might have been viewed as an oddly arranged colour field or an abstracted grid but we're so acclimatized to codes that the pattern begs to be 'read.' The fact that this is irresolvable might be annoying. And that's interesting.

Wavy Gravy, marker on synthetic velvet, 58" x 43"

The possible multiple references could be more engaging than the one answer provided by a QR reader app. There's something to be learned in the discomfort of the open-endedness.

Moments like these, I seek out the artists who have embraced what New York artist Polly Apfelbaum calls the 'tough beauty' of visually exciting works that incorporate everyday materials in surprising ways. Apfelbaum, who calls herself a bad crafter, articulates the process of hard work in this video.

"I work all the time," she says, without a schedule and in a highly experimental way. "You make the work and then you hope for the best."

"It's very important to get your fuck-you back."

I'm going with that.

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Just a bad craft? Time and techonology will tell

11/29/2013

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I'm posting this picture because if I don't do it now I might cram this doomed project into a green garbage bag and stuff it where the sun don't shine: in deep storage.

I've seen through some fraught, laborious projects in my time but I may have met my match. After months of hoarding buttons and hounding others to surrender their button jars "for art's sake" I'm thisclose to admitting this thing is a colossal waste of time.

The plan was to create a companion piece to my QR Quilt: After Douglas Coupland, a scrappy quilt translation of the artist's QR Code Paintings.

This new one will be a 'whole-cloth' quilt, where only the buttons would bind the layers. And of course it will be readable with a QR code reader app. Trouble is, since I designed this coded button blanket last year I'm starting to think that QR codes are a fleeting technology, like the fax machine. The geeky chatter on the interwebs also tells me so . So, in a few years when the industrial marketing complex has made the stampede over to some other state-of-the-art attention-grabbing software schtick, the whole point of this project will be rendered obsolete. How did I not see the futility of trying to grapple with fleeting technology through a painstakingly slow craft method?

The inner negator has been bullying me throughout week one of sewing one found button after another onto my marked grid. It's not helpful realizing that in the unlikely event that I have selected the correct colours to read black, and have sewn in enough button-density to create a readable pattern, I'm still left with an unwashable, lead-apron-heavy quilt. I can't even dedicate it as a shroud in my final wish for a sustainable green burial, as my corpse would be cocooned in all that non-biodegradable plastic poundage.

This is normally the time when I call for reinforcements in the form of artist friends, who will invoke the usual mantra: 'Trust the process, trust the process.'

I get it and I'm going with it. See it through. One button at a time, one day at a time. The week-one picture is posted. There's no pretending it's all still just a concept. This matter of time, technology and endurance matters.

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From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

Nothing new on halloween, and that's a good thing

QR button blanket: Epic fail or a larger reading?

Just a bad craft? Time and techonology will tell

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