Category: Fiber

Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project

6/13/2022

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When my nerves are frayed and it feels like the social fabric is unravelling I feel the urge to amend the situation, often by actual mending.

These hands do much less flailing when they're taking up loose ends, making something out of nothing anybody wants or repairing the damaged, discarded and disregarded. But the pandemic has hit hard and for the first time in ages, I am compelled to fall back on something cozy and familiar, for the body — any body — in need. I need to make a big ol' quilt.

Even as the fleeting thought was bonking around my distracted, pandemic-disturbed brain I worried I was regressing. Are a dozen queen-sized quilts — each a barely-passed test of my patience and endurance — not enough for one lifetime? Have I gone circular?

This (and much more) mental pummelling has manifested in the not-yet-completed "Current Conditions" quilt, a weighted blanket in a bluesy palette and undulating pattern of strips of discarded, freely available jeans. Too thick and heavy to wrestle through my vintage Pfaff, I've taken a page from the Japanese traditional "boro" method and hand-stitched long waves of white cotton sashiko thread through the layers of denim, cotton batting and denim whole-cloth backing.

BORROWING FROM BORO: The "Current Conditions" quilt in progress, after hand-stitching through the layers and before the growing roster of pandemic-era hashtags are embroidered.

Soon another layer emerged: hand-embroidered text in the form of some particularly heavy hashtags over the course of this making. Working each of those hashtags into the strips of found textile has become both a meditative activity as well as a meditation on the meaning of those words of these times. This is my physical engagement with the world, one stitch, one block at a time.

Weighing in at more than 10 hot pounds, "Current Conditions" is an unwieldy beast of a blanket but my stitching encounters with the latest hashtags seem far from over. (Should #monkeypox be included? Do I need to reserve a line for #heatdome2022?). Like the global pandemic at this point, it's not clear whether the beast is finally done or will demand more from me.

VIDEO tour: 'Joyful Making in Perilous Times'

4/21/2021

Click HERE for a 10-minute journey through the methods and motivations behind this MFA thesis. (Film made by Ana Valine, Rodeo Queen Pictures, August 2020)

Tripping on this troublesome rug

12/6/2019

In the final critique of my final work in this second-to-final semester of graduate studies, I could see that there was going to be trouble.

From the start, there was the trouble of actually getting a full view of this sprawling, chaotic, twisted mass of deconstructed jeans. It required everyone to stand around the perimeter of the low-lit white-cube gallery, in a circle, facing in, looking down at this problem child.

There was the troubling of its position: Why not on the wall or hung from the ceiling? Since it’s sprawled out on the floor, does it invite being walked on?

There was the troubling of method: Why the knotting and weaving and braiding? Why the obvious waistbands and labels? Why spend all this time and labour? Why not just a pile of denim strips?

And there was the troubling over concept: Is it too obvious? Too simple? Too many signifiers? Not enough points of entry? Or too many? Is it art or craft? Who is this talking to? And to what end?

And those are just my questions.

I question everything, especially as I work, with my hands, intuitively. But my first line of questioning is directed at the material itself. What do you want from me? (Or, to borrow from my then-eight-year-old nephew, in an inexplicable situation: What are we even doing here?)

As much as I could have sat and gazed at the striated piles of folded jeans collected, machine-washed and line-dried by my mother and hauled to my studio by my others, now those jeans demanded more of me.

Seams, the index of the work by mainly women in foreign factories, needed to be exposed, so I cut them away from the yardage, bound them up in my own hand-stitching into tight, potent fast-fashion/slow-craft units. For what? For now, just for today: my daily reminder not to overthink or force solutions.

The labels and tags required daylighting, too, and the more collisions the better between fonts and texts and all that those brands try to stand for.

That left the denim textile, the fabric of this whole fraught, toxic industry. Shucked from their constraints of style and function, I ripped them into strips and watched them fall from my cutting table into heaps on the floor like tidepools.

Image-searching "jeans industry" produces a blue-stained global-reality horror show.

As much as I love the immersive works of minimalist textile installations, more would be more here. I would be mining all my own making methods and circulating them into this circles-within-circles piece, in allegiance with all of those who work with their hands for a living or for the love of material. Or both.

Like most makers I know, I love the challenge of constraining the work to some specific rules of material engagement so I limited mine to a single material, a knotting/binding additive process and two tools: scissors and sewing needle (well, three, if you count my hands).

I intrinsically start from the centre in an almost innate process learned over a lifetime, from macramé plant-hangers (1970s) to braided rugs (1990s) to crocheted giant doilies (2000s) created to cover and protect in the public sphere.

The work begins with a gathering of material-energy into a tight nucleus of force (I’ve been mixing up issues of astrophysics and making over the last year) and spreads outward, finding pattern then breaking that pattern toward new horizons. It’s a process of allowing the material to ebb then roil up again into forces that break into near disintegration, a rhythm that keeps me in the swim of things. As it flows outward into small tsunamis, then eddies, I feel an oceanic, topographic, geologic personality wash over this thing.

And this definitely wants to be a thing, not an immersive installation. This is an object that requires some finishing, a symphony of soundwaves that started with a bang but wants to end in a hum, in the round. It is a rug you can’t walk on, borne of Seismic Rug that emerged while I was confined to the floor with sciatica, watching footage of the horror of the 2011 Japan Tsunami flood in.

It is a resurgence of that making, and that fear of that flood and of the oncoming higher waters, but also the resurgence of my ability to grab hold of physically-challenging handwork after falling on the low-tide foreshore this summer and breaking my ‘good’ arm in two places. I cast aside those fears of not being able to make/do from the cast-offs of this unsustainable era of human history.

Resurge feels right for the piece formerly known as the Monster that raises issues from the ground up, this fuzzy menace.

Left: A colleague lists initial reactions during critique; right: pattern and collapse seen in one section.

Hoping for heat in this log cabin

11/5/2019

Comments

I have this idea for building healthy community in this pretty/cold city through hand-making. It’s a process of making peace with ourselves and connecting with others, transforming individualized desires (thanks, capitalism) into shared desires for a sustainable life and world.

Vancouver artist Jenn Skillen — collaborator No. 1 — beta-tests a freeform, no-measure hand-stitched log cabin block method. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

That's the idea. 'How' is the big question.

I start with a few rules of thumb. (I love that phrase for its controversial origin that is a deep-dive into human history and etymology, but also for the visual of the hand-as-tool.) First, the activity must be low-barrier enough to open it up to as much collaboration as possible — no need for special skills or equipment or fees or even shared verbal language. Second, the project must use only found material: freely available, with no better use (because there's already too much stuff in the world). Third, the project must spark interest, otherwise, why would people bother?

A decade ago, these rules of thumb resulted in The Network, an ever-growing public fibre-art piece engaging a wide variety of folks around Vancouver, co-created by Debbie Westergaard Tuepah. That knotty piece continues to weave through my work, mummifying a perfectly good painting practice, winding around ideas of alternative space-making, shelter, and safety nets. Now it's needling into my current project: the Safe Supply collaborative quilt.

'Safe supply' were the two words on the lips of the crowd at a CBC Town Hall gathering two months ago. Providing a safe supply of opioids would go a long way to addressing all the problems and fears raised by everyone from student activists to local businesses, from concerned politicians and developers to Indigenous elders: the toxic-drug death epidemic, violence, homelessness, sexual exploitation, theft, vandalism, mental illness. A safe supply is inherent in the view of addiction as a public health issue, not an individual, moral failing.

'Kettling' homeless people into Oppenheimer Park has resulted in a colourful display of a national humanitarian crisis. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Ground zero of this humanitarian crisis is the colourful, chaotic tent city crowded in Oppenheimer Park straddling Chinatown and the old Japantown. The sight of all those bright, tenuous shelters layer up with this history of racism and injustice, stolen land and lives, and soon I am binding up ideas of found colourful material and that call for Safe supply!, embedding it all in a design, with designs for this as a group project destined for exhibit in more privileged spaces. It is planned as a comforting activity in this often ruthless, discomforting city: a dis-comforter.

Historical clipping from the llinois State Museum website reveals the log cabin quilt has ties to ending slavery.

I begin this overarching theme one block at a time, and that block is, fittingly, the traditional 'log cabin.'

There's a long history of the log cabin block, ingenious for its simple construction that makes use of even the smallest, thinnest available scraps as well as its history as a vehicle for social justice.

I am attracted to the name that stands as aspiration for home and all that that entails, beginning with the hearth, the centre of the block. From the hearth, the block is built in a spiral of connected scraps to form a foundation for countless quilt designs (traditional examples below).

The work has not yet begun but like all collaborations it begins with faith in people and trust in my practice. Something will emerge. We will engage. We will generate some heat in this log-cabin community.

Some useful how-tos and overall pattern examples:

Traditional quilts made from colour variations of the log cabin block (clockwise from left): Straight Set, Barn Raising, Light & Dark, Courthouse Steps, Courthouse Steps Variation, Amish Crib Quilt. (From http://www.museum.state.il.us)

Comments

'Foundlings': Kids' works of terrible beauty

7/2/2019

Comments

Clockwise from top left: "This Little Lump", Sylva and Shyla; "Garbage Catcher", Coco; "Little Worker", Kahlio, Basha and Ari.

Everyone is feeling that relentless creep of plastic that is threatening to consume us, the consumers. I felt myself drowning in the tsunami of stuff over this past year of grad studies at Emily Carr University. Art, as one instructor stated, is a wasteful business.

Even as I retreated back to my green, pristine Gulf Island I was hit with it at the end of the long drive through forest to the local dump: a mountain of garbage. This, from a small off-grid community known for its environmental consciousness.

My art practice is driven by a need to physically grapple with the unfathomable when words are not enough. In the strange way that an idea for an artwork takes hold, that sight of that mountain of petroleum-derived recycling-rejects led to my latest project: Foundlings.

For a while I’d been trying to land on a low-barrier, low-skill technique that could involve kids in the making of objects from found, non-recyclable and non-biodegradable materials. Then I landed on the work of late American sculptor Judith Scott, whose many exhibitions of her curious bound and woven fiber/found objects have led to discourse on “outsider” art, disability (she was profoundly deaf, non-verbal, and had severe Down’s Syndrome), intention, new sculpture forms and the privileged art world.

Within a month of escaping the art institution I was driving a pickup-truckload of colourful non-recyclable, non-biodegradable bits from the home-grown garbage mountain to the island’s only elementary school.

Before we got to the making part I sat down with the students and shared some images of Scott’s work for inspiration. We talked about how this artist’s method of wrapping, binding and weaving fibre around objects adds curiosity to what is on the inside. We talked about how working with familiar objects and materials in unusual ways can lead to new ideas. And we talked about how an object can be terrible and beautiful at the same time, does not have to be a recognizable thing nor have utility.

‘Curated’ materials gleaned from the island’s dump.

We worked over time on the pieces, some kids on their own and some in groups of two or three, adding even more fibre and found plastic detritus from their year-end trip to the local provincial marine park. On the final day of school I arrived to pick up the final pieces and was astounded at the creations. They were richly textured, humorous and foreboding, and proof of why I collaborate with children: they consistently demonstrate the importance of letting hands and imaginations fly.
They each titled their pieces in their own hand and I installed them for exhibit on forest plinths (moss-covered stumps from the last big clearcut) in time for the annual Arts Fest. With no chance they’ll degrade in the weather they remain there, pretty and pretty disturbing: our inescapable stuff.

Kids assembling the armatures of their pieces in the first phase of the Foundlings project.

Part of the Foundlings project, installed in a Gulf Island forest.

Snow Pillow, by Mikiko

Comments

My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

Comments

The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.

The reverse side of the Emily Carr Cozy, seen only from the interior of the school, is like the work behind the scenes in my making: chaotic, improvisational and maybe more interesting than the public side. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)

Comments

Pretty, and pretty toxic denim inspires new work

7/6/2018

Comments

There ought to be an international law against the dirty business of jeans manufacturing.

It poisons waterways, mainly in China, prompting environmental groups to raise the alarm against the devastation to communities and local ecosystems, yet consumers around the world continue to cycle through jeans, for work and in slavish loyalty to fashion trends.

Even on the small off-the-grid Gulf island of Lasqueti where I do much of my work, there is a constant oversupply of denim at the local Free Store. Too ugly or thrashed to be snapped up for the price of zero, they are destined for the landfill where the toxic dyes are left to leach into the ground.

Jeans reflect the West Coast palette. Carlyn Yandle photo

But, honestly, if they weren't so pretty, I wouldn't be saving them from the dump. It's that very West Coast denim palette that compels me to rescue these ripped, stained or just outdated jeans, skirts, jackets and dresses and mess with them.

For the past few years I've been cutting them into usable pieces and sewing up utility items — bags, oven mitts, hot-pot mats, lumbar cushions — and before long I fell into my own tiny cottage industry stitching up utility aprons.

Lately I've been working them up in quilts of high-contrast hues with frayed exposed seams or muted reverse greys, all in conversation with the coastal views just beyond my sewing table.

So for environmental reasons and the pretty, durable nature of old denim, I keep innovating new uses, but my explorations into non-utility pieces (the stuff we call Art) is more about the culture embedded in all those jeans: the worn knees, the rips, the stains that all speak to the physical work people do on this off-the-grid island community to sustain them.

I dabbled with undulating appliquéd fields inspired by the coastal climate and vistas but lately I've been more interested in exploiting the sculptural possibilities of this weighty, stiff fabric.

Enter my latest exploration: large-scale macrame.

Knotting seemed like a natural way to enhance dimension, and it's relevant to this island community where knowing a few useful knots is an essential skill and in wide evidence. It also speaks to the late-'60s/early '70s back-to-the-land counterculture that defines Lasqueti. I liked the idea of creating a large-scale fringe for this place on the fringes of urban life. (Fun fact: The 13th-century Arabic weavers' word for "fringe" is "migramah", which eventually became known as "macrame".)

I gave myself some rules of engagement (like I do) to create a pattern. 1) The strands would be all three-inch strips. 2) The overall length would be largely determined by the number of strips I could squeeze out of an average size of jeans. 3) I would work from dark jeans to light to dark fabrics, to create a highlight in the centre of the piece. 4) The overall width of this super-fringe would be determined by the piece of driftwood I selected.

Fifty-five hours of knotty work later I completed 28 Jeans: Denim Ombré, a wall-mounted macrame work that continues to inspire more ideas and more questions: How can I achieve a more sculptural effect? How can I find that beautiful place between pattern and collapse? And most importantly: Why did I throw away my old macrame magazines??

28 Jeans: Denim Ombré, 2018 by Carlyn Yandle. Found jeans, driftwood, 60" x 45"

Comments

Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

5/26/2018

Comments

Clockwise from top left: Great-Grandfather Quilt; Dad's Throw; Tie Cushion. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Materialistic. People say it like it's a bad thing.
But there's not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little more materialistic we might not be now contending with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or space junk. I want no part with parting so quickly from one-use-life materials when a meaningful second life is possible.

So when a couple of people dear to my heart were clearly torn about parting with some favourite clothes of their loved ones who recently passed away — one within this year, the other within 18 months — I felt it too.

These bits of cloth are interwoven with the memory of the wearer, his style, the special occasions and the everyday. Just looking at them hanging in the back closet brought the son, the wife, to tears. Some of that emotion is also about feeling at odds with what to do with it all. Yet holding onto useless things, especially in this town where we're so squeezed for space we have to go outside our living spaces just to change our mind, can even bring on some shame or panic that we can't let go, move on.

I felt the potency of the pieces too, and suggested selecting a few items to be repurposed into something that would bring comfort, and in remembrance.

The first project this spring was the Great-Grandfather Quilt, for the first of the next generation who missed meeting his great-grandfather by 9 months. The second was Dad's Blanket, which lives on one of the two matching sofas where father and son watched the baseball in his last three years. The third is a lumbar-support cushion made from silk ties that's parked on his wife's favourite reading chair.

It takes a bit of faith to allow those blazers and sweaters, ties and dress shirts to leave their dark cupboards and be subjected to my fibre-art experiments but I'm grateful they did. It was a little unnerving, plunging wool blazers into a hot-water-wash and tumble-dry, or severing several silk neckties in one swipe of the rotary cutter, but that's the deal with making and innovating: sometimes you have to take a deep breath and boldly go, risking failure.

And there is definitely failure in all of this making. Design changes happen on the fly, dictated by odd dimensions of the pieces and unpredictable fabric behaviour. (It's a thing.) Trying to wrestle slippery bias-cut silk, unstable cashmere knit and coat-heavy woven wool into submission enough to lie flat together is a test of one's patience. The trick is to embrace imperfection and keep the big picture in mind. I think about the Gees Bend quilters I saw a few years ago at Granville Island and the gospel spiritual song two of them sang at the start of their talk, and I say a little prayer myself: God I hope this works.

The other challenge is creating works that resonate with the spirit of the original wearer, so it's not just a matter of chopping up the clothing into tiny unidentifiable pieces to be re-fabricated in a generic quilt. You don't want to be too literal either, appliquéing ties into a Ties Quilt or (creepier) using every last button and pocket or (horrors) just sewing all the clothes together into a blanket or something.

Binding the one blanket with necktie fabric and appliquéing the suit labels in one corner of an army blanket backing (for the man who served in the US Army) felt like the right balance.

I post each Remembrance Pieces project on Facebook to inspire other material girls and guys, and to pay my respects to the stuff of life and to those of this life no longer.

Comments

Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

6/5/2015

Comments

I'm not knocking social media. Hitting 'Like' to one posted act of injustice after another is nothing like joining a sit-in at your MP's office or marching in protest. But I also get that there is power in those tweets and online petitions. We saw it this week when Tim Hortons decided it had had enough bad press and was breaking its ad deal with Enbridge.

Still, there's a lot we lose by going through life connecting with one another mostly via screen-pecking 'like' or tweeting or 'gramming. We are, after all, a social species; our well-being is dependent on sharing space in the actual physical world. Consider this: If someone took away your ability to connect on social media you might get seriously miffed. If you were allowed unlimited social media access but had to connect in physical isolation from all other humans, you might get seriously unhinged.

Early days of the Network. Photo by Debbie Tuepah

There is something profoundly healthy about being around the energy of other people. It's the why for clubs and associations, parties and gatherings. And it's the why behind the Network sculpture/social engagement project.

Artist Debbie Tuepah and I came up with the idea just a few years after the birth of Twitter and Facebook, and within a year of the debut of Instagram and Pinterest. We felt a need to create a physical alternative to all this virtual social networking — some low-barrier, small-footprint way to bring people together. Something that would be collaborative but less skill-based than, say, a quilting bee, but offering similar tactile engagement.

This thread of an idea soon joined other threads: the materials should be found/donated and should be the stuff that ordinarily ends up in a landfill. Synthetic, petroleum-based fabrics and sheeting would do the trick. (No one knows what to do with those lurid-coloured Fortrel bedspreads and vinyl shower curtains.)

The more people work on it, the more visually interesting it becomes.

We cleared the decks and hung several strands from a hook in the studio ceiling, like I did as a kid when making those macrame plant hangers. We added one strand to another by simple knotting. We held parties and invited friends to bring their friends to tie one on. Kids got knotty and businessmen who thought the whole thing a little weird at first were soon weaving free-style.

We knew we were onto something. A year later it made its public debut at the Mini Maker Faire at the PNE, where it grew into the gargantuan piece it is today.

The Network is too big for any studio parties now. This mammoth collaborative sculpture demands the kind of space like the Atrium of the Mount Pleasant community centre, where it will be suspended on Saturday, June 20, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. as part of the city-wide Draw Down event.

Come on down, tie one on, grab a thread and take part in this social medium in the actual, physical world.

Comments

From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

5/15/2015

Comments

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.

Comments

<<Previous

Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project

VIDEO tour: 'Joyful Making in Perilous Times'

Tripping on this troublesome rug

Hoping for heat in this log cabin

'Foundlings': Kids' works of terrible beauty

My needling starts with a need to build community

Pretty, and pretty toxic denim inspires new work

Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

Mammoth social sculpture going up at Draw Down event

From disaster to 'Discomforter': 5 lessons learned

browse by topic:

Archives