Stop the presses

And isn’t he the cutest?

We went to a gallery show, accidentally on First Thursday.  We went to this place that specialised in East Coast deli stuff, right down to the prices, but dude they have pastrami cheese fries.  And we went to Gen X and I resisted getting ridiculous clothes while he had a shirt made.

The man started his day by shooting a retirement party for Forest Grove’s postmaster.  It was at 8:30 in the morning and they had a taco bar.  A taco bar.  Then he went home and made himself strawberry shortcake.

What I am saying here is that he is great.

I bitch a lot about the arts.  I’ve cultivated a fine contempt for most of what I see treacling across my RSS.  However, there are some people who do not make my choke on my own vomitus.  I figure, since I am clearly way too occupied sorting our things away at the new place, I should fill this space with some of them.

Though Nicole is second I’ll mention, she was actually the first fiber/stitching artist I found that made me happy instead of raging.  I still had Craftzine’s blog on my RSS at the time, but was skipping most of what I saw.  Then, between a post on making twee flag bunting and something about Steampunk heart pins was a quote that caught my eye.

The idea with this project is to examine the implications of the fact that we now have the ability to disseminate widely something written very quickly, to a potentially very large audience… My response is to create this blog, posting embroidered diary entries on a semi-daily basis. While the posting of the image is nearly instantaneous, the act of physically creating the object is much slower than typing or even handwriting an entry. This forces me to think very carefully about what to include.

That was Embloggery.  I was thrilled.  I mean, my project at the time was embroidering maps from memory, revelling in the time spent/wasted on inaccurate information.  And I am mad fond of hyperlinking.  What made me happy was that, when Nicole was unable to embroider for a while we started to see what other things she turned to when her hands itched to make things.  And in March she started Red Tarts, confessing “Rugs are actually my real passion. I adore embroidery but sort of view it as my “hobby” whereas rugs are more like my “career.”".  As she went on we got to see more of her work, like using the ‘backside’ of a needlepunch piece to draw.

Nicole and her work was a driving force behind my own attempts to figure out how I felt about stitching and using fiber and thread as a “graphic mark”.  Her pure amusement and joy in stitching is a constant encouragement to keep going.

What with moving and now trying to make this place a home instead of just a place we live (it involves curtains! and pegboard accessories!) I’ve been terrible and just letting the Twitter hold this space.  My stitching lately has been of little to no note, just mindless doodle-crap that isn’t worth scanning.  However, I did do this for an awesome co-worker’s birthday:

I have been equally awful in commenting and noting that I am somehow keeping up with everybody’s ups and downs lately.  Part of my bleh is that I’m now a laptop user and am still trying to get used to the difference in how things go.  Also using the internet comparatively less, though that hasn’t resulted in much more than Farscape watching.

I bitch a lot about the arts.  I’ve cultivated a fine contempt for most of what I see treacling across my RSS.  However, there are some people who do not make my choke on my own vomitus.  I figure, since I am clearly way too occupied sorting our things away at the new place, I should fill this space with some of them.

First is Chelsea, who’s posted bits of her thesis on her blog, PlainMade.  I think I actually pumped my fist in the air when I read this bit, where she explains some of Christien Miendertsma’s influence in her work:

These politics are evident in my work through the direct, non-gendered use of craft. I use sewing as a simple method of adhering pieces of material together to form a garment. It is not used symbolically to talk about the role of women or gratuitously to suggest an interest in labor. Like Miendertsma, I am using the technique as a means to an end. In choosing textile forms, I try to work with garments that are not immediately symbolic in the way a piece of lingerie or a 1950’s style of dress might be. I am more interested in garments that are familiar and suggest a utility. It is the space within this familiar territory I wish to shift slightly and utilize as a site of communication.

Sometimes stitching is just stitching.

And sometimes strange conceptual work has an underlying sense of that “There’s got to be a better way” bit of David Cross’, Gothic revival gardening, protective camouflage and makes my brain happy and interested.

Chelsea sells prints through her PlainMade site and has another blog focusing on the conceptual work of herself and others, called Fool.  Through Fool is another store, where you can get her freaking awesome flat pack houseplants.

We had this couch.  It was a great fucking couch.  Chase could stretch his full six-foot-plus length on it.  It loved when you napped on it, but was just uncomfortable enough to stop you from sacking out too long.  The nap couch.

We tried to get it up the stairs to our new place, but the stairs had too many sharp turns (a side effect of an old house being split into apartments), so we had to find it a new home.  So, like most people in the Portland metro area we took it to Goodwill.

First, a little back-story: Most of our favourite furniture and clothing came from a place called Saint Vincent De Paul.  They were like Salvation Army, big on helping in the community, they took most donations, decently priced things, had a great system of price lowering things that had been there too long, etc.  That one store in Hillsboro probably supplied most of the working poor, students and really pretty much everybody with clothes, furniture and whatnots for at least a generation or two.  It’s where the nap couch came from, in the beginning.  But it went out of business years ago.  It was such a big part of most folks’ lives that you still hear people bitching about it.  All there is now in the FG-Cornelius-Hillsboro area is Goodwill.

So, the couch is in pretty good shape.  There is one tear in the back cushion, it looks used and no longer has the liner on the bottom, because it tore years ago and was since removed, since the vacuum liked to eat the liner bits that hung down.  Other than that, the same condition it was bought for ten dollars in.

Onto the truck it goes and we pulled up to the donations area.  A little bell goes off as we pull up, like at a gas station.  We wait.  And wait.  And finally I saw a woman coming up through the windows in the swinging doors.  Already her face was beginning to screw up into practice denial expressions.  She’s barely out the door when she tells us they cannot accept something in this condition.  All she had seen and will see of the couch was the underside, with the liner missing, the two cushions tucked next to it under a rope.  She gives us no reasons beyond its “condition”.  Chase and I, innumerable swears and curses boiling below a layer of shocked silence, climbed into the truck and gunned out of there.

We’re pissed, because it’s a decent couch.  We don’t shop at Goodwill, because despite their cause, they’re still a big corporation that prices things with name brands higher, like assholes.  However, we went there because we want someone else to get some use out of the couch.  We don’t really have time or space to list the couch on Craigslist (for free, because we just want it to go to a home), so we turn to the dump.

They’ve raised the prices at the dump.  It is now $50 for our size vehicle.  We are not going to pay half a hundred dollars to waste something that is still useful.

Luckily, Chase remembers something as we drive away.  The ReStore.  The one in FG* just moved to a better spot and Chase had covered the story, so it was in his mind.  All we had to say to the guy was that we’d tried to move the couch into our new place and it didn’t fit.  That was the pedigree it needed.  So our couch gets to go help somebody else take awesome naps.

Super bonus level:  Later last night when looking for ice cream we turned around in a parking lot of what used to be this super sketch things-that-fell-off-the-truck warehouse.  It is now a Salvation Army!  Or will be on June 4th.  I know nothing will be as great as St Vincent De Paul at taking donations and pricing things as they should be, but I don’t think the Salvation Army is as mercenary as Goodwill. Which, in an area like this, really will help the people that live around it.

* PDX folks, the one in your area is a feeding frenzy.  If you can handle the frightening forty minute drive into the ‘burbs, it is worth coming to the one in FG, because not as many people go.