The Art of the Stitch

News stories about cross-stitch brought to me by my Google aggregator have been backing up in my inbox since I spent so long off the blog. I have so many stories to share, I'm going to have to break it up.

Classify these stories under cross-stitch makes its way into other art forms:
Murals: Ah, cross-stitch "a nod to old traditions." But the stairs have become art.

Tattoos: someone has aggregated cross-stitch style tattoos from Instagram. And there are some pretty good ones!

Concert Posters Featuring an illustrator who makes making cross-stitch designs harder than it has to be (dude, there's software!), who outsources the actual stitching (grr), and throw in a reference to the ancient ancientness of cross stitchers, this article isn't as happy-making as we might like. This is also the guy who did the 30-foot Star Wars panel (which I reported on earlier). And as usual, the reporter couldn't keep the old ladies out of it:

"The idea is that cross-stitching is a hobby usually carried out in the home for an ornament or in memory of a special occasions within family life, which Guestar hopes home concerts will become a part of. We’re not sure who younger than the age of 65 actually cross-stitches anymore, but we love the idea."

Old Lady Count: Eleventy-million? I think I officially lost count in 2010.

Thanks for your lovely comments on Christian's Stocking. I'm waiting for the beads to come in, which I hope is super soon! I've blinged-out two of the other stockings. I'm getting there!

To Send or Not to Send

About a month ago, I read about textile artist Amy Meissner on Jen Funk Weber's blog. Go ahead, read about her work. I'll wait. (For those of you who have no time for interesting articles about textile artists, Amy recycles abandoned needlework, incorporating it into new, remarkable pieces.)

When I read about it, I immediately thought, "Frickin' Chicken." For those of you who haven't been introduced to Majestic Rooster it was published in Cross Stitch and Country Crafts in 19 dickety two. I chose to stitch it for my mother because it matched her dining room exactly. Before I was even close to finishing, my mother upped and redecorated her dining room. And then a few years after that, she moved out of the house all together.  

I started stitching in the middle and jumped around a lot, and in jumping screwed up. There is just a tiny bit of stitching left to do on this, but there is no way of knowing where I am on the pattern. I've tried to pick it up in the past but there's just no finding your way to making an x. I decided to send it in. I found it and went to iron it a little. 

That was the first time I really looked at it in a long time. I saw how little I had left to do*, and how amazing that green tail is. And I started to have second thoughts...On the one hand, yes I did all that work. On the other hand, this piece wouldn't really have a spot in my house, or my mother's, or even in the house she used to have. But then, it's thisclose to being complete. But it's a giant headache to stitch. If I let it go, it will go to good purpose. It will be rescued. I guess this is how my cousin feels when a foster dog goes to its new family.

And in thinking about this one, I've started to reconsider Watercolor Geraniums too.

What would you do?



*Even less than in this picture.

Dilated

I have been having trouble with my eyes. I'm finding that I need more magnification when I stitch because it's hard to focus otherwise. And it's especially difficult to look up from my work and focus in the distance or even the middle distance. Since I was about 20, I've occasionally used glasses to correct my vision--I have one eye that sees near and one eye that sees far. I don't need glasses to see, but sometimes it works a little better with than without.

That's pretty much what the ophthalmologist told me today--I don't need to wear glasses but I could. But when I saw how much sharper I see in the near eye, I realized it's time. Of course, since I had to get progressive lenses (when did I get so effing old?) I couldn't get the cute Nine West pair (the lens needed to be bigger). I did resist the Pradas the technician showed me. I ended up with the Kate Spade Madelyn in olive tortoise. Because picking out new glasses when you have dilated pupils and no bff to give approval is just what you want to do.

The good news is that the doctor saw my stitching--and I was stitching 40 count over one with no magnification (though my arms were waving about like I was playing the trombone)--and told me that I had to see the embroidered quilts at the Perelman Building at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'm pretty sure he's right.

Okay, I've cooked dinner in my sunglasses. When will my eyes return to normal?

Street Cred

Cross-Stitch With Street Cred
Allison Tunis takes arts and crafts to the edge, celebrating female sexuality in cross-stitch

I wish I were more articulate. I wish I could better represent cross-stitch--not the straw man description of "cross stitch" that gets used as a basis for deciding that some people are doing "really innovative things" with our craft. (This also goes for The Girl on the Wall, which I find admirable and interesting but probably not nearly as unique as we are being led to believe.) I'm tired of being pointed to the seat by the grannies because what I'm doing is somehow trite and twee. I'm just so fucking sick of the belief that cross stitch is all teddy bears and country geese, unless it's about naked women, ejaculating penises, and the word fuck. (I'm not on the side of the people who are all "eww, ejaculating penises" either. Is there a middle ground?)

Visit Tunis's etsy shop where you can find cross stitch face that is neither family nor celebrity and thus even more perplexing to me. You cannot, however, find the bright purple vibrator. Now that was what I was looking for.

Tunis is probably a fabulously interesting woman at the center of this. It's just that other people are deciding what gets said about her. It's not really about her.

Interestingly enough, people who are old timey readers of rctn will remember that creepy old guy who used to cross-stitch naked women. I'm pretty sure he used 68 different colors of "thread" too. And then you wonder what's the difference between naked chicks stitched by an art school trained woman and naked chicks stitched by an old man ("outsider art"). There is a difference--for instance, one gets you covered in the news and on blogs--but there's not, you know? Again and again someone reinvents the wheel and others point and say "brilliant!" "Outside the box!" "Innovative and unique!" "Speaks for itself!"

Grr. Nothing, people, nothing at all, "speaks for itself." Just strike that from your vocabulary. The implication is that there is only one way to interpret something. Interpretation, however, is mired in ideology. If you think everyone would have your interpretation it's simply because you can't see beyond your own ideology. So fuck you. Wow. That felt good.

Lancaster County, PA

On Saturday, we--and everyone else in southeastern Pennsylvania--headed out on Route 30 to visit the Amish. We went to Intercourse (you just have to) and visited the People's Museum to see the quilts. Then we looked around the gift shop. There was a lovely piece (squares of wool felt--half inch piled on one inch--and topped with a button) framed, on sale for (hold on to your hats) $895. All it is is squares stitched to a ground fabric through the button--no piecing, no quilting, just a one inch squares topped with a half inch square topped with a button and sewn to a ground fabric. Ten across and ten down, or so. Slapped in a shadow box frame. Eight hundred ninety five dollars.

So I went downstairs to the fabric store and bought $22 worth of hand dyed wool felt that you see here. Someone's gonna have one helluva piece of art on the walls!

pretty, pretty

Today I was going to review a book, since I have done no stitching this week. Maybe tomorrow, but I've got to prep for the guest.

But then, lucky you, this fell into my inbox. A woman in San Francisco used to bind books. Which she embroidered. Oh, beauty! They are on view at Arion Press in SF through April 13.

A Face that Launched 1000 Stitches

Oh sure, he's Kate Moss's boyfriend but it's still hard to believe he could inspire cross-stitch. And yet... This woman is cross-stitching her text messages. All of them. Including the deep, momentous message from Doherty, "Eels slip down a treat." In American English, it doesn't even mean anything. She believes the folorn medium of text messages should be memorialized; some of these messages are meaningful. I'm pretty sure that unless you've got philosophers for friends, most of your text messages can slip into oblivion unnoticed.

Is the world gone crazy, and the rest of us hadn't noticed?

Buying Fiber Art

In the most recent issue of Needlearts, the EGA newsletter, Shirley Kay Wolfersperger bemoans the lack of sales for fiber arts. They exhibit it, but we don't buy it. She wants to know why. That, I thought, is a really good question. Her friend the gallery owner said that people don't buy fiber art because they aren't educated about it. This is probably true. But what really caught my attention was this:

From embroiderers I hear many comments, such as, "I don't need to buy that, because I can learn to do it," or "this is just what my Great-aunt Charlotte did, and I have enough of that."

A person can know how to do oils yet still want to buy a Picasso. The modern fiber artists are no Picassos? How do you know? ...My Great-aunt Charlotte never did anything like what I do--never even dreamed of it. (11)

She then goes on to encourage embroiderers like us to buy embroidery since we know good from bad and great from mediocre. This will start the trend and more people will become collectors.

When I finished the article, I thought all sorts of conflicting thoughts. First, I'm not so sure we do know the great from the mediocre. I was once in a museum that displayed cross-stitch pieces that had hoop marks. (It was in conjunction with--althought not part of--The Dinner Party, and these mediocre pieces had been done by recognized artists--not necessarily recognized embroiderers.) I also have a tendency not to like the stuff that EGA exhibits. So who decides what is great? Now I totally agree the fiber artists don't get their props because they're mostly women and it's mostly men (and the patriarchal system) that decide what's "great" when it comes to Art. But still, I'm not buying the Picasso if I don't like it.

Then I thought, "when's the last time I was in a gallery of any sort?" I think a lot of us have the DIY spirit because we just don't have money to splash around on art, let alone Art. I'm not even talking about spending money on antique needlework pieces. I thought this as I was standing in my bedroom. I saw a little irony in my thinking--over the bed hangs a weaving from Indonesia (from my sister's trip), next to the bed is a button blanket from the Tlingit Indians in Alaska (honeymoon souvenir), on the other side of the window is a batik from India (our Indian friend brought it back for us) and that hangs near the mola I picked up in the San Blas Islands. So I do buy textiles, but the pieces have particular nostalgic meaning. (And now that I think of it, "art" produced basically for the tourist industry may or may not be art.)

Beyond the obvious monetary reasons for doing it ourselves, we love to touch the fabric, to choose the colors, to feel the threads. It may not be art but it's ours. If I buy something from a Fiber Artist, where do I get my tactile satisfaction? I'm not putting my fingers on something I just paid $500 for.

What about Aunt Charlotte? Aunt Charlotte's copies of patterns drawn by someone else might not be Fine Art, but we're back to the idea of nostalgia. There is something about having her work hanging around the house versus the work of some artist I don't know. There's a spiritual connection to Aunt Charlotte as well as the familial one.

That's what I thought when I read Wolfsperger's "Point of View."

Dirty Stitchers

I love having access to a university library. You can go to the electronic resources and find articles from the The Dominion Post (Wellington, NZ). Back in July, they reported on a group show "Done Dirt Cheap."

The crafts of cross-stitch and crochet, usually associated with suburban mothers and grandmothers, have been adapted to sexual themes, with the exhibition's curator happy that her own work is labelled pornography.

The group show Done Dirt Cheap, which opened last week, features work by eight artists, five Kiwis and three Britons. Works include a crocheted penis and several cross-stitch designs depicting sex acts. Curator Angela Meyer, who made the cross-stitch works, said her work was harder than mere erotica: "It's pretty explicit stuff. It will be really interesting to see how it goes in New Zealand and see whether people embrace it or go: 'This is outrageous!'"

Ms Meyer, 29, learned to cross-stitch when she was a child. She was impressed by "the beautiful threads" for sale in Wellington craft stores, but "the patterns were just naff [nb: American readers, "unstylish, cliched, outmoded"] ...I'm not really a puppies and baskets kind of gal."

Where to start with such riches? First, I'm really tired of people thinking that all cross-stitch is puppies and country-style geese. I know some of it is, especially if you are only looking in the big box craft stores. I also have a sneaking suspiscion, based on what I see in the imported craft magazines, that a lot of what is available outside the U.S. is indeed naff. But I'm not going to knock my international readers for doing it, so I'll leave it at that.

We also have to do something, as young, hip, urban stitchers--and I know some of you reading this are--to change the idea that people who cross-stitch are suburban mothers and grandmothers! I'm pushing for the stitch n' bitch for um, real stitchers. (Knitting just isn't stitching to me. Stitching has needles with eyes. Try to convince me otherwise.) So go to meetup and sign up.

And what's with the idea that grandmothers aren't hot for porn? Apparently when you get old you dry up. Just check out what one old bastard's up to. Scroll down, all the way down. I'm warning you, they're nude. Of course this is erotica and the aforementioned material depicts "sex act." Now why can't I find that on the internet?

You probably expect some kind of feminist rant against porn, but I ain't your girl. "Outrageous" indeed.

Well, that was an adventure!

I didn't expect to be so long getting back here. I was stuck in San Francisco an extra day because of the fires in Southern California. While my apartment is not in any danger, the air traffic controllers were, and everything got shut down on Sunday. Much was back up on Monday--of course, we had to fly on a different airline and into Orange County about 40 minutes south of where we expected to end up. Oh, and we had to wait an extra 1.5 hours on the runway before we could take off. Everyone was well behaved except for the Big Idiot sitting behind us who doesn't think the U.S. should be brought in to help pay for the bazillion dollars in damages because the fires are "local." But mostly I could tune out her yammering.

At any rate, the hotel didn't have a yellow pages, so I couldn't find any cool stitching stores to check out. I did, however, manage to get us to the Asian Art Museum for a quick look before the wedding. I saw some lovely Korean wrappers (patchwork fabric giftwrap) and some Tibetan weaving. I like seeing textiles in museums. I am a sucker for it. I once spent an hour looking at a (as in one) needle casket in the V&A. I only moved on because there was more needlework to see.

I worked on the sampler for the Dude on the planes and in our downtime. "When in love I do commence, may it be with a man of sense." Whenever I tell him he's silly, he says, in his very serious English voice, "No I'm not; I'm sensible." So in addition to being cotton for our second anniversary (last July), it's very apropos. I love the colors as well, and it's on Meadowlark fabric from R&R. FABULOUS mottling in pinky-peach and blues on a greeny-gold.

I'm going to a card making workshop at the scrapbook store with Sissy tonight. I'm never going to finish this afghan, am I?