Misc.

Hi Everyone,

Wow. I've been such a deadbeat blogger. I've been feeling creative (which I haven't felt in months), so I've decided to go with it & create. I put a border on that bible piece, which I mentioned in my bible piece entry a while back. You may remember that I had wanted to put black garters as a border, but I was having trouble getting garters shipped at a reasonable rate. So, I instead decided to make my own garters to save money. With the cost of materials, the amount of money I spent was the same as if I had bought those other black garters & had them shipped. And I also had to make these new garters. I think I learned my lesson on that one. Here's a bad photo of an edge:














Unfortunately, in this photo you can't see that I had sewn the garters to each other & to the bible pages with that same red thread. Fortunately, later this month I'm going to have the fabuzoid photographer, Charr Crail, take images of this piece & some of my more recent pieces. I'll post them probably in July.

When I was working on the piece, Doug commented that it looked Victorian and that it looked like an old fashioned sampler. That notion of a sampler inspired me to put the piece into a frame & call it a day.

I finally finished reading Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. I don't know if you remember my remarking that this book is full of textile metaphors. One rich metaphor towards the end of the book in Chapter 80 is "The universe is a cloth, and all humanity interwoven. Each and every person connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone. Each person who comes into my life affecting the pattern, and me affecting theirs."

Last night Doug and I were watching the new Pride & Prejudice movie. In one scene the characters are shopping for ribbons. In another scene, while the family is scurrying to get ready for a distinguished visitor, the mother calls to the daughters to get out the ribbons. It was interesting to see a scene about a time when ribbons were a high-status item.

Last week Doug told me to apply to my dream school for grad work. I've decided that I'd like a school that would allow me to not only do design, but would allow me to explore textile anthropology & the text-textile connection. I'm thinking perhaps UC Davis or Phila U or maybe returning to San Francisco State U. Readers -- do you have any suggestions?

I hope you read Sista Sledge's comment to my last blog entry, in which she challenges the relegation of craft to second-class status. You go sista! (Sista Sledge is my nickname for my sister, Mary Kay.)

B.