Bliss: How I Came to Love Guerrillas

Early on in art school, I decided more than anything I wanted… scratch that… needed to become a Guerilla Girl when I grew up.

Who wouldn’t?

Emerging in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls represented the furious backlash arising from the male dominated Christie’s auction frenzy of the 1980’s. They wore fake gorilla heads and accessorized with fishnet stockings. They tagged the streets of New York’s Soho with their own brand of mini-manifestos. They touted themselves as the Conscious of the Art World. Yes, they were that cool.



Just looking at their work was enough to inspire in me such a maddening desire to do something, and simultaneously make me feel like I could. These are precisely the same emotions that are conjured up whenever I read about, or run into an act of guerrilla knitting.

The Knit Knot Tree in Xenia, Ohio was my first experience guerrilla knitters. Walking down Xenia Avenue and seeing it standing there, all warm and wooly, and bursting with every color in a Skittles bag, it was serendipitous! Only 2 weeks prior I had picked up some #10 aluminum needles for the first time, like, ever.




Recently, I was led (by a tweet from Kim Werker) to the Yarnbombing blog written by Canadians Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain who, it seems, are exclusively and extensively compiling information on the premier guerrilla knitters from around the world. My favorite entry so far, is an interview with Grrl+Dog. She says:

Found objects in public are evidence of a magical world; where a mysterious someone cares enough to make something and leave it. It is an act of generosity, of impermanence, of letting go.

She even mentions knitting a gorilla suit.

Yeah.

A Newbie's Quest for The First Sweater (and Good Old Fashioned S. E. X. )

I am desperate.

Usually, I have a Navajo sense of time about major life decisions. It's the philosophy (read: excuse for a non Native American living in modern times) that allows me to wait until the time is right before making any decision of consequence. Take for example, my 4 year engagement to my DB. Yes, I do want to marry him. No, I do not want to "date other people." Yes, we are two peas living in the proverbial pod. However, much to the chagrin of friends, family, and assorted others, I couldn't bear to make one single, solitary thought/plan/idea concrete until it "felt right."

Now that there are "official" plans in the works for state sanctioned nuptuals, our friends, family, and assorted others sleep a little better at night. Things, it seems, have worked out for the best. There are many other times I can recall where subscribing to this particular philosophy have not had such wildly successful consequences. Waking up in the morning and deciding, because of the wrinkle on the bed sheet, and a particularly ominous ant climbing across the ceiling, that I should forgo a seven a.m. class, may have set back progress toward my first four-year-actually-took-seven-degree once or twice.

I fear I may find myself in similar circumstances regarding the completion... no, INITIATION of my very first sweater. This dilemma is compounded of course by an irrational fear of commitment (as you may well have already gathered). Truly, I feel this may be one of the biggest decisions I will have had to make in recent memory. As a newbie (~1 year) knitter, who voraciously reads anything I can on the subject of The First Sweater, I take the process very seriously.

Because I anticipate the processes of knitting an actual garment too be a source of simultaneous joy and consternation, I felt I should start with something of smaller proportions. So, in honor of spring, I cast on Kimberly Fairchild's Sexie little tank (as featured in Debbie Stoller's Stitch 'N Bitch Nation)

Thus far the experience has been one of consternation only. I have been doing the Dog Circling Seventy-Seven Times Before Laying Down Dance. It goes something like this:

Row 1: knit *rip everything out and CO 150… again; repeat from * 5 times due to flawed counting system
Row 2: *knit, then tink entire row; repeat from * until eyes crossed
Row 3: hide knitting under couch, cast on a lovely scarf, *locate bourbon; repeat from * as desired

Certainly someone can identify (or at the very least, empathize) with my current situation. Maybe it just isn’t “time” yet. Maybe I have irreconcilable commitment issues. Maybe I should drink less bourbon.

Before I was driven to complete and utter madness, I came to my senses and high-tailed it over to my LYS, Knit On! for some good, old fashioned S. E. X. (non-knitters read: stash enrichment eXpedition). Stash it seems, makes everything better.





And it is always time for stash.

Get Your Sock On

Sock knitting is probably one of the coolest games in town. And I gotta say, I am pacing the floor like a wild animal since I caught wind of this monumental socktacular event.

Sock Summit 2009 appears to be THE place to be for an ultimate dog days of summer sockstravaganza. Sock Summit teachers were just announced... a veritable who's who a woolie wise women. Updates are promised on the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Blog, and the related Sock Summit group on Ravelry is positively abuzz with anticipation, shared projects, and general happiness.

I absolutely MUST find a way to get myself, and recently converted/now rabid sock knitter best friend (who, by the way, just completed her very first pair which she affectionately refers to as "canoe covers") to Oregon.

My baby brother Carm will be the lucky recipient of these woolie wonders for his upcoming 21st birthday. I promise, they will be made more appropriate by carefully inserting only the finest little airplane bottles of booze available (99 Apples, and Cherry Pucker, for example).

The next pair, however, are mine. Greedy, greedy.

Bliss: Stuff That Makes Me Happy

I have to give enormous thanks to anyone who manages to get Art and Craft to collide. This quarter's issue of Craft featured a brief article on interdisciplinary/multimedia artist Laure Drogul, and her Orchestral Knitting Apparatus. Imagine: ten sets of needles, miked for optimum sound, and happiy clicking away to the tune of Old Sweater Vest Pattern. One may also visit her website, Cult of Radical Marms, and participate in a web-based art project entitled Olefactory Factory by simply aswering a few questions about your city and it's smells.

Carm's socks finally made it off the needles at about five o'clock this morning. I anticipate having major difficulty giving these up, as the yarn knitted up quite yummily. In order to satisfy my raging sock lust, I started swatching IMMEDIATELY in order to create a pair only for me, for me, for me... Somehow, someway, I continue to dodge the bain of all sock-knitters' existence (second sock syndrome). Perhaps this only sets in as the knitter becomes more prolific, and succumbs to the pressures of loved ones, thus becoming a one wo/man sock factory. I remain resistant. (Excuse = I'm just not that good yet...)




The nifty Brother sewing machine Greg and I got for Christmas finally made it out of the box and modified it's very first thrift store/re-cycle/re-shape tee. I have what amounts to a small army of tees recently purchased from the Goodwill. They are so awesome, except for the whole "fit like a circus tent" thing. Using my favorite tee as a template, and emboldened by a few PBRs to "freehand," we came up with this:


Please don't make fun of the craft weenie loose threads...

Kicking around some ideas for (ahem) The First Sweater. Absolutely too many to choose from. May need to assign each a number and just roll some dice. You know, so I can actually WEAR the thing before summer is upon us and I start knitting bikinis I will never, ever wear.

Final thought: Big ups to Kerry for making it through the fly-by-the-seat-of -my-pants instruction, and making it through her first ceremonial heel turning! I want pics!!!

More Wrecked

Origin of the Craft Weenie/Bag/Scarf Combo Begun!

My second year of school at the Art Academy, I was taking an intro to photography class. Mr. Ken Knowlton was our instructor. Ken was a mild mannered fellow, loved photography, loved film, LOVED Monty Python. I was a lackluster student of art, loved being on my own, loved my new camera, HATED actual work.

Ken wasn't the kind of guy to call you out in the middle of a critique and tell you exactly how god-awful your piece was, he left that to your peers. But he did harass and harangue me to no end about the nit-pickety stuff. I was no natural at things like matte cutting, dry mounting, and mixing chemistry. Square corners, no matter how many t-squares and 90° triangles there were, eluded me. I couldn't manage to use an exacto knife (and mine was always dull) without inflicting harm onto myself, others, or school property (little did I know this was foreshadowing of events to come in the many kitchens I would soon find myself working in).

One spring afternoon, I was busying myself with cutting another trapezoidal shaped matte. Patiently Ken approached me, and began discussing the finer aspects of squares. Exasperated, I pointed out that no one would notice my jagged edges or 76° corner from a distance of, say 15 feet. “Crystal,” he said as he wagged a finger in the air, “don’t be a craft weenie.” Needless to say, the phrase caught on. I never heard the end of it. It eventually became a standard reference for students in critiques, not only for photography, but sculpture, painting, and drawing as well. Very regularly, it was applied to my work.

Somewhere…somehow, I have become much more type A. I obsess much more. I’d rather rip out a month’s worth of work that suffer silently over a misplaced purl stitch just laying there, mocking me, mocking me, mocking me. I lay awake at night wondering when I will be able to weave in those pesky ends on a project just started.

I hit the thrift store yesterday and found the most fantastic pleather coat. I started the scarf/bag combo last night. The crochet Fit to be Tied bag is out of Debbie Stoller’s Happy Hooker. It looks pretty nifty, but is a bit flaccid… if you know what I mean. I’ve got one of my grandfather’s old hankies to sew into it, and am contemplating wooden dowels or some plastic mesh to get her a little more *ahem* shaped. The scarf is worked in garter stitch using the same ribbon I threaded through the bag. I am planning for fringieness at the ends. I am terribly excited (about the fringe that is).

Carm's Red Red Sox are going swimmingly...

More Wrecked Journal