Textiles, Art and Culture: A Personal Reflection

I have resolved to start taking pictures regularly and blogging them. But right now is finals week so I just thought I'd copy/paste a paper I wrote for one of my classes that I want some of my friends to read.

When I attended the reception for the recent exhibit of Ghanaian textiles and art at the Common Wealth Gallery, I was struck by the beauty of the cloth, prints and paintings on display. The primarily geographical curatorial sensibility brought to this exhibit was unusual, as this is a more common approach with older art rather than artists that are working today. Juxtaposing these very different works from the same culture, produced in different contexts and different mediums, along with the work of Pamela Clarkson, who has adopted the Ghanaian culture rather than grown up in it, gave a sense of context to this art that I found incredibly valuable to my own aesthetics and ideas about what art is.

I don’t like to define art; in fact, I have a lot of problems with dictionary definitions for the vast majority of words in common usage. In How the Mind Works, evolutionary psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker describes what he calls a “fuzzy category”: “whenever one tries to program a set of criteria to capture the members of a category, the category disintegrates.” Fuzzy categories are ultimately bound up with the human cognitive faculty we refer to as “common sense.” Ever since I read How the Mind Works, around my freshman year of high school, I became a lot less interested in the question, “What is art?” I simply say that some things are definitely art (Van Gogh paintings); some things are sort of art (runway fashion looks); and some things are definitely not art (my beat-up water bottle).

Mary Hark’s choice to exhibit paintings and textiles in the same space not only underlined the influence of textiles on African art but also showed us the African respect for the textiles of everyday life. A fundamental tenet of my aesthetic sense is that things are for using, which puts me in direct opposition to the Western art world’s insistence that art is separate from everyday life. As a result of this odd dichotomy, so-called “real art” gets more respect than the artful things of daily life, even from fiber artists. Fiber Revolution, a group of artists who work in the medium of quilts, ask to be respected despite the fact that their work has its origins in a practical art, rather than because of it, saying on their website, “Although the art is constructed from fabric, it is not meant to lie at the foot of the bed, but rather to hang on the wall like an oil or watercolor painting.” Although they are trying to “educate the public about fiber art as an exciting art form,” they have not themselves moved past the assumption that a painting is “real art” and a quilt on a bed is not, a barrier that stands in the way of even so-called “art quilts” to be taken seriously.

I was raised in an environment (the near west side of Madison) that placed a very high value on intellectual pursuits, and a low value on material ones. As a person who likes to think and got good grades, I was considered not only “smart enough” to be a lawyer or an engineer but occasionally “too smart” for even the liberal arts. In order to get onto the life path I’m currently on, one which I do believe is the correct one for my life, I had to overcome my own ingrained snobbery. As a kid, I took a few weaving classes, and I actually bought a drop spindle when I was in middle school, but I didn’t have any examples of how to integrate textile making into my life so I gave up asking my parents for a rigid heddle loom and took up a lot of my time with ballet classes. (I still have some of the wool roving that came with the spindle in my craft supply stash.)

Obviously, I have spent years thinking through some of these questions. stepping outside our own culture even a little shows us just how weird the snobbery that has infused Western aesthetics over the past few hundred years really is. In acknowledging the ways that textiles are alive and important in African culture, we see the ways in which they are dead and disregarded in our own. To me, this is in some ways a call to action. Seeing art, craft and design as opposing rather than overlapping pursuits does ourselves a disservice as we fail to integrate our lives. This exhibition, where batik yardage was displayed as art, does not work within this disjointed Western paradigm to “elevate” cloth to the level of painting and printmaking; instead it celebrates cloth for what it is: material. Rather than continuing as precious pieces to hang on the wall, this cloth will be sold as yardage; I’m thinking about buying a few yards to make into curtains, or for some other sewing project.

I keep coming back to Pamela Clarkson’s artist statement: “Moving from one country to another is like passing from one age to another: one’s own and that of the host country.” Her work, with its very personal sensibility and diverse inspiration, is inspiring. And the conflation of traveling through space with traveling through time illuminates the way that our notions of modernity can never be disentangled from their cultural context. It took a long time for me to figure out why these words really stuck with me, but now I realize: it’s because I want to run away so I can look back and see what insularities are inherent in my current perspective.

Fine art vs. craft

I had to cut this from a paper because it was too tangential, but I also wanted to hold onto it. So hooray for copy/paste!

From my perspective, the bias of fine art against craft has its roots in patriarchy as well as the women’s liberation movement. In the 1950’s, the acceptance of the idea of a certain kind of domesticity as a path to personal fulfillment proved extremely harmful to the psychological health of many women. However, the feminist movement reacted by saying, “Domesticity is bad and boring. Let us into the club of things men do, those things are interesting and fulfilling.” I, however, would draw a different conclusion: that fulfillment does not come from playing the role that’s expected of you, but from from making right choices for oneself. In many ways, the role that men were expected to play in the 1950’s, that of careerist and breadwinner, has become the expectation for all individuals, instead of being rejected as a limiting and repressive aspect of our society. Indeed, the chauvinism of the 1950’s has been preserved in the idea that “masculine” fields—academia, law, business—are the fields that make the best use of a person’s intelligence, while things that women were “allowed” to do are almost uniformly a waste of human potential. In other words, put down the repressive needle and pick up the liberating paint brush!

Knit together in the Network Society

Continuing my "lazy blogger" trend of just copy/pasting a paper written for class . . . I really need to actually start taking pictures, my goodness.

Knit Together in the Network Society: Ravelry and the Human-Centric Web

To those that do not practice them, traditional textile crafts seem incredibly old-fashioned, rooted in a pre-industrial past. But we cannot step in the same river twice; no matter how closely we imitate the creations of our foremothers, we cannot fully espouse the attitudes of a person who has no choice but to spin their own yarn, even if we have drop spindles in our craft bins or spinning wheels in our living rooms. And, more importantly, when we are connected to an information society—when we have reliable methods of transmitting and receiving information across time and space—our knowledge is of necessity organized differently. Rather than being masters of a few techniques passed down from mother to daughter, many knitters of today are adept pattern-readers (and modifiers), drawing from the compiled knowledge of experts and sharing their innovations and technical expertise not only locally but online. The website Ravelry, often called a “knitting social network,” is one of the major points of access to the world’s knitting knowledge to web-savvy knitters. With over 1,730,000 registered users (Ravelry: People Search), and many more registering every day, it’s clear that (although Ravelry does not gather any demographic data from its users) this is not just a phenomenon of young knitters. Indeed, when I was a new knitter at age 18, a friend of mine who’s now in her sixties pointed me to this invaluable source of socially-derived knowledge. By harnessing the collective intelligence of users and controlling data that is enriched by normal use of the site, Ravelry is profoundly changing the experience of knitting in the modern world.

Ravelry, founded in 2007 by Jess and Casey Forbes, a husband-and-wife developer-knitter team (Jess is the knitter and Casey the developer), exemplifies the “Web 2.0” paradigm as set out by Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly explained Web 2.0 as he saw it in a 2005 article, two years before the founding of Ravelry. O’Reilly gives a list of seven characteristics he sees as key to the Web 2.0 experience, though he qualifies this list, saying, “excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven.” Ravelry is outstanding—indeed pioneering—in two of these areas: the effective ways that it harnesses user data, and its utilization of the collective intelligence of its users.

Ravelry contains two key features for users: user “notebook,” where projects can be entered, with information about the pattern, yarn, and needles used as well as pictures; and the forums, where users discuss anything from a favorite designer to a favorite TV show to a lifestyle choice. When looking up a pattern on Ravelry, you can not only see the designer’s suggested yarn on the main page, but you can click on a “yarn ideas” tab and see about 30 yarns most commonly used to knit a given pattern. Clicking on that yarn will in turn take you to projects made with a given yarn, so you can see if it looks good (a big concern with color-changing yarns), as well as comments written by users which may alert you to a yarn’s unsuitability. Conversely, from a yarn’s page you can browse some of the most popular projects made with that yarn. All this information—what yarn is used for a pattern, what people are saying about it—is made available because everything on Ravelry is linked. Instead of just writing the name of the yarn used, users actually link to the yarn’s “page” (maintained by either the yarn’s manufacturer or volunteer editors). Pattern pages and yarn pages can also be linked directly in the forums, and that link is “two-way,” as you can go from any yarn or pattern page to a list of forum posts about it. By providing an extremely useful service for individual users who just want to keep track of what yarn they used for what knitting project, Ravelry is building a massive collection of data that is helpful to its users.

Ravelry also uses data gathered from users as well as information provided by pattern designers in its “smart search.” Using a wide variety of social, personal and factual data, a Ravelry user can search for patterns (and yarns!) meeting a vast range of criteria. For example, browsing for patterns for “women’s sweater” (or any other criteria that might be interesting or relevant) I can choose to sort by “Hot right now,” “Most popular,” or “Most projects,” among other purely social criteria, as well as aggregate criteria (like “best result”) that take socially-derived data into account. Ravelry is not only useful to users that enter their own data—giving them a personal record of their own knitting—but also to “freeloaders” who use Ravelry’s search capabilities to find a pattern or yarn without entering data. But anyone who browses the Ravelry databases is taking advantage of data gathered through individual actions that are both useful and fun—a cornerstone of Web 2.0.

“In the past, knitting traveled by artifact.” So wrote acclaimed knitting designer Anna Zilboorg (2011) in a brief introduction to a sock pattern published in Piecework magazine. She goes on to detail the processes by which knitting traditions (and indeed, all textile traditions) have evolved locally and cross-pollinated geographically in the days before mass literacy and printed knitting patterns. But now, knowledge of knitting travels in the heads of people on airplanes as well as in books, magazines, and online. As Zilboorg says, “Today, . . . we have access to all the ways people knit and the things they make. We can engage in World Knitting, a genre that does not depend on the whims of the moment but draws its inspiration from many traditions, melding them harmoniously.”

Unlike many traditionally intellectualized domains, knitting was not a part of any information society until comparatively recently. According to Richard Rutt (1989), the first knitting patterns published in the English language appeared between 1835 and 1840. For at least the first century of their existence, too, knitting patterns primarily served to align the handwork of middle-class and wealthy women with mainstream fashion. It is only in the past fifty years or so that Zilboorg’s “world knitting” has even come into being, with knitting books and magazines bringing the knitting of the world to the West rather than just disseminating Western information. (Zilboorg, by the way, is not young and not active online.)

Information and conversation about knitting has been on the internet as long as there has been an internet, but before 2007, this information was scattered, not synthesized. Podcaster WonderMike (2011) sums up Ravelry’s revolutionary networking of the global knitting community: “If you’re a relatively new knitter such as me—and I started in 2004—it’s hard to remember life before Ravelry. How did we organize patterns, find errata support, and interact with our fellow fiber junkies?”

A microcosm of the internet’s potential, as well as its utility, Ravelry shows us how powerful and useful the innovations of the Network Society can be. We are coming back around to the old ways of knitting from the other side, bringing all the baggage of the last 170 years of receiving knitting knowledge from strangers to this new mode of networked, repersonalized communication. Knitters are an older demographic, according to surveys conducted by the Craft Yarn Council of America, and Ravelry’s nearly two million users represent only a small fraction of the many millions of knitters around the world. What will happen when all of us are truly networked? What innovations from the next technological revolution bring to the crafting world? And what will be the next stage in the development of true “World Knitting”?

Works Cited

Craft Yarn Council of America. (2011). 2009 Research: 5,000 Passionate Knitters & Crocheters Speak Out. Retrieved from http://www.craftyarncouncil.com/know.html

O’Reilly, T. (2005, Sept. 30). What Is Web 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a
/7425

Ravelry: People Search. (n.d.) Retrieved Oct. 26, 2011, from http://www.ravelry.com/people
/search#advanced=1

Rutt, R. (1989). A History of Hand Knitting. Loveland, Colo.: Interweave.

WonderMike. (2011, Aug. 9). Ravel-ution [Episode 22]. Fiber Beat. Podcast retrieved from the Fiber Beat website: http://fiberbeat.com/

Zilboorg, A. (2011, Jan./Feb.). Firework Socks. Piecework, 19, 10-12.

Yo dawg I herd you like networks

Hey guys, this is a paper I wrote for a class called "The Information Society" which I wanted to put on my blog for various reasons. I had a lot of fun writing it.

Networks within networks tangled with networks: Mechanisms of human connection in and around the World of Warcraft

In a virtual world, “importance” and “reality” are constructed in the same way they always have been—socially. So we must keep in mind that although networked computers allow the existence of these virtual worlds, it is the human networks within and surrounding these worlds that gives them their true significance. As Edward Castronova has stated, “Everything that happens in a synthetic world is the consequence of the interactions of human minds” (2005, p. 48). It can even be argued that virtual worlds are much more a “meeting of minds” than the physical world, as rather than being governed by the laws of nature, a virtual world is governed by a mind—a developer. Just as human minds are unpredictable, the networks we form online are chaotic and fractal, as one network, like those in the game World of Warcraft, can generate subnetworks and metanetworks through its importance to players.

One goal of the developers of a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), such as World of Warcraft (WoW) is to tell a story, a story which is the world that players inhabit. Within this story—the story of Azeroth, a world invaded by demons, corrupted by malevolent influences, attacked and defended by dragons—players form social networks, often joining formal organizations called “guilds” in order to find players with similar play styles as themselves, or perhaps creating a guild in order to play with real-life acquaintances. These are formed by members of the same basic in-game network, i.e., the same realm (or server), and the same faction, Alliance or Horde. The guild is the most common persistent subnetwork found within WoW. Guild members have in-game methods of communication and incentives for grouping together rather than with strangers. As discussed by Williams et. al., guilds can generally be classified as belonging to one of four types: social, raid, PVP (player vs. player) or roleplaying (2006). In addition, guilds vary in size from very small (it is possible to have a guild with only one player) to very large (due to various game mechanics, the maximum number of players in a guild is 1,000 (McCurley, 2010)). Guilds facilitate gameplay chiefly by providing a group to play with, but their importance to players is largely social. Williams et. al. conclude that a major factor in the guild’s importance to players is as a source of social capital, similar to a civic organization where individuals may have close friends in the organization but also take advantage of a formal organizational structure to meet strangers and interact with casual acquaintances. It is, by the way, important to note that I have classified guilds as a “subnetwork” because all the characters in a guild must be a part of the same in-game network. The players, however, are connected to each other by more than just their WoW accounts; guilds often have websites with forums, use VoIP services to communicate by voice, and contact each other by email, instant messaging, or even SMS and telephones. It is also not precisely true to say that these subnetworks draw from preexisting realm/faction networks; it is not unusual for guildmates to have met in real life or elsewhere online before choosing to play WoW together, and an individual may choose a realm and faction because of a guild they want to join.

In-game, players cannot communicate with their enemy faction verbally or group up to accomplish in-game goals, and not many kinds of groups can be formed across realm boundaries. WoW players who are not necessarily able to connect in-game have connected out-of-game in a wide variety of metanetworks, whether centered in discussion forums, informative blogs, or even derivative creative works. Many of the metanetworks of World of Warcraft stem from a desire to be better at the game. For example, the forum Elitist Jerks describes itself as “a WoW discussion forum targeted towards topics regarding high-end raiding and analysis of game mechanics” (“Welcome”). It is very clear from the site’s FAQ that this is not a place to joke around and have fun; in this particular network WoW—and mostly just raiding in WoW—is serious business. Other WoW metanetworks facilitate the kinds of fandom interactions common to many popular intellectual properties, including fanfiction, webcomics, and speculation. But any game as big as WoW—with 11.1 million active players worldwide as of June 30, down from a world record maximum of 12 million (Cifaldi, 2011)—is big enough to generate what can rightly be called major online media outlets. WoW Insider, a blog about World of Warcraft, hires writers and editors to cover many aspects of WoW, from news about upcoming game content, to how to play your class, to discussions of the in-game lore (or story), to humor, to features about the fan community itself.

It could be argued that subnetworks and metanetworks come about because of game mechanics (and, in some cases, a profit motive). But there are many video games—indeed, many Massively Multiplayer Online Games—and their game mechanics don’t all generate how-to sites, let alone enough pageviews to generate ad revenue. Players who don’t care about the game world or community don’t stick around long enough to form guilds. The importance of a network to individuals is crucial to the ability of that network to successfully generate other networks. Metanetworks to WoW can even generate subnetworks. The guild AIE (Alea Iacta Est), for example, is described on its website as “a casual Horde Guild that was started by the creators/fans/friends of The Instance/ELR/Buzz out Loud/Jawbone Radio/Mahalo Daily on the Earthen Ring (RP)-US Realm of World of Warcraft” (“Charter”). (The Instance is a World of Warcraft podcast whose listeners and fan community are another WoW metanetwork.) Tracing the “network generation”: First, some guys that play WoW started a podcast. As the podcast grew in popularity, it became the focus of one WoW metanetwork. The members of this metanetwork created a WoW guild: a subnetwork. This WoW guild has in turn generated “co-networks” in other online games. The podcasts only thrive because of the importance of WoW to hosts and listeners; the guild came about because the podcasts were important to many people; and the guild became so important to its members that they not only communicate out-of-game but have created a formal mechanism to create subnetworks within other virtual environments. It’s now possible to regard AIE: Azeroth as just one subnetwork of AIE as a whole as well as a subnetwork of the World of Warcraft.

If we participate in any information society, we presume we are and will continue to be able to communicate at a distance. With the infrastructural revolutions of the network society, we have a previously unparalleled ability to communicate across human space and time. Many see this as an intellectual paradise and a breeding ground for social change. Yet amidst this tremendous potential, we are more likely to use the internet to tweet at writers we reference in our papers and kill dragons with friends in Omaha than to exchange intellectual or spiritual ideas with strangers. Some consider this a waste of the internet’s potential, but what else would we use it for? Social connection—staying connected with our loved ones, making connections with like-minded individuals—is a basic human need that has always driven the revolutions of the information society.


References

Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Charter. (n.d.) Retrieved Sep. 20, 2011, from http://wiki.aie-guild.org/index.php?title=Charter

Cifaldi, F. (2011, Aug. 3). World of Warcraft Subscriptions Continue To Decline, Though More Slowly. Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36351/World_of_Warcraft_Subscriptions_Continue_To_Decline_Though_More_Slowly.php

McCurley, M. (2010, Oct. 8). Cataclysm: Guild cap revised, now 1,000 members. [Weblog post.] Retrieved from http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/10/08/cataclysm-guild-cap-revised-now-1-000-members/

Welcome to Elitist Jerks. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://elitistjerks.com/faq.php?faq=forumrules#faq_introduction

Williams, D., Ducheneaut, N., Xiong, L., Zhang, Y., Yee, N., Nickell, E. (2006). From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 1, 338-361.

World of Warcraft, Fashion History, and so forth

It's been forever since I posted anything, I'm terrible I know. But I have realized recently that a lot of the comments I end up actually leaving have enough substance in them to be a "response" blog post. A couple weeks ago this nice lady Carol came over here after a comment I'd left on a blog we both read (and I really should start a series of posts on the things I discussed there), and was nice enough to be disappointed about my dearth of recent posts. And there's nothing like a total stranger believing you have something to say to make you believe you've got something to say. So I'm fleshing out a comment I recently left on WoW Insider, World of Warcraft blog I've been reading as I'm getting more and more into the game.

WoW Insider has a regular feature called "Breakfast Topic," and this morning they asked:

At what point does modern technology in World of Warcraft go too far? How far can gnomish technology really go? Is the game becoming too "steampunky?" Is that even a word?

Do you feel that introducing items from modern-day Earth into Azeroth interferes with the immersion of the game? Is it impossible to properly roleplay when someone just roared past you on what appears to be a Harley-Davidson with a sidecar attached to it? Or do you just shrug it off as gnomish eccentricity? Are the items properly introduced with a logical argument for why they exist, or are they there for the sole purpose of giving engineers something to do (and a way to make money hand over fist)? Do you personally own one of the mechanical vehicles, and, if you are a roleplayer, how do you work it into your storyline?

There was a lot of interesting discussion in the comments, with a not-insignificant number of people complaining that they didn't like to use guns as a "medieval-looking" character and so forth. I think that those people are fundamentally silly for thinking that a fantasy game somehow "has to be" medieval, so I told them so, armed with some Facts I've learned in my design classes and through my interest in design history over the years. Discussion of female underwear leans heavily on Elizabeth Ewing's Dress & Undress, a history of women's underwear in England which I'm currently devouring--highly recommended.

(Blockquote is things from my comment; non-blockquote, brackets, etc. are my attempt to explicate what I'm talking about for a non-WoW audience.)

So of course I thought of this response as soon as I left for work and didn't have time for WoW Insider at lunch . . . Anyways, my $.02 on the whole "Medieval" thing--the aesthetic of WoW is not really so much based on the actual Middle Ages here on Earth. At all. I am not a total architecture expert, but the cities and buildings we see are either completely imagined or drawn from a hodgepodge of historical times, it's not a dichotomy between medieval and steampunk. Even Stormwind, with its Gothic cathedral and crenelated walls, doesn't look much like any actual historical time/place combo.

Stormwind is the human capital city in the game. Below, a screenshot of my "main" (i.e., the character I play most), Syringe. She's a level 23 human fire mage, and yes that is her parrot. She's in Stormwind in the cap--as you can see, there's a bit of an old-timey vibe but the roofs are blue. There's also a player with googles, but that's not really anything to do with city architecture.

And if you're basing this assumption on clothes, well, speaking as a "clothes nerd" (I have the same major as aspiring fashion designers), let's just take a look at cloth-wearing human females (which I am and my main is), who wear close-fitting bodices over a natural torso--that is, we can pretty safely assume no corsetry of any kind, just some sort of bosom support. (No jiggling.)

Here we've got a nice head-to-toe shot of Syringe, in a simpler outfit because sometimes I like to dress my characters pretty, not practical. Notice that even she is not immune to the problem of blinking when her picture's being taken. She's just like me you guys! Except for she's a natural redhead. And she knows magic.

This is actually a very modern idea--the defined waist and fitted bodice first came into fashion in England in the twelfth century, but did not establish themselves firmly on the fashion landscape until the fourteenth--meaning that for most of the time period thought of as the Middle Ages, women in Western Europe (which I know is what you all mean when you say "Medieval") all wore loose-fitting robes, shifts or skirts. Because the fitted bodice was so closely associated with corsetry, it was not worn by women who needed to run or lift things--as our player characters do--for many hundreds of years after it was adopted by fashionable women. During the nineteenth century, women who performed physical labor sometimes wore restricting undergarments, but that didn't last. The "prom-dress" silhouette of a human female in a robe is very, very twentieth-century.

Look look! I'm doing magic!

As far as the combinations of armor and guns--this is a world with magic. In the real world, we don't bring a knife to a gunfight, and we stopped wearing plate because once guns are in the picture it's just too encumbering and not protective enough; also because why would you spend that much money on cannon fodder? Whereas in WoW nearly everything the players use--our guns, our knives, our armor--is enchanted. When your toon [this is another word for "character" but it takes less space to type] puts on plate armor it can actually make you MORE agile than basic, close-fitting cloth, but somehow I still wear cotton/spandex blends when I do yoga.

I've only rolled one Horde character (I'm pretty much a total n00b) so I have less to say about their areas; but in a world where the Plains Indian-styled Tauren and the quasi-medieval Humans and some goat-inspired hotties from outer space with holographic technology are all in contact with each other isn't any less medieval than a world where gnomes build awesome shit out of gears.

Phew! A lot in there definitely would have been a bit over my head just a week or two ago. So let's unpack:

This is Ysylya. She's a level 20 Draenei frost mage. (Shut up. I like playing mages.) The backstory of her race is that they are from a different planet--Outland. (Most of the game takes place on the planet Azeroth.) But as you can see, the model for the race is pretty goat-y. She's currently in a human area, but the space-shippy background she's in gives you a good idea of the spaceship interiors that are very common in lower-level Draenei areas. (I can't go to Outland yet, I need to actually level instead of blogging.)



It's a little easier to see the goat-based styling in this cap--look at the legs. Speaking of the history of underwear, wow is she working the Gibson Girl s-bend--I think it's got something to do with the way the cape interacts with the tail, but I think you'd even see the line if you took the cape off. The main difference between Ysylya and the ideal Gibson figure? The separated bosom.



And finally, my Tauren:



Not sure if I'll keep playing her--she's in a different faction (aka "side") as the other two, and can't be in the Alliance guild I play in with my boyfriend and his siblings and sister-in-law. We also all made a Horde guild but there's a limit on the number of characters you can play on any one server and at least one person was running out. Also the more literal animal-based races look kind of awful in the female form, so even if I wanted to play through all the content exclusive to that race I might want to be less scary-looking, aka I'd be a dude.

Now I'm off to go level Syringe's tailoring, and run a dungeon or two with the guild. I hope to keep up posting--I've got two jumping-off points for rambling on "women's work and the nature of making" not even COUNTING books I'm reading, I've got a lot more to say about WoW which I think would still be interesting to a non-gamer and some of which intersects with my identity as a maker, and of course if I've made quite a lot of things since last time I posted but that would require actually, you know, taking pictures.

. . . Anybody here?

I don't actually know how I'd know if anyone even reads this thing. I miss Livejournal, where commenting was the easiest thing in the world and super common . . . but anyhow, I thought I'd give NaBloPoMo a shot. Which probably makes no sense at all considering how much time I manage to waste *without* trying to blog, but eh.

Got way too much homework to do today, so here's a few flickr pics of summer knitting and I promise to whip out the camera and start telling stories soon!





This is my Colorado Ishbel. Actual color of the yarn about halfway between those two pics. First lace I actually blocked on wires, and it was such a delight I'm planning on casting on an Estonian lace scarf soon, so I can encounter some actual challenges.

A lot of stories go with the knitting of this shawlette/scarf/thing, but I don't have time to tell them at the moment. If anyone comments and asks, I'll share a few, maybe try to get some of my dad's pics of me knitting it all over Colorado, but for now, here's the notes from the project Rav page:

9/17: So I finally blocked the thing (there was this whole saga where I ordered blocking implements, patiently waited until I knew they totally should have arrived because I didn’t want to be That Customer that complains because things don’t show up immediately, only to find I’d had them shipped to the wrong address), and pictures will be forthcoming–I just realized I was wasting away my Saturday editing them when there is all this beautiful weather out. Soon!

8/7: This is my souvenir of my family vacation to Colorado! I bought the yarn on the first full day, in Boulder. I knew I was going to use the yarn for Ishbel, but thought I’d wait to get home–but when I was getting my yarn wound, I decided to buy needles (I hadn’t thought to bring any extra) and get started right away. I knit in Boulder, in the car, in Rocky Mountain National Park, in Denver, and all the way home. I had to pause when it was time to bind off–I needed a larger needle (I actually ended up using a size 10), but despite the high stitch count and the slow going needed to keep the bind-off loose it only took about an hour, and now I have a fabulous shawl/scarf! I’m ordering lace-blocking equipment to keep things classy, but this project is done!! Now to work on those projects I thought I would make headway on in CO …

Happy November, everyone! If you read this, let me know in a comment: What would you rather see, WIP posts or FO posts?

Spinning

Thinking about doing Tour de Fleece this summer. Not that I'll be watching the Tour de France, but I have two spindles and two hibernating spinning projects. How embarrassing! So my goal would either to finish both projects, or to finish the spinning for Urchin completely and achieving some good solid progress on the red fiber. Or to spin every day on those two projects as well as finishing Urchin spinning Or something. Hmm . . . I'll keep thinking about this.

Orange beret

Checked to see what sorts of posts I've left unfinished; the nucleus of this post is from June 7.

This is the story of my orange beret, shown below with incorrect color but the construction's shown off well.



My then-boyfriend (the Engineer) took me to the yarn store for Valentine's Day and told me to pick some things out for myself. He was a pretty awesome boyfriend while it lasted. We biked from campus to the yarn store, and stopped at a chocolate shop on the way. Also a RadioShack. He didn't actually buy anything there, but I get it. I go to this awesome crafty/"creativity-focused" store on my lunch break all the time, but the only time I've spent money there was on a journal over winter break.



Now I knew that the Engineer could certainly afford to buy me yarn, but he always talked bad about his exes (he probably still does, but now that I'm ex he'd rather talk about me than to me), and how it annoyed him so much when they expected him to spend more money than he could afford, but at the same time he wouldn't give me an upper limit. So I focused my search on the sale room, especially because that particular LYS had just decided to stop carrying Cherry Tree Hill and a few kinds of Noro. I actually focused pretty exclusively on the Cherry Tree Hill, which was all buy 1 get 1 free. There was some frustration, like a light fingering-weight semisolid silk which I really really wanted but would only have been affordable at 50% off. I ended up focusing on a variegated laceweight alpaca, but I find laceweight a little scary, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't like the color effects in anything I'd like the fabric for. But a yarn store lady helped me a lot in my indecision by suggesting that I'd like to double-strand it with some slightly-mottled orange worsted cotton.



I let the yarn sit around in my stash for a while; I'd already looked up worsted-weight cotton berets with some awesome fair-trade tweedy organic cotton yarn in mind, and I was leaning towards one of those patterns. But I left the yarn in skeins until about two weeks after Mardi Gras, the day after he broke up with me. The very next day, I was spending time with a good friend (the Seamstress; she gets a code name in case I ever want to blog about our affair, which is a whole nother thing) because I was hurting a lot and didn't want to be alone and sad. I'd been watching Dollhouse for a couple weeks, and convinced her watch the first episode to be my swift as I wound the laceweight. It's a good thing I chose a show with extra-long episodes; as it was, we watched through the "Grr Arg" before I could finish. I wound the cotton the next day, and promptly cast on. I didn't want the yarn to be a memento of my first "official" boyfriend and all the firsts that went with that; I wanted a hat for that.



I ended up using the Spring Beret pattern (Ravelry only) by Natalie Larson; if you want to see exactly what kind of yarn I used, here's the project on Ravelry. And all things considered, I think I'd rather have this gorgeous hat, which helped me heal, and which is associated with someone (the Seamstress) I was much happier with, and remain friends with, rather than skeins that remind me of a failed experiment and a man I unintentionally hurt. Wouldn't you?

Giveaway goodies!

I've got lots to talk about, but I suppose I'd better start out with an explanation of those random links (which were supposed to be for personal reference only and later become a foundation for this post if I ever got around to it). See, a while ago Sew, Mama, Sew sponsored a gajillion blog giveaways, and I entered most of the ones I was interested in the prizes for, even remotely. I won two: Four yards of sheer fabric from Sewing with Trudy (and her daughter Emily of Super Stitches), and a fat quarter of flowered fabric from Two Hippos.

Here's a true-color photo of the sheer fabric:



And here's me trying to show off just how sheer this is, and sort of failing, but it looks artsy anyways:



When I first found out I'd won, I thought that the print was much smaller (and the fabric less sheer) than it is, and I thought I'd like to make a shirt out of it, something Dawn might wear in Buffy Season 7 (hence the screenshots), but that feels a little bit Beyond My Skill at the moment, considering the slipperiness of the fabric. Also, I'm not sure how well a giant print will work on that sort of a design. A smaller floral would be really awesome, I do know that. But I have no idea what else I'd do with the fabric. I think perhaps it shall go marinate in the stash somewhere.

The fat quarter came in a lovely package, so of course I had to do a "process series" of opening the thing:

What a pretty envelope!



Never mind. What an ingenious use for nice paper!



A very nice note inside:



And the contents! She included some very nice squares of a different pattern, as well.



This is closer to true-color, but a little more blurry:



Now, I've been a Very Bad Blogger and hadn't yet acknowledged that I've received these lovely prizes! But I won another giveaway today, which kind of shamed me into blogging. Besides, I'm not going to SnB tonight because I've already biked way too much (a saga involving size 2 circular needles and my inability to read), so I feel like I should blog before I knit to Buffy Season 7 and Skype my Love Interest.

But, anyhow! Today I won a giveaway on Craft Gossip for a book about how to score good vintage finds and how to modify them. It looks very Not My Style, but it probably has good techniques. And if it doesn't, well . . . there's always somebody who wants it.

Shirt inspiration for sheer fabric

I meant to save this thing as a draft for personal reference but I can't even figure out how to delete the damn thing, let alone un-publish it. So. Sorry.

http://www.screencap-paradise.com/caps/displayimage.php?pid=571167&fullsize=1

http://www.screencap-paradise.com/caps/displayimage.php?pid=569293&fullsize=1

http://www.screencap-paradise.com/caps/displayimage.php?pid=570981&fullsize=1

http://www.screencap-paradise.com/caps/displayimage.php?pid=569623&fullsize=1

Catching up - Ysolda (the designer) and Miss Edith (the FO)

Last weekend, Ysolda (rav link), one of my most favoritest designers & bloggers, was in Madison on her not-so-whirlwind tour of the states. So of course I went to see her. And ended up suffering from a bit of that weirdness that can occur in the presence of celebrity-type people (yes, Ysolda, you are a celebrity in my world), and being really awkward, and feeling like I had made a bad impression in some way which made me feel even more awkward. Should have brought a friend. Oh well, live and learn . . .

The sample table was pretty fun. A lot of things looked much smaller on the mannequins or laying on the tables than on the models . . . I don't know why. Well, the sweaters (especially Little Birds (rav link) (which is on the first page if you Google)) did. The toys looked bigger.

Two of Ysolda's patterns have been calling my name ever since I first saw them--Vivian (rav link), a gorgeous cabled hoodie, and Rose Red (rav link), a cable-lace hat. I tried on the samples, and Vivian was my size (although apparently it was supposed to be Ysolda's . . .). Rose Red was too small--I have a gigantic head, but Ysolda sizes her hat patterns, which is great. I actually have a hibernating UFO of her one free hat pattern, Urchin (rav link|my project), which is actually how I found her.



So now I'm planning to make both Vivian and Rose Red at some point. I'd really like a tweed Vivian--I was looking at KnitPicks City Tweed Heavy Worsted (rav link), but I don't know that I'd actually wear a jacket in many of those colors. (They've got a much better range in DK . . .) Also, despite KnitPicks being a relative bargain generally, a whole jacket of the stuff, even in my closer-to-the-small-end-of-the-spectrum size, is on the expensive side. Can't buy the pattern or the yarn until I get my next paycheck though, so plenty of time to compare prices. Rose Red is more of a long-term thing.

Anyhow, back to the trunk show: I'd started knitting a Poppy (rav link|my project) in the last week or so before I left school. She's named "Miss Edith" after Drusilla's doll on Buffy the Vampire Slayer because (1) I love Drusilla and (2) around the time I cast on I was being called “Miss Edith” rather often because Miss Edith’s always been naughty and needs to be punished. Of course, I'm such a stop-and-start knitter that she didn't even have one leg finished when I realized Ysolda was coming to Madison. I managed to get the entire body, as well as the hair, finished the night before, and cast on the dress. I worked on it at the store (a bunch of people, including a teacher from my old high school, sat and knit), but didn't get it finished. So here is my Miss Edith next to Ysolda's sample Poppy (the original!):



And here is me, Ysolda, Poppy, & Miss Edith:



At this point I've finished the dress, but she's remaining faceless for the forseeable future, based on (1) a vague memory about Native American (according to a brief Google search, Iroquois) superstition that dolls should not have faces, (2) faceless dolls from some toy catalog we used to get when I was little, and (3) trepidation about my embroidery skills.

So here we go: I used heart-shaped buttons out of my mom's dentist cabinet sewing stash:



Some art shots:







Me & her:



Look, we have the same hair!



More pictures if you click through to either Flickr or Ravelry--I went a little snap-happy with that backyard sunset photoshoot.

And I had been going to blog another FO today, but writing a blog post always takes longer than I think it will. Things I didn't get around to: an orange beret (rav link) and the last four pictures I took in New Orleans (including some needlepoint). Talk to me--are these worth blogging? Do you want me to say witty things about them and give fun explanations including my ex-boyfriend?

I did some mending!

So last summer, the plastic clasp thing on one of my favorite bikinis busted when I bent over. That was the second time this had happened to this particular bikini--last time my mom had sewn in a new clasp for me. Well, I was rooting around through her notions and what should I find but another bikini clasp--it turns out the previous one had been one of a set of two! I sewed two lines of split backstitch with a doubled all-purpose white thread, insipred by the stitching on the loop that the clasp hooks into. Also because this bikini's already busted two hook/clasp things, I gave it a little more length. I don't feel any pulling across the back--I think this one will last. No process photos due to camera cord AWOL-ness, but Photo Booth to the rescue!

I didn't take a picture of the busted bikini, so here's a dramatic re-enactment of my distress. Note the broken clasp I'm holding--it's kind of hard to see.



It's kind of hard to get the right details in Photobooth, you know. Here's me demonstrating that the bikini's clasped properly around my back, and that one tendril of hair is right exactly where it shouldn't be . . .



And now, because how could I possibly resist, some gratuitous bikini shots! (Did you know that if you put "bikini" in the text relating to a Flickr picture, you don't need to do any work at all to get views? True Fact . . .)



Ooh yeah, hella sassy . . .



MySpace cleavage shot--done for parody, not self-degradation. I swear!



This one even got commented on by a stranger. o.0



OK, this one might be a little degrading, but I'd like it if it was of someone else.

. . . All these views I am getting on flickr are tempting me sorely to exploit my youth & beauty for personal financial gain . . .

Oh and P.S. I'm planning on embroidering this Buffy screencap sometime soon (Season 3, ep 20, "The Prom"):


I'd actually really love to do an image of Buffy & Angel, but I can only picture it in cross-stitch which would be highly difficult to design without one of those fancy software packs. :/

Curtains fail

So I've been trying to sew myself some curtains, but there was failure involved. I blame the thickness of the fabric (I think), as I was blaming the ancient-ness of my machine but then I kept having problems with my mom's newer machine. But I did discover that Singer hasn't changed their needles much and hers will fit in my machine . . . hooray! I did take a nice series of illustrative photos in order to write a nice Sewing Machine Saga but as previously mentioned, I've got no idea where my camera cable is. :/

On the knitting front, Miss Edith (Poppy) is coming along quite nicely--Ysolda will be at my LYS on Saturday, and I want to be able to show her something of hers I've actually completed . . . (Do not even mention Urchin to me. Please.)

What I've been up to

So I know a blog post is nothing without pictures--*nothing*. Unfortunately, I really have no idea where my camera cable is--it probably got chucked in a box when I was packing up my dorm room. Or possibly my backpack. But the point is, I don't know where it is. So I played around with Photo Booth to show off the cross-stitch kit I'm working on currently. (Played being the operative word . . .)







Also way back almost a month ago (holy shit, almost a month and no job . . . going to call Sabrina's mom *tomorrow* . . .) when I was packing up my dorm room, I took some pictures of my knitting just because. So here are the projects I took pictures of then:

Miss Edith (Rav Link)
Pattern: Poppy by Ysolda Teague
Yarn: Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool



At this point she has an entire torso and most of one leg; I really ought to work on her more, as Ysolda's coming to Madison next weekend.

She’s supposed to look like me, at least eventually. She’s named Miss Edith after Drusilla’s doll on Buffy the Vampire Slayer because (1) I love Drusilla and (2) around the time I cast on I was being called “Miss Edith” rather often because Miss Edith’s always been naughty and needs to be punished. ;)

I wish I'd picked a plumper yarn; while I was at the store it seemed *so* important that I not get something that was ~6 yards short. Then as soon as I cast on I realized that it wouldn't have been the end of the world if I'd e.g. made her legs a couple rows shorter if I did run out of yarn. Oh well.

Monkey Socks by Cookie A. (Rav link)
Yarn: ONline Supersocke 100



Got yarn from my aunt for Christmas … she put it in a White elephant package figuring that if I didn’t end up with it whoever got it was likely to be willing to trade.

Since that picture was taken I have completely finished the pair of socks, except for the weaving in. x.X I know I know, bad knitter. It's just I've kind of been possessed by this whole cross-stitch thing . . .

And while I'd love to make this post even longer, I'm overcome by an incredible urge to actually so something. Later!

Hi, I'm back

I was just going to write this long, very eloquent thing and dump it in the Cast On drop (this is like e-mailing it to Brenda but other people can see it). Then I was like, that is silly. I have a blog. I shall therefore post a version of this eloquent thing here, in order to participate in a community and also to get credit for my personal eloquence.

I just watched The Story of Stuff for the first time. I think it's a good summary of my personal environmental beliefs, and why I personally am taking Brenda's current theme, make Do and Mend, very seriously. While the video itself doesn't really talk about making do and mending, it does talk about the incredible amount of waste that we produce today, and the costs that are externalized from buying too-cheap goods.

I actually had first heard about this video from my local newspaper, which had a syndicated version of this New York Times story about the use of "The Story of Stuff" in classrooms. What really stuck in my craw was the way in which this video was portrayed as being political propoganda, even by the authorial voice.

The video certainly makes the facts stark and at times very political: “We’ll start with extraction, which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet,” she says at one point. “What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”

What's the non-political way to describe this? "We extract the resources"? It really sticks in my craw the way that the right in America (as well as the main-stream media) has such a monopoly on "apolitical" language. Also how much more mainstream right-wing crazies are than left-wing crazies, but that's a whole 'nother rant.

One parent actually succeeded in getting his local school board to ban this video from local classrooms, on the grounds that “There was not one positive thing about capitalism in the whole thing.” Well, that's kind of the point. We are immersed in an environment that points out the good things about capitalism. Plenty of school textbooks (in America, at least, these are often total crap) talk about capitalism and how it's so amazing and gives us all jobs and cheap consumer goods, but is anyone going in front of school boards to protest this? Well, maybe. But teachers ought to have the right to bring in other materials that point out the dark underbelly of capitalism, as well as any other viewpoint that they believe is missing from the standard instructional materials.

In other news: I'm learning to embroider!

Does anyone remember me?

I know, I know. Lots of people re-start their blogs in January. For most of them it's probably a New Year's resolution type thing. Well, for me it's totally not.

See, a big part of the reason I have disappeared so completely from the knitting bits of the internet is that my camera had no batteries, and then I knew I had more AAA batteries but didn't know where I'd put them, and then kind of forgot. And now I'm home for Christmas (well, at this point almost done being home for Christmas . . .) and have no fucking idea if I even brought my camera home from New Orleans. So there you go.

But anyhow. In this magical month of not-having-any-homework-not-even-a-little-nothing-I-need-to-study-for-at-all-not-really, I have been doing a lot of reading. A lot of reading of library books, actually. It turns out (if you think about this for a bit it should be blindingly obvious why) that the extensive public library system in Madison, Wisconsin has a lot more knitting books than the university library at Tulane, or even the New Orleans public library system (although admittedly I don't have a New Orleans library card yet . . . I should get on that). And one of the myriad knitting books that I am trying madly to finish before I head back down to Louisiana and have to return all my library books (There are, like, 29. Don't laugh, this includes DVDs.) includes a book that I have actually finished--The Close-Knit Circle by Kerry Wills.

For the most part, I found this a fascinating and educational book. I'm relatively familiar with the subject matter, but it definitely did goad me into blogging again. Theoretically this is a book about the knitting subculture, which I feel myself to be a part of, but it spent a little more time talking about the knitting fad, which I think is kind of stupid, than was strictly necessary. This is theoretically one volume of many in a series about subcultures, including one about vegetarianism. If the author of the vegetarianism had spent this much time wondering if vegetarianism was still cool, their editor probably would have thrown them out on their asses. However, due to the misperceptions of knitting in the media etc etc (I just listened to Episode 45 of Cast On which touches on this subject) I suppose there is a possibility that it's not the author's fault that the knitting trend (OMG can it die now please? Can people stop assuming that because I am young and knit I am the same as people who will only knit the ugliest simplest patterns out of Stitch 'n Bitch?) is all over her book, because the editor might have been like, um girl, you need more about this knitting trend thing I been hearing about. Snip snap snizzle. Because that is 100% how I would talk if I were an editor . . . slash not.

Anyhow. I had a really happy holidays and in my camera-free time I have made three knitted gifts two of which are all the way in New Jersey and Harlem and things and therefore might never ever get blogged. But if my camera turns up/I steal my dad's camera in the next couple days, y'all can totally see my brother's ballet socks . . .

A vignette

I work at a public secondary school here in New Orleans that is almost entirely black. I help out in an 8th grade English class, working one-on-one or just generically helping kids with questions.

I went in today and the kids were just so happy and in that moment it didn't matter that I had missed out on the victory party with the local staff because these 8th grade kids are going to grow up in an America that has closed Guantánamo and maybe they will see that they (and me and all of us) are the ones to do what needs doing.

(They asked me if I voted & who I voted for & I showed them my bag with an Obama sticker and Obama buttons and they all cheered. Except for the two Vietnamese kids. If we end up with a Republican congressman he will be Vietnamese.)

A post a day keeps the doctor away?

Maybe?

Anyhow, I spent most of today at the Obama office making calls.

Yes we can!

If the polls in your state have not closed, and you have not voted, please vote. That's what makes democracy work. If you are in line before the polls close, you will be able to vote. Do not leave without voting. Consider programming an election protection number into your phone.

Yes, I know this should have been last night's post.

Anyhow, I'm off to the land of election coverage. Haven't been paying attention to the news all day . . . Actually I think Morning Edition this morning was my only news exposure since Sunday. I'm so ready for this thing to be over . . .

This one's just about me

and contains absolutely no knitting content whatsoever.

. . . So last night I overheard my roommate talking to one of her friends over, like, video chat or something that she wanted to transfer from Tulane to Indiana, because she doesn't like that the party scene is too bar-centered and not enough party-based. Or something.

And here's me, thinking about transferring either home, which has myriad disadvantages but is where one of my best friends going to school and would be in-state public school tuition, or else to Santa Cruz because I am a grown-up now and can start thinking about decisions that will affect my entire future, and there is this boy in Santa Cruz.

I guess it's that I've always been a little emotionally fragile, and don't make new friends (and I mean true forever friends, not oh-hey-how's-it-going-I-don't-see-you-enough friends) very easily, and basically I'm such a mess right now and I know that you're not supposed to make this sort of decision lightly, and I do love New Orleans and I do have some friends, but the thing is the bar scene is also hurting me--almost every friend I've made here drinks enough that I don't bother hanging out with them, and I'm just such a fucking mess. And if I don't get out of bed I might be dropped from Italian but I can't make myself care. Also I can't get a psychiatrist appointment to save my life because apparently everyone here is as fucked up as me.

What I've been knitting . . . the yarn, by the way, is an alpaca/linen/silk blend. It is the best. Thing. Ever. For reals.

And now I must away.