goods on sale for now...

for those of you who love shopping and have always wanted something nice from me, my wannamake etsy shop is having a big old sale this week.  30% off of every single treat in the shop, until the new year:
etsy.com/shop/wannamake

production, post-production

Oh how embarrassing.  The last time I posted here I was in the middle of spring production, and now I am on the tail end of fall production.  From May to October of this last year, my life was taken over by a project I call Quilt Stories- an field work research adventure in traveling by car, popping a tent, and collecting stories across the country.  Of course there is ample documentation on the facebook, the flickr, and other places, but as winter sets in and the quilt stories I have collected simmer down into new forms, I will be writing here on some of the anthropological readings I have come across, as well as technique discoveries and rad contemporary quiltmakers that are out there in the art world.

In production news, I have learned to roll with the punches of kiln mishaps and imperfect things, and have come out with some new slip-cast forms that I am very excited about.  The jar family has grown, and pendants, decanters, gems, and a mystical tincture bottle join the collection.

spring production

It's been a while since I have posted, I have been in the studio working on production:
A batch of new spring dresses for Radish Underground in Portland, and new slip-cast wares for my new Bay Area stores- Home 101 in Berkeley, and Gravel & Gold in San Francisco.

THORNBURG - - cloaks

 I am working on a patchwork cloak commission, and revisiting the amazing works of art that are Lindsey Thornburg's Cloaks.  She uses Pendleton wool knits and other amazing blanket finds to fashion an entire line of sexy and sculptural cloaks.  She also has a dress collection that favors black lace, draped velvets, appropriated prints from afar, and really really smart cuts.  Also, the photography on her site is straight up beautiful.

mall performances

I am pretty sure I have performed in a mall before.  I was in a jazz dance class and we would perform at different suburban locations- I can remember the Christmas performance being on the floor of the Funplex roller rink.  When Gary asked me to perform at the gallery PLACE, on the top floor of the Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, I decided interactive pieces would have the most pertinence.


Saturday afternoon, "Let's Be Matching" outfitted visitors with personalized accessories that linked them to past and future participants:  

visitors from elsewhere

                                                                           happy.....

not so happy.

Sunday afternoon, "Quilt Stories" gave me an excuse to lounge inside of my quilted tent, waiting for visitors to stop in and share their stories of quilt memories:

Travis Meinolf - textiles & social practice

My dear friend Nancy sent me a link to this craft theory reading list, where I found out about the dreamer / action weaver Travis Meinolf.  His dream is to incite a future culture that is gentle and self-reliant (using The Gallery as a space for experimentation), and his tools to start the revolution are sweet weaving looms that everyone can use.  The one I am really interested in is called a laser loom, and attaches to your waist while you weave.  
(this is his demo video)

His 2008 thesis paper (MFA from CCA) Common Goods proposes a revising of culture by spreading the skill of making your own fabric:


"Our objects are a concrete expression of our culture. Production, exchange, and distribution of commodities are the driving forces of culture. Production especially is deeply linked with the structure of society. This fact gives us a lens through which to consider this
global market economy, in which seductive objects are hastily made by near slave-labor to be impetuously consumed and swiftly discarded.
But more importantly, we can become object producers ourselves. We can aspire to recapture the reins of our immediate modes of production and exchange, and then the fact of commodities as agents of culture holds great power.
If we take control of production we are taking that power back.
This is a path for those of us who would non-violently change society: change its commodities, its understanding of production, of distribution and exchange. Even the way we relate to things personally. Do you have a sweater or other garment made for you by a relative or close friend? How does that feel to use when compared with something from a store? Imagine if, rather than wearing blinders to remain ignorant of the grotesque production processes that made all of your stuff, you could celebrate and enjoy the vision of its creation you hold in your mind like
that grandmother-knit sweater! What if you could feel that warmth for each item in your household: clothes, plates, chairs, blankets, bicycles? Each thing imbued with an awareness of its loving, familiar source. "

His example of the sensual experience of wearing a handmade garment is much in line with what I envision for wannamake.  I am interested in the histories reused fabrics hold, the action of saving those fabrics from a landfill, and the satisfaction given in wearing something personalized or handmade.  It seems inevitable to feel warmth and personal connection to your household items- each one holds a story for you, even if it was mass-produced you may have an anecdote attached to how you obtained it or one special time you utilized it that imbues it with meaning.  I don't want to get into a scary preachy zone here, but sometimes it is disturbing to look at a manufactured product and start to think about the hands that made it- the place (working conditions) it was born in- the source of the materials- many of those histories that objects hold are very dark.

His paper also makes me think of the idea of the 'aesthetically sensitive', and Penny Sparke's theories on the domination of male product production dictating the aesthetic of feminine taste.  If we are able to identify our own particular taste, then we have the power to build up our surroundings to suit it.  This familiarity of functional objects that Meinolf suggests is comforting not only in that our surroundings suit our aesthetic, but that they suit our morals and priorities.

shakers and other finds...

shakers for potato fans, with a matching gravy boat and conjoined siamese cats 

Ever since I made a little set of spice shakers for a friend, I have become enamoured with S&P shakers and all the forms they live in.  It seems that any subject, shape, and size, are available to house your salt and pepper (or other spice- sweet or savory) as long as the sculpture is hollow and perforated with at least one hole.

a squirrel clinging to a giant acorn shaker and toast shakers that pop out of a tiny toaster



A trip to the antique mall today inspired me to let loose on making my next batch of shakers.

this is not a shaker, but it is a pig wearing roller skates on a music box

pair of owls in a rose bud studded sugar egg

many cutouts of young girls in a sugar egg

Sugar eggs are also not shakers, but I want to make some.

new studio & new things

I just moved in to a new studio.  A little room just my size up on the road that goes to the airport.  I have a nice window and could hear the tap dance class in my neighbor's space today.  I have not had privacy like this in more than two years; it is so good.  And it means a new part of town to explore in on breaks....

the great american t-shirt

I don't want my earlier post about the wonders of the BSU library to give the impression that the Boise Public Library has not been a treasure trove of inspiration for me in the last eleven months here.  I often check out the same book a few months later, as I always return to the same 'how-too' sewing and quilting sections, and the section that seems to categorize garment history and psychology.


Check out these hot photos from The Great American T-Shirt, The T-Shirt Revolution From Underwear to Art Form:

choice excerpts from "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde

from Chapter 8, The Commerce of the Creative Spirit:

"Let us begin at the beginning, with the question of the sources of an artist's work.  An essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation.  Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received. ... there are few artists who have not had this sense that some element of their work comes to them from a source they do not control. ... Having accepted what has been given to him - either in the sense of inspiration or in the sense of talent - the artist often feels compelled, feels the desire, to make the work and offer it to an audience.  The gift must stay in motion. ... The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison.

"So long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economics of scarcity. ... the gift is not used up in use.  To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which the paintings come.  On the contrary, it is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next.

"The fruit of the creative spirit is the work of art itself, and if there is a first fruits ritual for artists, it must either be the willing 'waste' of art (in which one is happy to labor all day with no hope of production, nothing to sell, nothing to show off, just fish thrown back into the sea as soon as they are caught) or else, when there is a product, it must be this thing we have already seen, the dedication of the work back towards it's origins. ... Such is the dedication implicit in the work of anyone who feels his creativity to have been informed by a tradition.

"The imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has a gift.  An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what I shall be calling a 'gifted state,' one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life. ... Once an inner gift is realized, it may be passed along, communicated to the audience.  And sometimes this embodied gift - the work - can reproduce the gifted state in the audience that receives it.  Let us say that the 'suspension of disbelief' by which which we become receptive to a work of the imagination is in fact belief, a momentary faith by virtue of which the spirit of the artist's gift may enter and act upon our being.  

"As is the case with any other circulation of gifts; the commerce of art draws each of its participants into a wider self.  The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person.  Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world."

patchwork by LB

"Made from clothes and other domestic effects accrued over decades, Bourgeois’s fabric drawings are abstract yet acutely personal works, retaining allusions to the materials’ past incarnations. "

The eye-pleasing site, Intelligent Clashing, often leads me to exciting web research.  Today, through this stimulating portal I found more work I had never seen before by the greatest artist to walk this earth- Louise Bourgeois.  Hauser & Wirth in London is housing this group of small patchworks crafted of reclaimed fabrics, stitched and sometimes woven together in amazing compositional poems.

                   plaid - dashes - blue - stripes - cheetah - ribbed - spot - appropriated - checkered

nationale - - - pdx

the best little store in portland.   May has created a haven of beautiful things, and she has kindly included me on her shelves

the architect's wife

Several years ago, I was relating to my friend on the subject of receiving gifts from family that you would never want- these objects being personally displeasing in look or material and existing now as your belonging that you would like to dis-own as soon as possible.  The gift-giver has good intentions, but they seem clueless to your point of view.  My friend said- yes, this is the difficulty of being an aesthetically sensitive person.  From then on, being 'aesthetically sensitive' was my valid excuse for controlling the things that surround me in life.  I would like to believe that every person has this sensitivity- tailored to their aesthetic of preference, but I think what separates some of us in this case is the care taken in defining that need.  Whether your cousin/friend/life partner seems to be oblivious to the layout and color scheme of their dwelling or outfit, they will still be subconsciously influenced by the visuals that surround them.

In the introduction to Penny Sparke's book, "As Long as It's Pink:  The sexual Politics of Taste" (1995), she cites the story of an architect's wife crying over the fact that there are no curtains in their home, which is dominated by (her husband's) Modernist design and outfitted minimally with venetian blinds.  The article suggests the the disintegration of the importance of the woman as an active homemaker, as the industrial revolution gave men the role of designing, manufacturing, and marketing the convenient appliances and decorative housewares that women would consume.  The idea is, that the trophy wife had her tastes dictated for her, by a male designer, and lost the simple power of controlling the aesthetic of her environment.  To quote the article, "Through the objects and styles which represent it, taste communicates complex messages about our values, our aspirations, our beliefs, and our identities.  Deprived of the curtains she so desperately wanted, the architect's wife was being denied the right to form, and to express, her own identity.

Sonia Delaunay

Wherever I live, I find that proper access to the library is so important.  Gaining access to the BSU library was a major step up for my life in Boise.  The shelves on the third floor are bursting with treasures like this oversized book on the amazing Sonia Delaunay.  This woman knew the importance of decorating- of surrounding yourself and draping the world in the patterns you want to see.  Lampshades, book covers, jackets, cars- everyday objects were redesigned by her with as much artistic consideration as a painting.  Working instinctively, she pieced together scraps of colors to make each object in her everyday life important and beautiful.