I have been locked away in a secret lair knitting miles and miles and miles of material for a yarn bombing.
I will post more pictures soon. Until then, take a look at the event on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=yarn+event&init=quick&sid=search_preload#!/event.php?eid=154313297928628&ref=ts
My friend Robin wrote a really excellent anti-local blue law post yesterday.
It is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. Numerous times when I lived in Lincoln, I’d get a phone call from my mother before going home for Easter. She’d ask, “Could you pick up a bottle of Windsor Canadian Whiskey?”, or “Could you pick up an extra 24-pack of Busch Lite?” The answer would always be “No, it’s the law.” The blue laws in Lincoln dictated that no wine, beer, or liquor could be sold before noon on Sunday. This is actually a big step. Earlier in the 1990s there were no Sunday package sales in the city.
Another time, I wanted to make an Irish cream cake before a blizzard came in to town at noon. It is as if the people who write blue laws don’t consider the culinary value in pink vodka spaghetti sauce, adding wine to any recipe a la Justin Wilson, beer cheese soup, or even as a method of fruit preservation.
When we moved to Arkansas the laws were much stricter. I have to drive at least 20 minutes to get to the liquor store. You can go 3 blocks down the street at our house and buy an over-priced Bud Light, and drink it in an entirely too loud, overpriced pizza atmosphere. That’s not really my style.
The problem here in the south is that nobody wants a liquor store in his or her backyard, even a fancy-schmancy one with a wine-tasting bar like they have in Little Rock. All of the grocery stores are too small to have a decent liquor section even in wet counties in Arkansas, and I think it may offend the Baptists. One wonderful thing about Lincoln were all of the liquor stores attached to the regular grocery stores. The price and selection at Hy-Vee, Super Saver, and Russ’s is something to embrace and to cherish. (The local beer selection alone at the Hy-Vee near 48th and O St deserves an award and your patronage.)
The with three colleges, city of Conway in Faulkner county is really growing right now. Four years ago, restaurants couldn’t serve alcohol and the gastronomic choices in the community really suffered. Now we can at least go down the street and watch Sunday football, have a beer, and eat a pizza. The educated contingent in the community is really growing too, so that means more people who want to have a convenient drink at home or at a party. That means more people who want to make Flaming Cherries Jubilee at the spur of the moment, and you can’t do it with out brandy!
Finally, distributors aren’t allowed into the county. Restaurants have to bus in their own booze. They use inefficient vehicles and drivers who usually do other things to get the booze from the same places where private citizens buy their beer, wine, or liquor. Let me make this clear: each restaurant has to send a truck down to Little Rock, and bring it back filled with what they need. In the sane world, the Budweiser truck comes up once a week and serves all of the restaurants. The current scenario is completely unsustainable from a petroleum usage aspect. Oh yeah did I mention the 40 minute round-trip drive to the liquor store for the private citizen? That is 1 to 2 gallons of gas per trip. Multiply this trip by a quarter of the residents of Conway (2008 special census) at an average rate of one trip per month, and that is 172,632 gallons of gas. I’m not even going to touch all of the lost tax revenue exiting our city and county, and that is a much stronger point than the wasted gas.
So I’m kicking off a movement, and it starts with a song. My band, The Conway Twitties started playing a song at our show last week called “Get Wet (Wet Faulkner County)”. You can watch our special midnight acoustic performance on the web.
My elephant project marked the end of my life of leisure. I started working on it before I knew I would have a job, and now I am so involved with work that I almost didn’t have time to put the finishing touches on it.
Last Thursday I took the elephant to work so I could take some pictures with some co-workers for a costume contest.
Friday was the big rainy day out for the pachyderm. My friends and band mates Robin, Sam, and Sujith, all helped me stretch the elephant to a full 10 yards in length. Robin’s friends Gabe and Mike also helped out, as well as a new friend Jacques!
We made an initial rainy walk up Front St. where we stopped by and marched through some of the galleries, making sure to get some cheddar dill soup from the Oak St. Bistro stand. It is a weird restaurant, because they are only really open for lunch, and I told them they needed to have a Sunday Morning Bloody Mary Bar. Luckily, they’re moving buildings soon, and promised they would do it at the new site.
We headed back down to Toad Suck Square for a super secret special flashmob/dancemob. I was at the tail, but Sam was at the head, and she kept marching us closer and closer to the dancers, as if we were going to become apart of the show!
We walked around some more and crashed Melissa Gill’s art show at the end of the night! One of our friends was playing music on a bass, and so we even danced around on the parquet floors a little bit.
The one down side to the ArtsFest was the weather. We were somewhat protected from the rain under the Chinese Dragon-like train. The inflatable 31 feet tall “Painted Pachyderm” did not make it out that night. I would have liked the two to meet.
On the way to have a nightcap, we all walked down Front St. picking up the pylons walkingconway.com had put out to redirect the foot traffic into each gallery. Someone started singing through one, and eventually, we had a pylon band. I was once involved in a spontaneous kazoo parade that was supposed to march on the capital building one night but only ended up going around the block. The kazoo parade and the pylon band were very similar experiences.
My friend Robin even wore an elephant sweater!
I feel like my entire crafting experience was building to this point. The elephant was on a huge scale. I basically knew what I needed to do, but I was unsure how it would all come together, or if it would even come together in time. It felt a little like a dissertation. I knew a bunch of people were going to see it, and that it was going to be doing something more than promoting my crafting and fabrication skills. And then we paraded it around town! If you see any fun crochet contests send them my way and I’ll enter it!
I’ve been posting so much about fiction writers and poetry writers, that I almost forgot this is first and foremost a craft blog!
I’m super excited about my fellow former Nebraskan crafter Garth Johnson’s new book 100 Ideas for Creative Reuse, due out in November.
I zipped over to amazon.com to see if any of my projects made the cover, or if I made it into the first few pages browsable by Amazon’s Look Inside! feature. After a few clicks on the Surprise Me! feature, and there is one of my projects at #242!
One of my favorite things about this book is that it has a single picture of each creative reuse project. There are no patterns and no instructions. It is a book of ideas, but it is also a fantastic book of possibilities for people who consider crafting as interesting and as engaging as solving puzzles or gigantic systems of equations. The picture of the finished item is proof that the puzzle can be solved, or that a solution exists. As a crafter, you can infer a few things from each picture, but the path you take in utilizing the creative reuse idea is completely up to you!
Earlier today at my new job, I had to fill out a section of my Corporate Resume about my published works and publications. I wonder if they’ll let me add my recycled sweater coozie to that list? I’ll post a little about my job this weekend.
Here in Arkansas, the public libraries have found some pretty creative ways of funding.
The Little Rock library system has the Cox Creative Center, which features a second hand book shop, gift shop, coffee shop, and art galleries. The book shop sells a number of books donated to the library system and the funds are re-invested in the library system.
We just found out that the Faulkner County Library in Conway has a room devoted to a similar task. Despite going to the library quite a few times, yesterday was the first time we saw the room. The books covered a vast array of titles from elementary text books, “engineering music”, crazy cook books, plenty of fiction and audio books, and FREE MAGAZINES.
We picked up a few gems that were priced just right:
Ty wanted Ecotopia because he heard it was a badly written utopian novel that had very good utopian ideas.
Tyrone even found an awesome edition of _Satellites_and_Space_Ships_. My copy was turned into a journal by Ex Libris Anonymous. I love their journals, but something inside of me really wanted the book too.
The artwork in the book is super cool, as indicated by the picture of yow.
On the book front, I just finished the juggernaut that is Denis Johnson’s _Tree_of_Smoke_. It sounded good and it felt good although at times I was pretty confused and just waiting for the main characters in the story to cross. SPOILER ALERT: the characters never cross, they’re just illustrating different fronts of the Vietnam War. Denis Johnson is one of Tyrone’s favorite writers, and the lyric rhythm of Johnson really drops you into the confusion and wonder of the jungle and the CIA.
However, I like plot. I don’t think I really understood how much I liked plot until I married a literary fiction writer. I’m growing a greater understanding of the atmospherics and immersion of language, but I want to come out of it relatively quickly…less than 300 pages, unlike Johnson’s 614 page epic.
The historical perspective of the book is wonderful for dates and times and battles and a lost culture, but I read the visions and they sound like fodder for beautiful animations. I also like reading about beliefs and how cultures seem to always be looking for a savior. When a savior was needed it appears that Black Elk stepped in to fill the position for his people.
There was a whirlwind of activity around our tower in the weeks following my birthday. When everything settled down, my present from Ty was finally delivered:
It is a Wendy Jane Bantam original, and I love it. She did a fine job with the piece “Puppet Show on 2841 Fox Hollow Road”. Her abstract style, thick/thin/shiny paint, and knack for houses combine to make this one of my favorite gifts ever.
A family of opossums hang out of the tree as a big ball of yarn rolls out of the front door. The place is surrounded by bunnies and other special blooms, just like it is in real life.
I was also excited by this gift because of the Buy Handmade movement. In this time of cheap imports from China, buying handmade supports local artists and crafters. An added bonus is that the artist or crafter may be in your own community, allowing for customization if you wish!
In this economic downturn, buying handmade locally keeps money in your community. It allows people to earn a little extra money on the side, even while their jobs may be in question and companies are cutting back.
We here at Julee’s Sharing Needles Blog are proud to say we have been linked to by the Obama Craft Project.
They feature my crocheted Obama Ornament. I posted the pattern to the crochet/knitting site ravelry.com to share and get more exposure with other needleworkers.
On that site, Peppergrass was the first person to ever follow a pattern I wrote! It was such an inspiring moment for an aspiring pattern writer.
Aargh, Between getting the my store open, volunteering, and meeting new friends, I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked before.
Shiver me timbers, I wake up on my own, sometimes BEFORE 7AM, throw on some grungy clothes, and go play with chemicals, sand paper, adhesives, drills, and other mad scientist tools. I turn on the radio, listen to the news, correspond with family and friends, and then get back to work on the fiber and the paperwork. Sometimes there is even time for a work out to get away from it all. That is when I get my best crafty ideas.
Yesterday I met a new friend, Julie for lunch at a Conway icon, Stoby’s. They have deli sandwiches, but also grilled chicken and burgers. They are well known for their meaty cheese dip. I was delighted to see summer sausage as one of the sandwich meat options.
Later that day, I met up with some friends to help register voters in downtown Conway. I liked the sound of the live band, despite the horrible public address set up. Julie and her husband Chris showed up too! I ended up chalking some sidewalks. My favorite one was “REGISTER to ROCK”. My friend David, who has a birthday today, took this picture:
I’ve never really moved before. I moved out of my parents’ house once, only to move right back in after a few months of school. I also moved into an apartment, but all of my belongings could fit into my brother’s truck. When I moved into the dome almost everything I had except for a bed and a table, could be moved with a cross-town trip in my trusty Saturn.
This time, Tyrone and I really moved. He liked to brag that in the last 18 years, he’s had to move 16 different times. His wisdom in the pack and the drive were priceless.
Never really moving before, I had never really had to pack before either. The definition of packing here entails configuring multiple boxes in an optimal way for space and cushioning, sealing those boxes with tape, and then not seeing the contents again for two weeks minimum. Who knew plates are stronger if you pack them on end?
I only had one piece of intuition about packing that saved us money or time: using raw crafting items for cushioning. Over the years I have amassed quite the collection of yarn, felted wool sweaters, and a library of fabrics. We used these items to cushion ceramics and plates. Jean quilt squares were used in vases and coffee cups. Skeins of even the lowest-quality acrylic yarn cradled clocks with exposed faces. These materials were even used to pack most of my crafting gear, such as my swift or my embroidery/quilting hoops.
So if you are crafter about to move, do not de-stash your yarn and fabrics yet. Once you see the price of bubble wrap, you’ll have the only reason you need to stay a craft pack rat while you pack.
I gave a bunch of people the address to this blog this week. Hopefully, the readership will increase, but it may turn into a “how to live in a cement mixer” blog for a a little while.
I’m planning on adding more patterns and items to sell to the site, but in the meantime, I will leave you with some activist craft yellow ribbon art. To everything there is a season, and this season I wish you peace:
