Thoughts

My sister is getting an MRI today. She has swollen optic nerves and a blurry spot in one eye and they think it might have something to do with her brain. I really know little about it... the younger brother called and we talked and he mentioned it and then my sister got on and told me about it. But, her eventual comment bears some explaining.

My sister and I when we go out together have a strange thing happen to us. She's 15, I'm 21. I'm regularly mistaken as younger than her, with me as the younger one and her as the older. One lady thought she was 16 and me 13. Another thought she was in college and I was the one in highschool. A third time a museum curator scolded her for baiting her younger sister, when we asked how old the lady thought we were, she was thought to be 19 and me 14.

I'm not necessarily upset about this, (okay, I am but I also think it will be cool when I'm old and I'm mistaken for younger). Last night though I was reminded of why she's mistaken as the older one.

We were talking, and she mentioned on the swim team that another girl she swims with had similar problems and she ended up having calcium deposits in her eyes. And I asked, "Do you think it's because of swimming?"

Her: "No, it's a coincidence that we had similar environmental factors." (What 15 year old talks like that?)

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I've been feeling rather sad lately... I think mostly because its nearly that time of month, and normally I get rather weepy around that time. I hate it, because I'm sad and there's no reason why and I feel listless and don't want to get out of bed and have very little energy.

It will go for two or three days, and I'll be withdrawn and antisocial and generally try not to take everyone down around with me. And then just as suddenly, I'll snap out of it and I'll be my overly happy cheerful silly self.

But it just bothers me when I'm in the sad mode because I know I'm sad, I know the reason why, but it still feels to me like I'll always feel sad like this, that it will never end, and that the world just hates me. Its so irrational.

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Other random notes:

My sculpture is going well. I've made the wings. It really does look better without a head.

My last yarn I tried spinning was in this beautiful color, and I'm so excited about it. I spun it real thin, and I love how it came out (Navajo plied) except that the yarn kept loosing so much of the twist it broke while I was plying it. Especially toward the end. Does that mean I'm not giving it enough twist, or is there another problem?

Spinners, your help would be appreciated.

Busy Times

I've been working on a sculpture in my advance Sculpture class lately. It's a figure, and it has wings and a tail. I'm really struggling with it, both because I've never, ever done anything with the human body, and my understanding of how the human body fills space is rather warped (both because of my own self-image and because in some ways I really don't pay attention to it).

Anyway, the other day I was in a meeting with my professor and I told him that I was so frustrated with the head and arms because I couldn't make them make sense with the rest of the sculpture. I wanted to chop them off.

And he said, "Let's do it then."

In short order he was cutting through metal and I was clutching on to the sculpture for dear life both to hold it up and because taking off the arms and the head seemed so... drastic.

And it was.

But you know what? The sculpture looks better now.

I've been thinking about making changes, and how sometimes it is the shaving away of a little bit of plaster that makes the difference. Those little shavings, when they add up, make the sculpture look a lot better. But each of those shavings is rather easy to do, because it's not that hard to change back.

Sometimes though, you need to make big changes in order for something to make sense. And it can be scary and make you feel vulnerable.

But its worth it when the end result looks better, is better.

It makes more sense.

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In other news, I've been crafting a bunch but have been reluctant to take pictures of things. I'll have to soon though, because they are soon going to be given as gifts, and then I won't have any pictures.

I'm going to try to get back into the swing of writing something on the blog every now and then. I was silent for a while, and I'm not going to appologize for it- because this is my space.

It was necessary and now I'm back.

To my boyfriend (bf)* last night:

Me: The cat needs to die.
BF: Why?
Me: It's good character development. And it's a plot device.
BF: Okay.

[A bit later]
Me: What's it like to run over a small animal?
BF: You've never run over something?
me: No. Maybe that means I'm a good driver.
BF: Maybe that means you're a Yankee.

[even later]
Me: What do bones look like when they're sticking out of a body? I assume they only look white when they're bleached dry.
BF: They look like bad teeth.
Me: ?
BF: You know, yellowy.
Me: Ah.

[later]
Me: The cat still needs to die.
BF: She's pulling into the driveway. I don't think it's plausible that the cat gets run over when she's pulling into the driveway.
me: Then how can it die?
BF: Poison?
Me: *Mutters* Wouldn't that get into her milk and kill the kittens? The kittens need to live.

[five minutes later]
BF: I know! The cat has rabies and she has to kill it with a machete!
Me: Would she have that in her garage?
BF: Maybe it could be an axe.

*giggles* Maybe I'm the only one that finds these snippets of conversation amusing.

In other news, I knit two socks out of Noro yarn, and they came out looking completely different. So I'm having to knit two more socks, hoping I'll come out with near matches. Not that I'm complaining.

It's getting into finals, and I'm really busy, hence the lack of writing. There's lots of things I could tell you about... like the not-quite-masks I'm making for sculpture class, but I don't have the time right now.

BTW, if anyone out there has scraps of novelty yarn they don't want to use, I'd love to have them sent to me. I could really use them.

I'm running a fever, and my joints ache.

*My boyfriend, is also known as Southern Gentleman (SG) on previous blogs, and perhaps previous blog posts. I waver between the two nicknames for him. He's really sweet and I'm terribly in love with him. He has a slight (or more than slight) bias against Yankees (he's mostly joking) but makes an exception for me. And you want an example of how great he his? He winds center-pull balls of yarn for me.

I was going to do a post with pictures, but I'm too tired.

Why am I too tired? Well yesterday I was working on my sculpture and gating it until around seven forty five. I raced over to the union to get dinner, and managed to grab some milk, apples and hot chocolate/vanilla latte/coffee, because I was cold and thought I could use the pick me up.

I don’t normally like coffee drinks, but it was good, and it went well with the eggs I made in my room.

Anyway, around eleven I was freezing. The heater has been blowing hot air, and after wavering between warm weather and chilly weather, the temperature plunged on Saturday night, and hasn’t revered yet. As a result, I’m freezing in my room. After talking with Laura and making sure I wasn’t the only one imagining it, I went to the union to warm up (with the fire and everything it’s quite toasty) and get something hot to drink. Well, I thought that the drink I had earlier was pretty good, and it didn’t seem to effect me that much, so I decided to do it again, but make it a large and add a bit more coffee to it, because the coffee was hotter than the hot chocolate. I wanted something that would stay warm when I went back to my room.

Well, after adding cinnamon and nutmeg, it was quite tasty, and I brought it back to my room to drink as I worked. I nursed it for the next hour, and it stayed quite warm.

Needless to say, somewhere around there the caffeine from the two drinks caught up with me, and I didn't get to sleep for a long long time after that.

Today we did the investing process, where we pour plaster around our wax to make a mold. The wax will be burned out in the kiln, which will leave the mold behind. Then, next Tuesday we'll pour molten metal (bronze specifically) into the mold.

The investing process (which is part of the lost wax casting method) was messy, dirty work. We all had jobs, and mine was measuring out plaster which means I got plaster powder everywhere (including my nose… I was the one measuring out plaster in our whole process, so I was inhaling lots of dust… probably not a good thing) and got crazy dirty and my skin is really dried out and my hair is a crazy tangled mess I don’t want to deal with.

It was so much fun. We mixed silicone sand with plaster and water (equal parts of each) and then poured them into the containers we had built around or wax sculptures and the gating attached. We made the containers out of felt paper and chickenwire. It was a lot of work, left me feeling vaguely exhausted.

Thus, I don't want to go to the effort of taking pictures of my current crafting, nor any of the other interesting things I got on my camera, despite knowing that craft blogs are more interesting when they have pictures in them.

Least of all, they are for me.

I don't know quite what to say

I haven't been writing lately, and I'm trying to resist the urge to apologize for it. This is, after all, my space, and I shouldn't feel guilty for writing or not writing.

But, I've gotten several e-mails from different people, and it was very heartening. There isn't really anything wrong with me other than a vague sense of loneliness that's been with me lately. I had a friend visiting for just under two weeks, and she was staying in my single at college with me. It was nice to have a room mate again... I've been missing that. Anyway, I was busy with her being here, and then she left on Friday. Meanwhile, another one of my good friends flunked out of school (for various personal reasons) and her parents withdrew her (her parents are not the most sympathetic of people and were not very supportive of the fact that she's been going through a lot of stuff). So in a week two of my friends dropped out of my social life.

Now, normally that wouldn't be that big of deal, but in addition most of my friends that are my year are crazy busy with applying to grad school and other stuff, and my friends that are a year younger than me (including my boyfriend) are all studying abroad.

So I've been just a tad bit lonely.

The end result is I've been trying to expand my social circle, with interesting results. Still, while I am getting to know some facinating and interesting underclassmen, it doesn't make up for the fact that most of my close friends are going through their own crisis.

So... yeah.

In other news, not much happening on the crafting scale. I've spun up three new yarns, and I'm working on another sculpture for my class. We're casting in Bronze! (more on that later) I'm planning on incorporating crochet into the end product. (surprise, surprise)

It's going to ROCK.

The promised Sculpture Post!

So, this post is going to be a bit long, because I'm going to post up the paper that I wrote on my sculpture. Let me know if it's interesting or not.

Touch Me or; A Rebellion Against the Sampler
The assignment called for something made from wood, but I also wanted to make something with crochet. Crochet has long been my craft of choice, but it is not without its disadvantages. Knitting has always been more in vogue, and thus finding patterns that lend themselves better to crochet than to knitting is difficult. This is because crochet is more rigid, consumes more material, and is harder for people to learn. I wanted to create something that took advantage of crochet’s strengths- the fact that it is more rigid, and because each stitch is independent of the last, lends itself better to improvisation. I had dozens of ideas as to what I could make out of crochet, an explosion of color and vibrancy that carried itself over into the final product. While my project started out as an explosion of ideas, the process of constructing it lead it to become part of a greater dialogue about crochet, art and the function of handicrafts in a modern society.

There is a vibrant internet community of people who crochet and, being a college student connected to the online world, I follow several different artists who use crochet in their sculpture. Primarily, The Institute for Figuring’s hyperbolic crochet math models, crochet coral reef, and vortex of trash influenced my idea of what crochet could do. It’s exhibits of crochet choral reefs are full of ruffles, branches, and bulbous branch-offs. Its hyperbolic crochet exhibit features ruffles and uneven surfaces which are strangely hypnotic and fascinating to the eye. The Institute for Figuring made me realize that crochet could be something other than functional art.

The Institute also set up a discourse about what crochet could represent, one which I wanted to respond to. The institute takes advantage of crochet’s unique properties. Like crochet, knitting can increase exponentially, but the number of stitches on the needles quickly becomes unmanageable. Crochet, which each stitch being independent of each other, offered the perfect solution. (The Institute for Figuring website) Like The Institute for Figuring, I wanted to enter into the dialogue of using crochet not only because I loved crochet but because it was the most efficient solution to my problem. After engaging in externalization and objectivaion, I was finally ready to transform “structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness” (Berger). I wanted to add to the dialogue of sculptural crochet, a term coined by Wunderkammer, who was another influence on the advantages of crochet as a sculptural form and tool (SuperNaturale).

In Peter Berger’s essay “Sacred Canopy” he writes that, “Once produced, the tool has a being of its own that cannot be readily changed by those who would employ it. Indeed, the tool may even enforce the logic of its being upon its users, sometimes in a way that may not be particularly agreeable to them.” Crochet is a tool that forces its logic on its users, making those who want to crochet instead of knit create in a certain way. Oftentimes, people who crochet will avoid making certain items (like socks) because crochet does not lend itself well to the construction of those items (crochet socks don’t have much stretch). Like Berger’s man who creates language and then is subject to its rules, by adopting crochet as my craft I am limiting myself in what I can do. Touch Me reacts against these constraints, attempting to take advantage of the limitations of crochet instead of being restrained by them. Peter Schjeldahl describes in his essay “Deacon’s Faith” a conversation between two men. In reply to a question about what the sculpture is, the second man replies, “it’s art. Look at the way it’s put together.” Much of the meaning in this sculpture is derived from the way it’s put together. Using Dr. Seuss-ian forms and a patchwork construction I attempt to give a sense of movement and also a sense of whimsy- a wish for what could be and a need to reach beyond the obvious. But the bars of wood- rigid and simply colored, restrain it from going beyond the bounds of its form. While the sculpture might reach outside of the form a little, it is too big to fully escape, just as crochet can go beyond its constraints, but not fully escape them. Glaringly bright and clashing colors give it a sense of childishness, but also violence- a frustration with what is, but also an acceptance.

Touch Me, or A Rebellion Against the Sampler is part of a discourse on crochet, a celebration and protest of what crochet means to not only me, but to many other people who crochet, and who are frustrated by the discrimination against the lesser-known handicraft. John Thompson writes, “In spoken discourse meaning resides as much in its disjunction, its truncations and dislocations- in a gesture of the hand, the involuntary twitch of a muscle or a barely perceptible flicker of the eye.” Touch Me attempts to capture some of that gesture, some of the sense of discourse surrounding crochet. It, in the ruffles and rapid increases and decreases, invokes other crochet works, referencing what came before. But it also adds something to the discourse with the incorporation of the wooden cage- an open, airy cage, but a cage nonetheless. It makes gives the limitations of crochet a physical form. While the meaning in this sculpture did not come in its conception, the repetitive process of creating stitch after stitch of crochet gave the sculpture meaning as I worked and utilized the advantages and disadvantages of crochet. Works Cited

Wunderkammer. SuperNatural. 30 September 2008. <http://www.supernaturale.com/articles.html?id=277>.

The Institute for Figuring. Home. 30 September 2008. < http://theiff.org/main.html>.

YEY! You made it through the paper! So what do you think? Was the sculpture successful or not?

(EDIT 2:30am: In an entirely unrelated note, almost all my links have went blue, and I can't figure out why. They were green and matched my layout before I wrote this post, and now they've changed colors. I'm wondering if this post, which was formatted in word, did something strange to it. Any computer geeks out there who can help me?

EDIT @ 2:40 I got rid of some of the formating and that seems to have fixed the links, but I can't seem to get the text to remain the same in this post. Forgive me, but I really must get back to writing my essay, so I'm going to leave this until later today (after I've slept) to fix)

Remember: My contest is still going on! Writing a comment will get you an entry. Mentioning the contest in your blog will get you TWO entries, just make sure that in your comment you link back to your blog. Thirdly, if you make a halloween-themed object during this month, leave a link on the comments and you get TWO entires. You can comment as much as you want (if you spam my blog, that will get you disqualified), you can make as many halloween themed stuff as you want.

There's so much to blog about!

It was so nice to get back from my "Art to Alabama" trip over the weekend to see all the comments on my blog. It made me really happy, because one of the reasons I'm doing the contest is to foster connections with other blogs on the web. I've been trying to comment on all of your blogs for those of you who left a note if you have blogs, and though I haven't gotten to everyone yet I'll try to.

So what did I do over the weekend? I went on a trip one of my friends arranged to go see art. We began by driving to Atlanta, where we went to the Botanical Gardens and to the Hie- which I absolutely loved. It may sound dork-ish, but I always thought that museums were boring (one of those stereotypes you get when you're a kid, and that just doesn't vanish from your head.) but after going to many museums in Sweden (my blog about my adventures there is here) and some in America now, I've found that I actually do like art museums. Perhaps it also has something to do with me knowing more about art, so I can appreciate the thought and feeling that goes into differnet pieces. I think as a child I hadn't expierenced a depth of emotion great enough to understand what I was looking at.

The next day we went to Rural Studios in Alabama. It's a really neat place because the archetecture there is built with an eye to aestitics, but also with afordability and durability. Not all the buildings are conventionally beautiful, but a lot of them are beautiful because of the amount of work put into them. One of the projects that Rural Studios work on is models for low-income housing. You see, (as I understand it) there are grants from the goverment for low-income people to buy houses, but currently the only afforable price houses you can buy are trailer houses, which depreciatte in value (because they fall apart). Rurual studios are trying to figure out a way to build houses for less than the price of a trailer house, but that will increase in value and last for the person's lifetime. The houses are really really cool.

So, I will be posting pictures.

Well, this trip involved a lot of driving, so I got quite a bit of crocheting done (and less homework than I would have liked done because I grabbed the WRONG BOOK) , so I will post some pictures of what I got done.

And now to the last matter. Remember the sclupture I was making out of crochet? Well, my professor wants it to be in the student art show in the spring! I'm really really really excited!

That reminds me, I need to post pictures of that also. Tell you what. I'll give you another taste here, and then post the rest up with my next post.

Ta da!

So tell me, what is your opinions about museums? Take them? Leave them? Let me know.

Remember: My contest is still going on! Writing a comment will get you an entry. Mentioning the contest in your blog will get you TWO entries, just make sure that in your comment you link back to your blog. Thirdly, if you make a halloween-themed object during this month, leave a link on the comments and you get TWO entires. You can comment as much as you want (if you spam my blog, that will get you disqualified), you can make as many halloween themed stuff as you want.

Remember how I'm in a sculpture class?

Well, the sculpture class is tomorrow, and I'm going to be handing in the sculpture as well as a paper (which I've yet to write). Just a preview of the finishing touches....

I also have another exciting post I'll put up tomorrow. Hint: it has something to do with what I got in the mail!!!

Up late

I've been up late working on my second sculpture which involves a lot of crochet. The concept is a little like, "rebellion against the sampler" and "Dr. Seuss" combined.

I've been lazy, so I haven't gotten any pictures up, but I'll promise I'll get some up soon.

My Sclupture Class

IMG_3178
Originally uploaded by jenamberautumn

So I'm taking a sculpture class for my art credit at college, and this is my first sculpture. I'm including it here because aspects of it are crochet.

Not much more going on today. Got some roving in the mail... I'll get up pictures later.

Blog still isn't totally fixed, but it's getting there. Bear with me.