north carolina.

Because this tends to be where I live when I’m not in England, although one never knows…

the sweet sweet end of summer.

| Betsy

The other day my friend Kerri and I had ice cream for dinner at Maple View Farm.

We figured that since when we were kids we used to beg to eat ice cream for dinner, it was only suitable to purposely accomplish this on a hot summer night. As a result? We were treated to a sweet sweet sunset along with ice cream goodness at the tail of summer.

So we ate ice cream, talked about where we thought we’d grow up to be when we were kids, mused over whether we were on track with our 1985 dreams and watched the sun go down until it disappeared. Lovely.

Lately:
*Hecho a Mano (via Extreme Craft)
*Reading posts on Craft Unbound
*Learning about cool parents who teach schoolkids art
*The coolness of Kayte Terry’s Complete Embellishing
*A clock shaped like the queen for sale at the lovely Oak

*Wishing I could teleport to NYC tonight for Knitting Jam at the Chelsea Art Museum
*Am apparently the last human on earth not to have finished Rob Walker’s Buying In. So good!

Not necessarily sweet, but still awesome: Coming across an mp3 of Pantera’s “Walk”, I’m rocking it old school like its 1993 this evening…
Mp3 found over at Soundtrack to the End of the World via Faythe.

weekend odds n’ sods.

| Betsy

If you’ve never had the pleasure of spending time in the American Southeast during the summer, you’ve never seen the world slow down right before your eyes. Drink water with ice that melts in what seems like seconds, put on flip-flops, slather on sunscreen, close the door don’t let the air conditioned air out, squint your eyes to meet the hothot sun.





1. My first glimpse at my baby tomatoes!
2. New curry and coriander plants, old pots
3. Olive’s 2nd birthday (no, she didn’t actually eat the cupcake)
4. My “bedshelf” continues to grow out of control, newly added to the stack:

*The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen
*Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
*The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery, Wendy Moore




Other things of note (fairly) recently:

*The work of Gretchen Elsner
*Nina Katchadourian’s Mended Spiderwebs
*WSJ Opinion column, Gay Marriage is Good for America
*Flying Mayan burrito recipe (Sweet potatoes and black beans, who knew?)
*In the Middle of the Worldwind (Thanks to the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest!)
*Rob Walker’s Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Listen to him talk with Diane Rehm here.)

On repeat on the stereo, Santogold’s self-titled album. Holy hell, she is awesome.

muted.

| Betsy

Some days photographs are easier to manufacture than words.

Some nights down here in the American southeast it’s too hot to sleep, even though you can practically taste your dreams you’re so tired.

So we toss and tumble at night trying to think of snow and cool breezes as the temperature creeps up so much that time seems to stop.

All the while knowing that the next day will be just as hot and sticky, leaving you searching for tiny respites in glasses of iced tea and the freedom of flip flops.

But luckily, as if to spite the consistency of the heat and tendency to wall up inside with the air conditioning on, each day still brings the smallest of surprises.

public transportation, summer reading.

| Betsy

Public transportation is a joy to me (when I manage to get up early enough to catch the bus to work) as not only does it allow me the luxury of traveling and knitting but we’re also lucky enough to have a free local bus system! There’s something lovely about industrial/institutional design that grabs me. Around here, the interior of buses are either blue or orange, in those blocky clunky colors of my 70s childhood.

One of my current challenges is to get myself out of the habit of looking at my hands as I knit, so I’m back to taking my knitting with me wherever I go again. Usually I’m such in a rush that I don’t have time to enjoy just sitting and knitting- I’m always working on a project with a deadline or fighting off sleep! While selling zines this past weekend at a local craft fair, I was reminded of how much I enjoy knitting simple squares for afghans or scarves in public and the dialogue it never fails to envelop me in. I hope I never stop adoring the conversations with children, the elderly and everyone in between that occur when I bring out my craftwork, as it is one of craft’s most magical qualities.

untitled.bmp

As work slows down for the summer here at the university, that means a bit more time for online reading. (Unlike the bus, the coffeeshop or the bars, I can’t knit at my desk!)

Recently, I have been enamoured by the likes of:

Craft Culture (esp. this by Tanya Harrod)
Collective
Craftresearch.blogspot
Graffiti Archaeology
MAKE zine
Radical Craft Conference (so sad I wasn’t there!)
Studio Incite

Not to mention daydreaming about the knitting images here.

And for more on the definition of craftivism, here’s a link to a recent piece I wrote for Knitchicks.

on remembering…

| Betsy

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Lately, all my thoughts have come back to this photograph. Not just at the actual image, but also the way the top seems to fade into nothing. I’ve been trying to dry a delicate felt rug that I made in the bathtub for days now. It’s made of fleece and due to some thinner spots, I don’t want to hang it up before I can mend it with a felting needle. The beginning of southern humidity is doing little to expedite the drying process.

Sunday night I gathered the fleece on the rug before me, stacked in fuzzy piles of various color and breed. Once I was done assembling the fiber, I took the lot to the bathtub to begin the felting process. As the hot water hit the fleece, the room smelled like sheep and flooded my mind with memories of the farm in Sussex, rural North Carolina flocks and even the land deep in Georgia my grandfather owned when I was a child.

The ridiculous juxtaposition of natural fiber and mod cons was laugh-inducing as I sang along to The Reindeer Section while stomping to mesh the fiber just like that old “I Love Lucy” episode with the grapes.

Already somewhat mawkish at this point, I thought of why I was making this particular piece- in order to find ways to recycle fiber that has become almost surplus in some areas of the United Kingdom due to a steadying decline in market price. I remembered an afternoon spent hiking in the North Carolina mountains where we came over a rise to find the entire landscape before us clearcut. One of those moments where you just feel a stomach-dropping sadness for what could have been.

Seeing the photo above gives me that exact same feeling I had that day in the mountains. Where you feel like you stumbled on the scene too late, unable to do anything truly useful. Despite my recent article getting nice remarks from friends and colleagues across the world, I’m still getting sad news from England regarding farmer’s incomes.

And as I do things like look at photos and stomp wool in the bathtub, I can’t help being struck by the fear that maybe it is too late for the English wool industry. But simultaneously being enlivened by the idea that perhaps in time, we will start to reclaim our cultural legacies instead of eschewing them for more, more and more.