press

candy + craft = lovely.

| Betsy


The pretty little candies above were waiting to be eaten at a hotel I was checking into the other day. Even though they were almost too gorgeous too eat, I found a butterscotch one soon after I took this photo. Yum.

In talking to the desk clerk, apparently the hotel manager saw the candies at another rival hotel and liked them so much that she bought them for her lobby, too.

A few days earlier, in another hotel, I finished the above cross-stitch pieces for the show “Craftivism” at the Lawton Gallery at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay curated by Faythe Levine. The show opened today and will be open until October 30th.

The pieces are #2 and #3 in my International Anti-War Graffiti Cross-stitch series. Although I still use lots of yarn in things, I do love the cross-stitch and the radical cross-stitchers who make lovely things with lots of teeny tiny x’s. The pieces above are around 30,000 stitches apiece!

And speaking of radical crafts, check out the new Holiday 2008 issue of Vogue Knitting for a lovely article by the amazing Shannon Okey called “The Politics of Knitting!” If you don’t feel like reading the paper version, you can read the article online here!

sand.

| Betsy

In what may be the worst photograph ever posted here, I bring you sand:

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This particular sand is part of a parking lot near my house. While walking home recently, I came across this vacant lot covered in intertwining lines of tire tracks and foot prints, making it look almost like a painting or a piece of fabric instead of a lonely strip of sand.

This is why I prefer to walk instead of ride a walk, why my eyes are always darting from side to side as I’m driving down the road, because quiet beauty is so often overlooked.

The pattern created at random in the parking lot twists and curls in myriad patterns and weights, making ridges of sand that reminded me of low tide at the seaside.

Lately it seems as if I’m going on all these different divergent paths like the sand depicted above, creating cacophony instead of a forward moving front. But, when I stop and take a moment to really look closely, I see that instead of looking at the big picture and taking it for what it is (waves upon waves of sand), I was paying too much attention to the individuals tracks and trails.

Stepping back, its uniformity and oneness is again revealed.

And all these paths I’m taking (craft, art, sociology, theory, thinking, making, doing, photographing, writing) converge into an act of progression and embracement of DIY and individualism. I keep moving forward because I am not alone in thinking this way.

I recently came back to a post I wrote over two years on why craft is punk rock. And I still believe that correlation rings true.

And for a recent article on craftivism, please see here.

live and in person… (well, sort of)

| Betsy

if you think i sometimes babble on when i type in these little boxes, you should hear me in person..

well the wait is over, you can now hear me babble in real time, thanks to audioactivism.org!

last sunday i was the given the opportunity to talk about what i’m trying to do here, where i’m planning to go with it and a bit about the difficulties in living an ethical life.

i take no responsibility for the ridiculousness that is currently my accent. all i can say is that moving back to north carolina from london has made my vocal chords freak out.

and no, i am not from wisconsin.