This One Will Scan (in Person) Using QRdroid For Android Phones, But None Of The Free IPhone Apps I Had

This one will scan (in person) using QRdroid for android phones, but none of the free iPhone apps I had (Qrafter, Scan and QRreader) can read it. This one (R) is done in a composite stitch - French knots pinned in place by split cross stitch (the two strands of each arm of the cross stitch fall either side of the French knot). I couldn't find this stitch in any of my stitch dictionaries, but I'm sure someone must have thought of it before. For now I'm calling it French Cross Stitch, but if anyone knows another name for it, I'd love to know.

Just to let everyone know, the giveaway is now over, and the winner has been contacted. As promised, I wrote everyone's names on bits of paper, stuck them in a hat and got a curious cat to stick his paw in an pull one out. Your hat for this giveaway was Pink Floyd and the cat was Zeno. I wish I'd filmed it, but I needed both hands to hold the hat open for him.

Wonderful photo of the work, but please ignore my blurry face in the background.  I didn't realise I was going to be in some of the photos, and it was a very hot day and I'd been running around like crazy helping with the graduand leaving party. Hot and sweaty is not a flattering look.

Me, on the radio. Fun times!

Stitched Iliad Interview

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I was in BBC Broadcasting house Bristol this morning, doing a short interview on the Iliad project for BBC Radio Bristol. I’m in the last ten minutes or so if anyone would like to listen. 

So… This is the kind of thing I have mixed and complicated feelings about.

I’m not going to say “that isn’t art” because my position is that art is in the eye of the beholder.

But I *will* say that this is something that hundreds and thousands of knitters and crocheters the world over do ALL THE TIME. It’s called frogging. It’s just efficient. You find something that’s not going to be used or worn, but where the yarn is still reasonably undamaged and you frog it. You store the yarn for a future project.

Like I said, I’m not going to claim this isn’t art, but what I don’t understand is why it gets acknowledged as art when two white men do it in a gallery-space, and not when hundreds and thousands of (mainly) women do it every single day in their own home.

If Lernert and Sander are unaware that this is common practice amongst yarn-based crafters then their research is piss-poor and they should do better. If they did know, and just chose not to acknowledge their indebtedness then they’re just appropriative assholes.

Yes, frogging finished items is a beautiful thing and it’s art, but it was art already when everyone in the yarn-based craft community did it. These two men doing it doesn’t magically make it art when it wasn’t before.

I feel this is the sort of thing that they should have written an ‘academic’ (whatever that means) article about, acknowledging the actual community engaged in this practice and then discussing what makes it such a beautiful phenomenon, rather than just plagiarising a community’s common practice and getting praised for it because ‘omg, men working with a material stupidly designated by society as being for women, HOW AMAZING.’

I also have issues with this relating to necessity/thrift/class/wealth, but I cannot brain well enough to articulate those right now. But there’s definitely something insidious about taking a practice based on reusing and saving money and ‘making do’ and importing it into the corpulent, lucre-obsessed art world. And the act of importing it devalues the concept/practice in the same way private collectors devalue the work when they rip a Banksy piece of a wall and store it in their private galleries.

I looked up from my work for a couple of seconds to watch the kittens play, and when I looked back down this little punk was crawling over it.