Day 72. I Took A Few Days Off Because I Need To Buy More Thread And Needles, An Because Of Our Minor

Day 72. I took a few days off because I need to buy more thread and needles, an because of our minor heat wave. I do not function well in heat.

A--R. Half way now. An detail of M and N. M might look pretty much like G above it, but I promise you they're different stitches. G is just a plain vertical cross, M is knot stitch/ four-legged knot stitch, where you wrap the thread around the cross before completing the final leg. The big stitch is captive rice stitch, to complement the triple rice stitch of the G above. N is Turkman stitch, and a spiral of my own design in the middle. Let's call it four-legged spiral stitch!

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.

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.

Okay, I'm very curious: what makes you determine how you are doing a translation into stitching?

Essentially: just reading the poem. I read to see if there's an obvious colour palette suggested by the poem. Reds and oranges, for instance, seem a fairly obvious choice for Blake's poem 'The Tiger' - the tiger  'burning bright' and the imagery of the forge, etc. 

Then I do a pretty basic frequency analysis of the text and sort the letters according to frequency, which helps me refine the colour palette - if I want more reds than oranges, then I need to assign reds to the more frequently occurring letters, etc. 

I also might assign colours based on a specific detail I want to pick out - to carry on with the Blake example, I might want to draw attention to how many questions there are in the poem, so I'd assign a really stand-out colour to the question marks. 

I'm currently working on a translation of Wordsworth's 'I wandered Lonely as a Cloud' I picked a blue colour palette because so much of the imagery refers to the cloudy sky, the night sky, the reflection of the daffodils in the lake, etc. but I'm picking all the punctuation out in yellows to represent the daffodils and to try and catch on some level the images evoked in the poem. 

Stitch play. Originally I was just intending to try out the thread itself, to see what stitches the variegation would work well with, and then I just ended up playing with stitch ideas I'd had in my head for a while. Unfortunately, this thread wasn't really the best for some of the chain stitch variations, so I'll probably do those again on another sampler.