A bunch of Rad things
Apologies for the lack of blogging. I’m in full on pregnancy countdown mode at the mo, and it’s not being the easiest one. So I’m thinking things will be pretty sporadic for a while. But there’s some stuff I just HAVE to share with you all!
I’m sure most of you have checked out the handmade internet sensation regretsy.com – it’s a hilarious site and has quite the cult following these days. I was very proud to have not one, but TWO products featured on there! First off (and not that surprisingly) was the embroidery porn piece I did for the Craft Cartel Trashbag Rehab workshop earlier in the year. It sold within hours of being posted on regretsy and I’ve had tons of custom orders. It’s been quite surreal.
What was then even more surreal was the email I got from Regretsy asking if I’d be keen to be part of a card series they were planning. Yeah why the hell not?
So you too can own your own piece of embroidered gay anime porn, and even better – share the love with your friends and family!
That’s mine discretely being censored by the others.. You can buy 8 of one design or a set of two of each. And at $10 a set, that’s quite the bargain.
And in other regretsy news, they’ve managed to sign a book deal with Random House. I’m thinking the porn might not pass their censorship standards. But luckily I have another product on regretsy’s site – the legendary Plug Rugs! Which have, of course, now sold out. These also popped up on the salon.com story about regretsy. So hopefully they get in the book.
The other rad thing I’ve been meaning to post for ages is the pdf of the Interventionist Guide zine! If you go to the website and click on Guides, mine is about halfway down. The zine features a whole lot of my thoughts about urban spaces and how we relate to them as humans. As well as the tutorial on how to cross stitch a heart on a bicycle basket.
Finally, have you checked out the London-based Craftivist Collective yet? They’re getting up to some seriously ace stuff. This latest pic popped up on Facebook and I reckon it’s a big bucket of brilliant. They’ve got tons of things going on so if you want to join in go join them on FB.
xox
Colouring in the city
If you went into the city in the weekend, it’s quite likely you saw something a tad unusual. You may have seen a garden in a strange place, a performance that left you scratching your head or a group of people doing something a bit odd. Or you may not have even noticed at all as a group of silent people walked past you, experiencing the sounds of the city without making any of their own.
It was a fantastic weekend of interventions by all the artists involved in the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne. Did you see or hear anything over the weekend? I’d love to hear if you did.
As for the radical cross stitch component, there were two interventions over the weekend. The first was a cross stitch on an existing grid on Lonsdale Street, just near the corner of King Street. There is a beautiful old blue stone building there which is currently a barristers office, but in one of its manifestations was the home of the Seabrook Wine Merchants. Fittingly – at some point in time – a grape vine was planted outside the front and over the years has been trained up the side of the building. To help it along the way, a wire grid was attached to the side of the building.
This is what caught my eye.
During the G20 trials I spent a bit of time in this area and I noticed just how few children were around this part of town. During the week most of them are in school I realise but even small children are noticeably absent. And gee, try taking a pram through court security.. In the weekend this part of the city is a ghost town.
I decided this spot was perfect for a bit of commentary on the invivsibility of children in the urban space.
All the times I’d visited this space previously there wasn’t any greenery on the grape vine. The last time I went past there was a very small amount. So I was delighted to see how much had grown on it. The vine created a perfect frame for what I’d planned to do!
There’s a few more pics on our Facebook Page if you wanna check them out.
The next stage of operations was the Melbourne Bicycle Beautification Society Outing in Flinders Lane. Normally this is a site rich in bicycle basket bounty but Sunday there was very few. So rather than sit there and stitch baskets as they came and went, participants were armed with a zine including instructions, a needle, wool and a thank you tag and sent around the city to find baskets in other places.
Each zine kit had wool to make one of these
And one of these wee tags to say thank you to the owner of the bicycle for being a cyclist
Hopefully I get some more pics from participants over the next couple of days. Were you one of them? Where did you find your basket?
The zine with the instructions and all my thoughts about the issues of intervening in the city will be online for download soon. In the meantime I have a couple more kits with all the bits in them left to giveaway. If you’d like to win one just leave a comment below and tell me what are some of the things you think about when you’re walking through cities.
Overall, a wonderful weekend! Massive thanks and congratulations to Lynda for her brilliant curating. This has been a wonderful show to be a part of and I do hope we get to work together again soon.
Bicycle Beautification
So what are you doing on Sunday?
This weekend is the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne weekend of interventions. The artists will be out and about on the streets creatively intervening with the city. Or as the Craft Cartel blog puts it: an interactive artistic wake-up call to confront all that is predictable and boring in our city.
Initially I was gonna keep mine to sneaking about putting bits and pieces up in strange places for people to find. But I got convinced that it would be much more fun to do something where other people can join in.
So…
The Melbourne Bicycle Beautification Society in association with Radical Cross Stitch and the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne are on a pilgrimage to reward Melbourne’s cyclist for their contribution to leisure, saving the planet, looking good and stopping oil wars.
In an effort to encourage spontaneous and uncontrolled acts of creativity, we invite participants to learn the art of bicycle basket cross stitch.
Materials and instructions will be provided during this casual afternoon of direct action against the pervasive boring of everyday life.
Participants need only turn up to Flinders Lane near the corner of Degraves Lane any time from 2pm until about 4.
This free event is part of the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne intervention weekend. Artists will be out and about from the 17-18th of October encouraging and even inciting random acts of public creativity. For details on other artists and how to engage in their interventions visit http://interventionistguide.org
Not brought to you by any government department or arts funding organisation.
RSVP on Facebook
Some Interventions and an Opening
Last night saw the official launch of the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne cabinets in Platform Gallery, Flinders Subway, Melbourne. While there is a gallery space where you can go and see work, the true work is on the street, where each artist is spending the month of October encouraging and developing new ways of doing public art in Melbourne.
I have installed four pieces of work around the streets now and planning a fair few more. For those of you in Melbourne, put October 16-18 in your diary as the weekend where all the artists will be hitting the streets for performances, tours, installations and other creative bits and pieces.
Two of the four pieces have already been on here:
And here’s some pics of the latest couple.
You might recognise the last piece from here.
For this show us artists were asked to consider urban space: how it’s built, how we relate to it, how others relate to it. And for me it is very much about questions of ownership, access, power and control. My experiences of Melbourne’s CBD have been quite varied; as a worker, an activist, a resident, a mother, a pregnant woman, a public transport user, a cyclist, a pedestrian. None of those experiences have meant much control in the space so I’ve managed to experience quite varied forms of discrimination in that space.
I’m also very aware of the access issues other people face. Those in wheelchairs is a prime example. It’s hard enough getting around with a pram sometimes, but even harder with a wheel chair. You learn a whole different path of navigation around the city that able bodied people just don’t ever need to consider. Another example is the elderly. I do know people who live in Melbourne who haven’t visited the CBD in over a decade because it’s just too hard and intimidating. They prefer the relative safety of the suburbs where they can get everything they need without the (media driven) fear of the city space. And there’s of course other reasons, language especially.
This all means that there is a large amount of people who are simply excluded from that space, they are invisible.
I got wondering just how many other people thought about these issues and I figured probably not too many. Discrimination tends not to be something you think about until you experience it, and spatial experience is something that even those that experience it, aren’t necessarily aware of. The idea that our cities and buildings are designed by and for able-bodied white guys is such a given that considerations for other needs are rarely made.
I always find department stores pretty amazing in their design. If you stop and look at actually who uses a department store, women are by far the majority. Yet even their designs rarely accommodate their needs. If it’s a multi story building you will almost always find the baby wares department above or beyond ground level. So a woman with a pram is going to need to negotiate at least one floor change to get there. And given you aren’t supposed to use an escalator with a pram it can sometimes take longer to get to the department you want than to find the actual item you’re looking for once your there. And that’s if you can get through the aisles. It’s astonishing how many shops selling baby things I have been into with a pram that have aisles narrower than the average pram..
So a lot of the pieces I’m doing are talking about different peoples’ relationships with space. And also the stuff that moves through the space. Especially given a fair chunk of the urban space is dedicated to the peddling of stuff.
The piece above on the rubbish bin is one such piece. Very much geared towards encouraging people to consider how easily and flippantly we throw things away. Rather than focussing on whether you can recycle something or not, I’m more interested in people thinking about why they needed this throw away thing in the first place. It seems that so many people still believe that the solutions to climate change and the rampant abuse of our planet are decisions to be made by politicians and CEOs. While those people certainly have a role, the role of the consumer in changing their own behaviour is just as, if not more important. In a country with the highest per capita emissions in the world, we really need to start thinking about why we invest so much energy in making things just to have a short, uninteresting interaction with the thing and then throw it away. There’s got to more to life.
So these are just some of the issues that I think about when engaging with the urban fabric. And I am sure these are completely different to the issues the other artists consider. I urge you to visit the website and visit the gallery and check them all out.
And most importantly, I urge you to grab a map from the gallery and get out into the city and consider your own relationships with the spaces within and what opportunities you see for artistic practice and engagement. Then head back to the gallery and share your ideas with the rest of us!
And now for some pics of the opening. Thanks to all who came it was a great night!
The Great Xtreme Destash
With an expanding family it was time to make some tough decisions about space in our house. I made the big call and offered to hand over my craft room to be the new guest room. Then the existing guest room (which adjoins Tara’s room) can become Tara’s new big girls room.
It was a tough call to make. But when I looked at it from an efficiency perspective it was quite obvious. I don’t actually craft in there very often. I was limited to being in there when Tara was asleep otherwise a) I couldn’t watch her or b) she’d tear the room apart. So I really wasn’t in there much. And it was turning into a giant hoard room. Hardly practising what I preach when it comes to sustainable crafting.
So I decided to set myself a challenge to consolidate the room to one filing cabinet and one tall set of shelves. I’m only allowed to keep what will fit in there. This means getting rid of a heap of stuff.
Readers might remember last year Cate from Polka Dot Rabbit started the Buy Nothing Craft Month. It completely changed my crafting. Rather than buying piles of crap because I might make something out of it one day. I stopped buying and started making. It did truly radical things to my output and my savings! Other than embroidery floss and sometimes aida fabric I’ve pretty much stopped buying stuff. But I got given a fair bit so the stash wasn’t going down too far.
But now I’m getting serious!
My mission is to make, give away, or sell as much out of that room as I can over the next couple of months. And I’m gonna share the results. But to add a bit of a challenge I’m going to try not to throw any of it away. So I’m trying to find uses for all the scraps too. Given the massive environmental impacts of the textiles industry, I believe we’re obliged to at least try to find uses for our scraps. And given the resources out there, it shouldn’t be too difficult.
A little while ago a friend gave me the book Generation T – 108 ways to transform a t-shirt (warning – last time I opened their website there was a blimmin loud auto play video on it that started with an ad. I’d mute before clicking..). It’s a fantastic resource and filled with heaps of ideas on how to reuse fabric. While most of the projects do rely on t-shirts in an existing form, a fair few of them don’t. And a bunch of them don’t even need t-shirt fabric.
I’ve been inspired by a couple of projects. Firstly there’s a great tutorial on how to make an ‘it’ doll. A nice wee baby friendly gender-neutral soft doll. Given how livid the mainstream toy industry makes me, I thought it made perfect sense to get organised and make my own. Now I have a stash of future presents and stall items for markets!
The first bunch I made I used some terry towling I had lying around.
Believe it or not, I wasn’t actually intending to make aliens. It was just a fluke I picked the green fabric. And it wasn’t until I finished them I had that ‘would you look at that’ moment. I gave one to the neighbours wee boy and he loves chewing on it. The best things about them is that they can be thrown in the washing machine if they get dirty – perfect baby toys!
I decided to have another go making them but with a bit of variation.
I call these ones ‘little hugs’. Gave them extra long arms so they can give their friends lots of big cuddles. And I gave them faces; stitched on, so there’s no dangerous fally off choky bits.
I’m quite proud of them, they look really cool! And were nice and easy to make. I think all up it took me about three hours to make four of them at a time. Can’t wait to give them to some certain little people…
Next up is still a WIP. But I decided to get into my scraps bag and make something fun with all the crazy unmatched scraps in there. Another project in the Generation T book is a couple of great patterns for rugs. I decided to make a braided one as a new mat for our toilet. Our existing one is pretty damn ugly. And it’s a room in our house that needs more craft in it!
All you have to do is cut your fabric into strips, stitch the strips together (I used a zig zag stitch on the sewing machine but you can hand stitch it no problems), braid three lengths together and then using a running stitch/whip stitch, stitch the braid on the under side into a spiral. It’s a bit slow to do but it looks cool! And a great way to use a heap of fabric. I started with three lengths about 3 metres long and I’ve got a rug about 30cm wide. I need to add another couple of metres worth I reckon, to make it big enough for a loo mat.
This last shot shows the underside. The red thread is my running stitch holding it together.
This is a great project for using very different types of fabric since they get mixed up so nicely. I used everything from nice japanese cottons to upholstery fabric selvedge. It’s a fun way to remember all your past projects! Will post a pic when it’s finished.
My craft room is also supplying all the resources I need for the Interventionist Guide. Other than a roll of gutter guard I picked up from an op shop. Everything in the show is coming out of my stash.
I’m also planning to sell a few things. Mostly things I know other people could really appreciate that I’m simply not appreciating enough. All in the Radical Rags store and living in the vintage supplies section. Yesterday I listed a couple of Golden Hands books. They’re in excellent condition. Don’t think the original owner ever used them. And I haven’t either.. I’ve got a few of them to list yet so if you’re a collector and have a hole in your collection, let me know and I’ll let you know if I’ve got it.
So it’s a blimmin big mission but one I’m determined to complete. Stay tuned for updates.
In the meantime I have to share this pic of Tara. I so wish I was as cool as her 
Stitching some Urban Fabric
Spent today in the city doing some final preparations for the Interventionist Guide. Aside from the wind, it was one of the most fun days I have had in a very long time! I am SO looking forward to the show opening so the play can REALLY begin!
Put it in your diaries people! Friday October 2nd, 5pm, Platform Gallery, Flinders Subway, Melbourne.
Also, I look this pregnant now
Not one, but three (and a half..)
It’s been a bit quiet on the ol’ RCS blog as of late. Partly due to the never ending joys of pregnancy (promise not to bore you with the details..) but also partly due to the busyness of preparing for some upcoming exhibitions. And it’s about time our lovely readers got to hear the details!
Firstly, opening next week in Jönköpings, Sweden, is “Craftwerk 2.0: New Household Tactics for the Popular Crafts”.
Craftwerk 2.0 is an exhibition that explores the new “updated” textile crafts that are developed by a new generation of serious amateurs, innovative craftsmen, engaged entrepreneurs and political practitioners.
This is one of the biggest craft exhibitions on the calendar this year and the RCS crew is most excited to be a part of it! Both I and the Ninja have pieces in the show including ‘Oh Sorry, was that your land?’, ‘Homes for All’, Mario map, and an as yet unseen series of QR codes. There’s some really interesting events running with the show and I urge anyone anywhere near Sweden to put this show in your diary! The exhibition runs from September 19 until January 16 2010.
The next exhibition on the agenda is Explosive Expression, an Art Auction and Exhibition in commemoration of the second anniversary of the State Terror Raids in New Zealand of October 15th, 2007. For more info on the Exhibition and the Auction (online bids are welcome for those not able to be in Wellington) check out the website and the Facebook event.
I was most honoured to be asked to contribute to this show. As readers will probably know, I am friends with a number of the defendants so have paid close attention to the developments of the cases. But aside from that I am appalled at the massive amounts of money being spent by the NZ counter terrorism unit investigating activists. As the Greens warned when this legislation was first introduced, it’s about giving massive powers to Police which encroach on civil liberties. And they warned from day one, due to the complete lack of domestic terrorism the legislation would inevitably be used to monitor and stifle dissent.
Whether or not the defendants are found guilty on the charges they all face is quite irrelevant to the overall issue that the Police spent over $10million investigating, using intensely intrusive surveillance techniques, a significant proportion of the NZ activist community in the name of counter-terrorism. They executed warrants on homes across the country and literally terrorised entire communities and homes containing small children.
The small group of people now facing relatively minor charges in comparison to the hype created around the initial raids now have to face the ‘justice’ system and receive a fair trial. To do this they need massive contributions towards their defence. Not just to cover the legal costs but also the costs of travel for the defendants and their families every time they need to be in court.
I urge anyone out there with an interest in collecting art, particularly political art to check out the works on the website and consider making a bid. Especially those of you in countries with strong currencies! The NZ Dollar is buying about 70 US cents at the mo’ so money coming in from overseas will go further
The piece I have contributed is called ‘Security Glam’ and is based on this image that came out of a collaboration between our friends at the Groundswell Collective and Artists at War
I will post an image of the completed piece once it’s on the Oct 15th Solidarity site.
Thirdly, I was asked a while back to participate in a Melbourne show (finally!!) and there was no way I was going to say no to this one! Curated by the super inspiring Lynda Roberts from Public Assembly, the Interventionist Guide to Melbourne is a group show of work by artists who focus their work in engaging with the urban fabric.
The show is both gallery and street based with the Platform Gallery being transformed into a virtual map of Melbourne revealing sites for individuals and groups to creatively and temporarily intervene within the existing urban fabric.
Each artist will contribute work in various mediums but each will be editing a zine guide as to how to go out and ‘do’ their form of intervention. The works will inspire members of the public to go out and do their own interventions which can be documented and will add to the show.
My work is very much focussed around challenging notions of space, particularly around issues of ownership, construction and access. I’ll be sharing the skills for three types of craft based intervention and am pleased to say none of it involves yarn bombing..
The opening is on October the 2nd at Platform (FB event here) and continues until the 30th. Contributing artists will also be out on the street on Oct 16-18 intervening! Keep an eye on the website for more details.
Finally – and this is the half – I’ve been working on a page for the 2010 3CR Calendar. It’s one of the major fundraising activities for Melbourne’s best grassroots community, activist radio station. And I was super honoured to be asked to contribute. So it’s not really an exhibition as such, but a group show appearing on a wall near you! I understand the calendar is about to go to the printers and I think the launch is in November some time. Will let you know details when I know them.
The piece I contributed is an antique inspired sampler with an anti-consumerist theme. Reckon you old skool cross stitchers out there will love it. I’m also going to release the pattern as a fundraiser for 3CR, it’ll be available in the Radical Rags store sometime later this year.
So I reckon there’s been about 80,000 or so stitches over the last few months which hopefully explains the lack of blog words! I’ll update this site over the next few weeks with more images and details as they come to hand.
Thanks for stopping in to make sure we’re still here
xox