Over there…

I’ve just written a great big post over on the new blog. Have a look! (And if you have a link, or a bookmark, please don’t forget to update. See you over there.)

Changes afoot

No, it’s not just that I’m finishing off a couple of pairs of socks, or that I’m soon to put some prints on to my (neglected, cobwebby) Etsy store. I’m fixing up the domain and setting up house in a proper blog.

Back soon…ish…

It was a pile of…fridges

Installation art bugs me, but I’m aware of this preconception. I’m fully prepared to be surprised and delighted by an installation, but it’s going to need to do more than make me nod my head at the artist’s sheer effort in bringing the thing to life.

The photo of Thomas Rentmeister’s installation in the Adelaide Festival Artists’ Week Guide looked for all the world like the last day of a scratch n’ dent sale at the Good Guys outlet. Why would the festival organisers ask a European artist to come over here and park some fridges in a room and smear them all over with cream when we’ve got a whole city full of perfectly good blokes with hand trucks (and probably dead fridges in their sheds) who would have been happy to lend a hand. (Although I’m not sure what they would have made of the cream bit.)

But then, I guess we still would have needed an Artist to say, Hey, let’s stack up these fridges in the corner of a gallery! And by the way, my airfare invoice is attached below.

So I went to see what kind of a pile we were talking about here. It wasn’t quite the pile I expected:

As the title says, Nearly 100 fridges stacked in a corner. Aaaaand?

Visually, it’s definitely interesting. I can see there’s order here, that the ‘forms’ are arranged with care and consideration. Plus, as a bonus, they’ve all been coated in some kinda cream that looks like spackle but remains soft. (Yes, I know this first-hand.)

But the only difference between this and using a bunch of white foam core to achieve the same effect is that the fridges more or less are passing judgment on us privileged gallery-goers for living in a society where fridges themselves have a use-by date.

But didn’t you know that before you even heard of Thomas Rentmeister? Most people I know are already consumed with worry about the world, the environment. I’m personally kind of tired of art that requires an enormous amount of effort to make a very small statement (if it can even be said to do that) and still doesn’t do what art is really, really good at: being beautiful, giving us hope, optimisim, glory, joy.

I think it’s wonderful that even a small piece of decorated paper in a little frame hanging humbly in a kitchen can do that, and yet the best a towering stack of high-art whitegoods in a gallery can do is echo the daily newspaper’s confirmation that the world is messed up and it’s all our fault.

Arts tart

The Adelaide Festival and Fringe have wrapped, which is just as well — between them and the heatwave I’ve got nothing left.

It was a little tough to get babysitting organised for everything we’d have liked to see. In the end, we wound up seeing mostly comedy events, interspersed with exhibits and installations. The last two days we squeezed in two performances each night, and I thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Kitson, who was more funny  monologist than comedian, and David O’Doherty, who had that really good blend of insight, IQ and class.

I’ve never reviewed a comedy show before, and I think I probably won’t start now (”…observant, sharp, funny! Look out Steve Carell!”—The East Outback Rag) but it was a very smart, funny set. (And where would he have been without negativity, may I ask?) The audience may owe him an apology, however: after a brilliant segment about childhood nightmares and the adult inability to get up in the middle of the night to investigate noises which demand investigation, we neglected to offer some extra applause beyond a bit of polite ‘nice golf shot’ hand-patting. I was too busy weeping with laughter to applaud, actually. (I think he forgave us—we got a half hour encore.)

Anyway, I think the Melbourne Comedy Festival is up next, so if he’s on the bill and comedy’s your thing, give it a go.

I have tomorrow set aside for visiting the major arts exhibitions of the festival before they close — and thank god it should be cooler by then. Still have to get in to visit those Rentmeister fridges…

Crapping it negative

People say it’s easy to be negative, but they’re stupid.

Ha. That’s a funny. Seriously, though, you try being negative, and see how many positive thinkers don’t (rather negatively, it must be said) instantly rain on your parade.

I use negativity as my humor, my shield, my way of defining what’s wrong with things. I’m not actually a pessimist. But more and more lately, there’s just no place for negativity. People are so freakin’ positive all the time that you can’t crack your own sorta joke without somebody pointing out, ‘But that’s so negative.’

Without negativity, no science, no debate. No logical way to pick things apart to find out how they work—or why they don’t. Without negativity, no Seinfeld. No improvement.

I don’t wanna go all yin and yang on ya here, folks, but (and here’s where we go negative) without negativity, no criticism. No criticism, it’s all good. But is it? (You know it’s not.)

And sometimes it is (Yarn 8: knitting, crochet, spinning, felting — it’s all good). But sometimes? Somebody needs to say, “Wow, what a load of crap!”

What’s prompting this? Oh, my almost complete inability to refrain from commenting on things. My lifelong battle with learning to shut up. (Publishing Yarn was a real crash course in shutting up.)

Maybe it’s some recent discussion on Ravelry. It’s hard to make a joke anywhere online without having to winky wink wink or LOL to let people know that’s a joke, son, which I find personally rather frustrating.

Or maybe it’s the fact that there’s a large-ish installation of refrigerators and other discarded white things in a gallery in Adelaide and somebody got paid to come over from Europe to install it here for our viewing pleasure.
I’m going to go look at it this week just to make sure it is what I think it is. I’ll let you know.

Which way do I go?

I have so much to post here. At least three, no four, big old posts just waiting.There’s:

1. A weekend away down south, paddling in a sea-kayak with my neglected spouse
2. The end of an era, in which I finally cast off and sew up my Wine & Roses bolero, cast on in December 2005 as a test knit for Yarn Magazine Issue 2
3. The stunningly soft and beautifully coloured 8 ply yarn recently received from Biggan Designs, and the updated Hailstone jumper (which I plan to offer for individual sale soon) have begun to knit with it. Or—wait—does it actually want to be a vest?
4. The recent trip to Melbourne, in which I

a) sat through two exceptionally long meetings during which I needed to listen and not talk and therefore knitted a lot, nearly a pair of boot socks now andb) was blessed for once by good timing and got to meet up with

1. Mandy Crane and her new knitting group night at Trunk (reviewed that very morning in the Age)… This last one is possibly a novel, except due to the champagne flowing liberally I can’t actually remember enough of it, although there are photographs… and
2. Mandy, Jennie and Kylie the next day for lunch, and then shopping hijinx around Melbourne in which wondrous retail establishments were visited and copious amounts of printmaking supplies were procured.

Can you tell which one I want to do? I think I actually kind of summed up the first three pretty neatly, actually, though I will come back to them. So, what about I do No. 4? It was the first time in AGES I got to go out and just be a girl and not have it be anything to do with work.Although I have begun to think Mandy and I were separated at birth (by several US states, really) because we did talk rather a lot about fonts, magazines and, um, Amy Winehouse’s teeth, which are all related to my career in one way or another, true. I mean, anyone suckled at the breast of Billboard was encouraged to know all about things like British hip-hop brats and to gossip incessantly about them as a means of coping with the stress of being an editorial assistant at a large weekly text-heavy magazine.But I digress. (What else is new?) Have some photos. Yes, it’s the easy way out. But you know you want them.I finished meetings on Tuesday, thus ending my knitting time. I finished one spiral boot sock and got halfway through the second. Would that all meetings were so productive.I collapsed for a short time and then hied myself down to Fed Square in 33C heat (turns out the concierge was wrong and Trunk is nowhere near there) at which point I collapsed again and had a rawther nice little chilled Riesling from Geelong (of all places) before hoofing back uptown and finding Mandy awaiting at Trunk, practically standing there with cc in hand ready to go buy the first of several bottles o bubbly (Do you sense another collapse coming on?)Kylie and many other showed up in short order. I met a lot of very swish new gals (now, lessee if I can find my notes, yes, here they are):Handan, Ele, and Bonnie (who was not five hours off the plane on a visit to her sister in Melbourne, and hey, I wish I were that put together when jet lagged…or anytime, really)Bonnie (Cheryl’s mum, also very together despite just getting off the plane), Penny (Cheryl’s sister), and yours truly not terribly put together at all, actually looking rather sun-addled after that kayak adventureDenyse, Mandy, Larissa, bubbly girls that they areAnd of course miz gusset, who brought along her Babette blanket in progress, eliciting much high-pitched squealing around the tableSquee! It’s Babette!On the morning of my free day in Melbourne, I woke up to weather that made my heart glad. RAIN LOOK LOOK ITS RAINING AND GREY (collapses again). Surprisingly feeling pretty good despite the bubbles.There was lunch, at Benito’s, with Jennie, Mandy, Kylie, during which I did not bring out the camera. It was a good thing. (Both lunch and lack of camera.)And there was much on-tram/off-tram activi-tay all over Melbs. St Luke’s, Neil’s, Melbourne Etching, various shoe stops (though no shoes to bring home), the ubiquitous chocolate break (at Cafe du Soleil) for the largest bowl of milky lovely chocolate, and then a trawl through the Nicholson Building including Kimono House (some damage there) and a stop at the beautiful Button Mania on Level 2. How beautiful? I leave you with these pictures, including one of owner Kate Boulton’s button alphabet, which she oh-so-carefully laid out on the counter of her lovely little shop.Sigh. I’m the first one to sing the praises of Adelaide…but I love Melbourne.

The meter is running out of time

Do you see that meter at left? (Don’t worry, I’ll put a screen shot in the post so you can see it after I turf its lying ass off my blog.)

It currently says “I haven’t knit much recently.”

I take umbrage. First, it’s “knitted.” As in, “I haven’t knitted much lately.” Second? That’s wrong wrong wrong. I just haven’t logged in to visit that needy little meter lately.

I am about to go take the widget down. Yes, I’m doing a stash knit-down challenge to knit a mile in about a month, and I’m doing pretty well with it, but I am getting sick of tallying. Especially when that meter lies like a rug. (Plus? I’m knitting in kilometres.)

Maybe this is just another symptom of change. I’m still cleaning house, paring back. Giving away stuff. (Drop me a line and you might get lucky! Just ask kylie.) I’ve also just signed off pretty much every Yahoo group I’ve ever belonged to and unsubscribed from newsletters. I’m gettin’ ready to go paint ‘NO JUNK MAIL’ on my mailbox, too.

I’m working (kind of) normal hours again. I’m getting more time with my kids, actually meeting other parents around school. I don’t have days anymore where I don’t leave the house because I have too much work to do. I’m also applying to go back to uni for a graduate diploma — yes, part-time. (In printmaking. Could you have guessed?)

I’m also beginning to think about going blogless. Dunno if that will happen. What about the readers? I’d miss all four of them.

But change does seem to be going around. Like Albert in Hitch, once you start, you can’t stop it. (See what I mean: You cannooooot stop it!)

Linocuts: a lasting impression

I made my first linocut when I was 8. It seemed to take forever to carve the lino—I’m convinced that the time it takes to do something is inversely proportional to your age, and of course 8.5 x 11″ is a massive landscape when you have but a pair of weeny little carving tools to work with anyway.

But once I got printing, it was exciting. I got so carried away, rolling the ink and inking the plate, that at one point I forgot to put down a sheet of paper and made a print directly on the newspaper covering the studio’s worktable. My teacher and the others in the class all thought this was a happy accident (perhaps my first encounter with that phenomenon as well) and encouraged me to make a few more prints on newspaper. It was one of these, turned a deep yellow under black ink, that I saw again for the first time 10 years later on my father’s mantel. (So many layers of temporariness there, I don’t even know where to go with it.)

I don’t recall making any more prints until I was 16 and took a summerlong workshop in intaglio (chiefly because all the other kids got the places in painting). But that was another happy accident—I loved it. I am a process oriented craftsperson—hence all those UFOs in my knitting : S—and printmaking appealed to me.

I want to get the kids doing some printing. Nathan took a class last year at Carly’s studio, but being Nathan, didn’t get overly excited despite doing some wonderful things. My daughter already has a good feel for it, I think—she has been making dozens of ‘editions’ of one particular little figure everywhere she goes (breakfast table, daycare, restaurant tablecloth, post-it notes).

While browsing for a few ideas for carving with kids, I found a neat little article that touches on some of the charms of the linocut.

Like the unexplored and unmapped Australian landscape, the linocut is an unchartered medium without codified orthodoxies; it can detail a preciousness and intricate fragility like the spikes of a banksia or a vast monotony of tone.

Another: my one-time teacher Dianne Longley illustrating the virtues of lino carving on a cold winter day in Adelaide with a warm iron at the elbow by mimicking herself in a gentle trance, pausing to contemplate her carving and soften the lino with the iron for the next cut. I can’t remember which printer it was, there were a lot—Margaret Preston, Ethel Spowers, Dorrit Black, Eveline Syme, Grace Cossington Smith, Thea Proctor, Grace Crowley—but one of them specifically mentioned working on linocuts at the kitchen table while the kids were around. It’s an enabling sort of art.

Unless of course you spend too much time blogging and not enough time actually practising art…

Everyday people

Just quickly, one of the blogs I (used to) read occasionally has folded, gone private to prevent stalking. For solace I looked around to find what she’d been reading, and came across Mustard Seed Journal, which I also liked. I totally appreciate the self-sufficiency drive and people who run farms, whether for fun or for profit (ha ha) have always had my respect.
But as I read, it struck me that what someone in the US has to go out of their way to do, a lot of ordinary suburban dwellers in Adelaide already do. Rainwater tanks, solar panels, grey-water recycling, chooks and big gardens, check check check. Just ask Sarah. (Although you’ll want to ask carefully — the drought and water restrictions are affecting her vegie garden.)

And that’s just the ‘burbs. Go 30 minutes out of them, to the Hills (which are really within suburb’s reach of the city) and you’ll find regular households that function like mini farms. I know people whose houses have never been hooked up to mains water, people who cook on (modern) wood stoves, people who grow a LOT of their own food, and they’re not urban runaways, and they don’t blog about it. It’s everyday stuff.

It’s a good thing to think about when everything seems too much — little patches of escapism right next door. Even if they’re having to buy water to fill their rainwater tanks. : (

Think you’ve seen it all? Wait Awhile…

Or, What I Did on My Summer Holidays, Part 1

Hello, all — back in Adelaide from the Wait Awhile State, aka that other 1/3 of Australia Way Away from everything else in the country. Aka, visiting my ILs in Perth.

I had a lovely break. Spent time with the kids, did the Xmas thing up right with lots of pressies and too much chocolate, and finally got to meet — in person — two longtime supporters of Yarn: Emma Gerring, the driving force of the Wool Shack, and June Lynn, the powerhouse of the Melanian Sheep Breeders Assn of WA and founder of Bilby Yarns.

I’ve had many extended talks on the phone with both but you know this is nothing like sitting down in person and having…you know it: a good yarn.

Emma runs her business out of a room in her home — makes it (slightly) easier to attend young family members with one hand, pack orders with another, type with another, knit on with two more, and with that last free hand, mete out deserved smackdowns to the lesser gods of Australia Post and their tyranny of distance. (What, didn’t anyone tell you she’s actually an all-knowing six-armed Hindu goddess?)

I myself have been known to do a bit of multi-tasking in a single small room filled with a lot of yarn and yarn books that can be a slight distraction for visitors, so in some ways the Wool Shack visit was oddly familiar. But it was also flabbergasting — I was not prepared for the real visual and tactile experience — so much luxury in such a small space. Floor to ceiling, I kid you not, every square cm is put to use. And there are even secret hidy holes!!

Organic cottons, dyed organic cottons, colourful Cascade — what more can there be?

Once I started to fondle the yarns, these almost-famous yarns I had viewed mostly from afar, I was pretty much a goner. Mmmmm, the chunky single-spun Rowan

Aiee! It is the secret stash of BSA Royal Alpaca! Let the hyperventilating begin!

Cocoon; ooh, the Araucania semi-solid sock yarn; so many colours of Jo Sharp; and OH OH OH the Blue Sky Alpacas Royal Alpaca. Emma realised I was losing it and had to sort of gently guide me away from the yarn, sit me down, give me a cool drink and put some knitting in my hands before I could talk like a normal human. And then we talked and talked and talked … and when my husband arrived to pick me up he had to pry my
fingers loose from the doorframe, pretty much. Why? I *had not shopped yet*. I wound up having to go home and do my Wool Shack shopping online like everybody else, ha! I enjoyed it thoroughly nonetheless, perhaps a bit too much — was unable to fit WA purchases in luggage and now must Wait Awhile for Australia Post to deliver it.

Part 2: Bilby Yarns, Coming Soon, Probably Tomorrow or A Bit Later Today Seeing As It Is After Midnight

The beautiful Blue Sky Alpacas range

Lorna’s, Cascade, plus a few pretty JP Messenger Bags…