My favorite things 27

Faithful readers of this blog may know that I am a flag junkie so you can imagine how exciting it was for us to buy a 20-foot flagpole for our front yard six years ago this week.  And what a nifty flagpole it is.

Instead of raising the flag with a rope, the traditional method, with this model you raise the flagpole!  It telescopes into five-foot sections, so you start with a very short pole, hook your flag onto rings with clasps, and then raise each section one by one.  When each section gets fully extended, you turn the pole an inch and it drops down into a groove that keeps everything in place.

Our house is set back from the street and the street numbers, although they're six inches tall, are affixed to the wall and unless you know where to look you could easily miss them.  So it's nice now to be able to tell people "we're the house with the big flagpole."

After we got the flagpole and wore out our first 3x5-foot flag I upgraded to 4x6, and when that wore out I wanted an even bigger one, but was told that the wind forces up that high are too strong for a bigger flag, which would apparently fill like a sail and float our entire yard away in a gale.  Didn't want that to happen, so we're making do.

Happy Fourth of July!

Mile-o'-handwork 3 -- the installation

The wall of the gallery that the mile-o'-handwork had to occupy is a strange one: it's pierced by two windows that connect the back room show gallery to the front room sales gallery.  The show committee arranged five of my cakes and three much larger ones of Debby's at the base of the wall, and unrolled enough to make several vertical drapes up and down in front of the windows and on the wall.

I was happy to see the strips on display, but not happy with the overall effect.  I keep thinking I wandered into the janitor's closet and found a bunch of mops, buckets and vacuum cleaners standing there, with their hoses and handles inexplicably reaching up to the ceiling.  I think I'll embargo this project until I get a whole lot more work made, and when it does come out again in public I think I'll keep way more of the cakes rolled up and a lot fewer strips stretched out across space.  So all in all, a valuable experiment, and lots of ideas for the future!

By the way, here's a close-up of Debby's knitted strips.

And here's a close-up of my crochet.

I'll show you some of the other work in the show next week.  Unfortunately the show comes down today so it's too late for me to urge you to drop in.  Had I not been out of town I would have gotten there earlier in the run.

Mile-o'-handwork 2 -- how to display it

When Debby and I first talked about the mile-o'-handwork we thought it would be a nifty idea to stretch our strips out across the Big Four Bridge, a pedestrian bridge across the Ohio River that we are fond of walking on.  The length of the bridge walk is one mile, so that would make a perfect installation.  This idea lasted for a while until I realized that I liked the look of my rolled-up cakes more than I liked the look of the crochet extended.  And besides, if I stretched the work out on the bridge it would get dirty.

So my thinking was that I would like to display the work -- if that ever became a possibility -- mostly rolled up, with just enough of the strips unrolled so people could see what the cakes were made of.  This thought process was academic, as I had no possible venues for display, and besides, I would like this hypothetical installation to be much bigger.  So I kept crocheting.

Meanwhile Debby was knitting, and one day she had an inspiration, which was to use her long strips to make writing on the ground.  When we were at our art retreat this spring she wrote out her favorite catchphrase from the Wizard of Oz on the back lawn.

Two very different ideas for what to do with the project, which showed no signs of ever getting finished.

But then the proposition!

Our local fiber and textile art group was having a juried show in a small gallery.  Because of the size of the gallery, there was a size limit: 24 inches wide.  Perhaps because of the size limit, or some other twist of the rules, we didn't get a whole lot of entries, and of course the entries that were selected were pretty small.

The show committee went from worrying that we would overflow the gallery to worrying that we wouldn't be able to fill it adequately.  And somebody had an idea: why not have a small display of the mile-o'-handwork!  Everybody in the group knew about our project, because both Debby and I had been working on it during meetings for years.

So I delivered one box of cakes to the gallery early this month with the directions "do whatever you think is best."  And finally this week I got out to see the installation (not a moment too soon, because the show closes tomorrow).  I'll show it to you tomorrow.

Mile-o'-handwork 1 -- genesis

Several years ago my art-and-walking pal Debby Levine, who is a master knitter, had a brilliant idea -- she would make a mile of knitting.  We talked about this idea over a period of weeks as we walked.  The more we kicked the tires, the more we realized how big a task that would be.  She revised her plans to make the knitting narrower, but it was still daunting. Then in a moment of temporary insanity I said to her "You make a half mile of knitting and I'll make a half mile of crochet."

I thought this would be a good way to use up those bits and pieces of yarn left over from afghans, and for a while that was going great, until I used up all my bits and pieces.  Then I started grabbing all the yarns from grab bag and crocheting them.  My crochet is about four inches wide, most happy when I'm working with low-rent acrylic yarn.  I roll the finished strip into a jellyroll until it gets wide enough to fit into a banker's box.

My grandson thinks these bundles look like cakes, so that's what I call them.  At any given moment I have several going, one in a bag in the car to take with me to meetings or other public events, one in the studio, a couple on the sofa where I watch TV, one in the living room to work on if company comes.

I tried to resolve that I would never buy any yarn for this project but simply use leftovers.  But about a year ago I got desperate for raw materials and bent my principles enough to go to the Good Garbage Store's going-out-of-business sale, where I got about 50 skeins of yarn for about 35 cents each.

I have five or six boxes so far, five cakes to a box.  A couple of years ago I took everything I had finished over to the house of a friend with a really long room, and we unrolled and measured all the cakes.  It seemed that I was maybe 20% of the way to my half mile, which didn't seem like all that much progress for all the time I was putting in.  But I am not discouraged.  I will keep crocheting, and I trust that the Lord will provide yarn like manna in the wilderness.  And someday I will display the work.

My favorite things 26

Sequoyah, the great Cherokee leader, born around 1776, fought in the War of 1812 under Andrew Jackson against the British.  He and his fellow Cherokee soldiers realized during the war that their inability to read and write was a serious problem: they could not write letters home, read military orders, or keep records.  After the war he resolved to create a system to write the Cherokee language.

He ended up with 85 symbols that represented syllables, and thousands of Cherokees learned to read and write the new alphabet.  By 1825 the Bible and many hymns had been translated into Cherokee, and Sequoyah began publishing a newspaper in 1828 using type produced by a Boston foundry.

After the Cherokees were driven from their homeland by their former commander, Jackson, Sequoyah had to abandon his printshop in New Echota, GA.  In 1958 archaeologists unearthed it and the type was cleaned up and used to print this proof sheet, which ended up in my father's possession and then in my own.  (This is just a display of all the characters in the font, not made into words.)

I am amazed at how tiny the characters are -- about the size of the stock market listings in the Wall Street Journal -- and how keen the eyes of the printer and his readers must have been to distinguish so many very similar characters.  Here's a contemporary version of the alphabet:

My dad acquired all kinds of strange and wonderful things in his long life and extensive travels, many of them related to printing, and they are among my most treasured possessions.  Although the technology of printing has changed dramatically within my own lifetime -- even within my own professional lifetime -- I am always inspired by reminders of the way it used to be.  One guy with a printing press, a font of type, and a vision can truly change the world.

PS Happy birthday, Dad!  I bet they have good newspapers in Heaven.

Thoughts on judging 3

One more response to a comment left on my post about judging.  Charlotte wrote that there's a difference between "shows" and "exhibits" -- that shows are composed of a bunch of different things while exhibits are curated around some kind of theme or concept -- and that exhibits need to be cohesive but shows don't.  I think that's a very good distinction, except I'd add that exhibits don't even necessarily need to be cohesive.  The only reason I even mentioned the C-word is that so frequently you hear it in statements like "don't be hurt if your work if rejected from a show; it's probably perfectly wonderful but it just didn't fit in with the jurors' vision of a cohesive show."  I've always taken such statements to be (a) untrue (b) patronizing and (c) smarmy.

She also commented that talking things over with others helps you develop your ideas, and she always gets more out of a show by going with a friend and discussing the art.  I would agree 100 percent -- if you're talking about simply looking at art.  Indeed, that may be the subject of a whole different post next week!

But that's a different context than jurying and judging.  I would hope that people invited to be jurors or judges have already developed their own ideas pretty well.  As a juror or judge, your job is to look at the artwork and make critical decisions -- and they should be your own decisions.

I am not totally against discussion in the jurying or judging process, because sometimes I have found it to be helpful in reaching a consensus.  Some shows have multiple jurors for selecting which quilts get into the show, but then have just one judge choose the prizewinners.  This may be a good compromise approach.  (At the 2014 Quilts = Art = Quilts show at the Schweinfurth Art Center, I served on the selection jury and then was the sole prize judge.  I can testify that making the decisions all by yourself is a lot harder than doing it as a group!)

Kit Vincent, Chaos: the butterfly effect -- I chose this quilt as best in show at  Q=A=Q 2014

I'm not sure I would like to have totally blind judging.  But I can testify to the danger of being swayed by the strong personality in the room.

I once was on a jury that got together the afternoon before a show opened to look at the quilts in person and award the prizes.  We circled the room and looked closely at all the quilts.  Then we sat down to make the decision.  The show sponsor gave us a list of six or seven awards to give out.

One of the jurors was way higher on the food chain than the others and spoke first.  She wanted to start at the bottom of the list -- first we'd choose who got the honorable mentions, then who got the special awards, then choose third, second, and finally best in show.

I thought this was a really strange approach and said I didn't think that was the best way to go.  No, no, that was the way she wanted to do it!!  But how is that going to work out?  No, no, that was the way she wanted to do it!!  I couldn't talk her down, and the other juror sat there without saying anything, so I gave up.

Sure enough, after we gave out all the minor awards we ended up with arguably the two best quilts in contention for best in show.  We argued.  Eventually we chose one and the other one, instead of getting second prize, got nothing!  I felt guilty, even though the quilt I liked got the prize, because I thought we had shafted the other person, simply because of the weird process.  But two of us weren't able to overrule the big-cheese juror on an issue that she really wanted to win.

Would blind judging lead to better shows and better art?  I have no idea.  But it's interesting to contemplate.  What do you think?