Heeeeeere's Charlie!

This is my dear friend Charlie. The boyfriend you don't want your parents to meet. Or your friends, for that matter...

I think he's probably my favorite that I've done so far. He went together easily, and his mohawk turned out so adorable! I also love the little earring (and I put it in there with an eyelet, so it's like a real little piercing.

I just think his attitude is great. Not to mention the detailing.

"Hey man, it's great to meet you. Is Cindy at home? Huh? Oh, I've got a date with her tonight. Yeah, I'm Charlie. No man, Charles is my dad's name, dude. Is she ready? ...What? Why are you closing the door, man?"

Anyway. Just thought I'd share him. He stands about a foot tall...

From the Journal: Creativity

Round two: this is one of my favorites that I've done recently. I will probably spend some time working on the last paragraph---it just doesn't have quite the right ring yet. Either needs to be more confrontational or more conciliatory.



I'm a Barbie Girl,
In a Barbie world!
Life is plastic;
It's fantastic!

We are obsessed with novelty. If this were leading where it should be leading, i.e. into innovation, creativity, and the general improvement of the species, well, we wouldn't be having this conversation now, would we? The truth is, we have a problem. Our laziness has grown ata much faster pace than our desire for newness, and so we sit back, click through the channels, and wait for something to amaze us. But we don't find it.

Human beings have an innate need to build, create, and alter the world. We love beauty, and we love to decorate. Even the most utilitarian things--bridges, engines, tools, alarm clocks--have an aesthetic principle behind them, millions upon millions of dollars spent not only on making a thing, but on making it say something, too. Statements. What does your product say to the customer, what does your product say about the customer, but ultimately, what does it say to the customer's neighbors and friends? The appearance has to sell the product. It has to be 'sexy'. It's also got to be dispensable, it needs to be cheap, it needs to be obsolete within the next two or three years.

I started an experiment last year. I decided that I wanted to shop second-hand, harvest yarn from old sweaters, build toys from fabric remnants, and art from the discarded rag-ends of a faster-moving society.

Guess what I found?

That we have lost something fundamental to our status as human beings: our love of creation, our need to create. The expression of all things human in me brought to my surface. I make all my own shirts. I knit all my own hats. I shop second-hand, second by second reducing and spreading thin my carbon footprint.

The most amazing thing is the reactions I get from other people:

"I wish I could do that."

You can.

"I wish I had the patience to learn to knit."

There are thousands of books, and hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos. No excuses, if both of your hands are attached and functional. There was a time when kids learned in the first grade.

I want more people to learn what I've learned, to see what I've seen. In this day of plastics and petroleum, the organic is amazing, the homegrown astounding, the handcrafted seditious and revolutionary. To make something that is yours, and yours alone, is an act of rebellion against a system that has conspired to make us look alike, sound alike, and, ultimately, think alike--a system that does not tolerate diference of any kind, while trumpeting the virtues of corporate individuality.

From the Journal: Knitting

I thought it might be interesting to post some of the entries that I've been doing in my journal. This piece, undated, is one that I wrote on knitting. Enjoy.



Have you ever seen a hand-knitted dishrag? They're not the most common things anymore--who goes to the trouble of making something that's just going to be violently soiled, something transient? I love making them, though: there is an incomparable serenity in knitting. It calms my mind, and allows me to tie my thoughts into rows of neat little knots, secured in loops of cotton and wool.

Knitting has always done that for me. Imagine my surprise at my first guided meditation (during that ill-fated stint at UCA), discovering that the goal of Zen meditation is an intense awareness of the body and its position in space and time, an awareness of its rhythms, and that knitting achieved the same ends. It has been an anchor for me in unsteady times. I have used it to ground out masses of manic energy, finish difficult books (I'm thinking of Pinchbeck's 2012 and Bram Stoker's Dracula), and I can even knit while so baked I can barely see. Once, I knitted straight through all 12 hours of the Lord of the Rings extended editions.

If you've got an itch to create, knitting scratches all the right spots: it's portable, affordable, infinitely variable and complex, but simultaneously simple and restful. There is something incredibly comforting about a handmade gift; a simple, heartfelt honesty and profundity. To give a handmade gift is to say, "I surrender to you that which our modern society values above all else: my time."

Dishcloths are a particular conundrum. A dishcloth, particularly one made on the Peaches and Cream yarn that's made for them, is ultimately a fragile, mortal object. It has a lifespan, admittedly a long one, if it's well cared for.

But even these labor-intensive, impermanent objects, the knitting goddesses that went before me have never been content to just make a purely functional rectangle of garter stitch. They are mostly knitted on a bias, the rows of garter stitch framed by a delicate circle of lace stitches. Some are even done as circles. With scalloped edges. Admittedly, boredom undoubtedly plays a large role in the elaborations on the basic theme, but still, they are amazing.

Once, I made an afghan out of a whole bunch of yarn my parents got for almost nothing. It was my first spring break at college, although 'spring' is perhaps a contradiction in terms--we got snowed in at Lake Wedington. There were ten of us in a frigid, ancient cabin made for five, and on the first night, over glasses of wine and the faint reek of weed I finished it--a utilitarian beast in gray and blue and yellow. Over the weekend, it was worn as a dress, and Cody and I spent our first night together beneath it. I had a picnic on it behind Baridon Hall with a curly-haired transsexual, and we smoked cigarettes and drank chocolate milk out of wineglasses while discussing zombies. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly.

I broke the afghan down when it started to unravel, and it briefly became part of a sweater before disappearing into a dozen or so hats. But I still remember the cold air, and the scratch of the wool on my skin, and Cody's stubble on my shoulder--warm and content, surrounded by snow, and wrapped in the distilled essence of time.