Including (but not limited to) Spirograph, Velocipede's Cycloidal Scribbling-Engine, fractals, atmospheric optics, letterpress, printmaking, fruits and vegetables I have known, and sundry shiny & diverse objects.
The chart has been slightly refined and adjusted from the one I used for the swatch in the picture. Both characters use the continuous cable technique. There are some places where things happen on wrong-side rows. The cable crossing with the red symbol involves dropping one stitch to reverse the direction of the column (which then gets grafted at the bottom of the ampersand) and then picking up a stitch again at the top, behind the three stitches of the wide diagonal line. The horizontal serif can be done with a lateral braid or by binding off the stitches and then picking up new stitches on the return row.
There are all sorts of fiddly refinements that I would like to write about, but I'm seriously crunched for time, so it's not going to happen right now. Good luck to anybody brave enough to try this!
I had some pairs of bent-wire components left over after I made the previous earrings, so I used them to make another pair. The mechanics of assembly are slightly different. I still have no earthly use for any of these, but I am gradually refining my methods for photographing them, so that's something?
"Cover the right side of the picture and estimate the size of the fish. Cover the left side and estimate again. What is the size of the fish if both sides are covered? What determines the size of any object shown in a picture?"
These are SO COOL I was compelled to try making something in a similar direction, out of the stuff I've been digging out of all my old boxes. I think I may have achieved "a little confused, but got the spirit."
It would be obvious to anyone reading very many of my posts that I spend a lot of time making things. And if not making things, then tinkering with things, adjusting and altering them to suit my own ideas.
(putting longwinded complaints under a cut)
It would maybe be somewhat less obvious that I'm almost always extremely unhappy about the things I've made. They so often feel like wasted time and wasted materials and disappointment and failure. Many of them I hate with irrational bitterness, as they accumulate in storage and gather dust. I don't know what to do with any of them. (This morning I came across someone's post talking about how much they love being able to say "I made the thing I'm wearing!" and it was so upsetting and triggering I had to walk away from the computer for a couple of hours to try and recover.)
This is mostly because the feedback I get is so often discouraging. There have been a handful of people on the internet, over the years, who seem to like some of the stuff I've done, but in person I get a lot of variations on
Why would you do that?
Can't you just buy one of those?
What's that good for?
Well, that's different.
It's very, uh…individual. Unique.
I don't think I know what to say to that.
I guess, as long as you like it, that's what really matters.
These are all spoken in tones that range from polite incomprehension to irritated boredom to not-really-concealed disgust.
I had not, until fairly recently, thought about what might happen if I made something as large and ambitious as a house.
I haven't personally made the thing, of course. I contributed a few bits and pieces, but the vast majority of the work has been done by other people. But the initial idea was mine, and many of the decisions about the project were ultimately made by me. And I don't have to worry about where to store it when it's done, or what to do with it: it's a place to store things, it stays where it is, and the thing to do is put myself and my immediate household and our stuff there and live in it.
But it's giving me that same sad sinking feeling of failure that all my projects do. Failure to connect, I think. Failure to reach an audience outside myself. There isn't anybody who quite gets it, and I'm in the uncomfortable position of having to be endlessly on the defensive, trying to justify myself to people who think I'm an idiot with no judgement and no taste.
Why would you build a house? Just buy one.
Why there? That's a terrible neighborhood!
Nobody does it THAT way.
Well, you can do whatever you want.
It's very, uh…individual. Unique.
I guess, as long as you like it, that's what really matters.
A major problem is that I don't like it, much. There are of course many things about it that I do like. I'm not constantly tripping over some previous owner's hideous aesthetic choices. There's no lead paint or knob-and-tube wiring. But there are so many things I wish I could have done differently, if only my budget had been orders of magnitude larger. The place is kind of tiny and cramped, and there's not really enough storage space (I'm still working on getting more shelving into the closets and basement) and I'm struggling to deal with all the oversized ancient heavy furniture my family has dumped on me.
But the biggest difficulty is that it's in a city I hate, with a climate I hate, and there's nothing I can do about that. If I wanted to pick up and move to somewhere I like better, I'd have to cut off the last of my remaining family connections, and I'm not willing or functionally able to do that. I have enough chronic mental and physical issues that I don't think I'd be able to survive on my own, even if there were no difficulties about things like finance. (There are very much difficulties about things like finance.)
So I'm wasting lots of energy and brain cells beating myself up for being such a rotten spoiled-princess jerk, who got to build a house and is now full of complaints about it. I'm utterly disgusted with myself for feeling this way, but I still feel this way, and I can't figure out how to get myself un-stuck.
This has cheered me up a little: it turned out I had some of that mylar fringe curtain stuff that you hang up for parties, and I put it in front of some of the windows that get the most afternoon sun. It blocks some of the light, so the house doesn't heat up quite as much, and it makes wonderful watery reflections all over the walls.
Now that my house and general living arrangements are theoretically stable (for now) (I am never going to trust that this will remain the case) I'm trying to start dealing with all the boxes and bundles and portfolios of things that have been in storage, or that I've been hauling around with me for all these years. It's mostly art and art supplies: tablets of paper, partial reams of paper, fancy decorated paper, carefully-wrapped stacks of prints, half-bound books, book cloth, beads, wire, bits and pieces of hardware, and so on and so forth.
All of it is, basically, junk.
I should probably just throw it away. Only of course I can't stand to do that. There's the whole sunk-cost thing, because this is stuff that I cared about enough to pack away and hang on to, that I was interested in, that I was in the middle of working on, that I was sure I would be able to return to someday and finish. It all meant something.
Does it mean anything now? Massive regrets, mostly. There's hardly anything I've ever made that I don't regret, sometimes very painfully. None of it ever found anywhere to go. Nobody ever wanted it. I never found a buyer or a gallery to take me on. I never found a working group to be part of. I never figured out how to market myself, to become a brand.
And now my life is so full of other obligations, that I don't want, but that are more or less required for my survival (and other people's), that it doesn't seem very likely that I'm going to be doing a lot of dedicated creative anything, any time soon. I'm surrounded by all the no-longer-relevant detritus of the last twenty or thirty years of my life, and going through the boxes feels like sandpaper on a sunburn.
(and I can't breathe a word of this to anyone! because then they dump their own buckets of slime on me! which is not helpful!)
if I'm functional enough to sit down and type something and post it, I'm doing better than I was.
realistically, many interactions are not a-bucket-of-green-slime level of bad. they're more like being pooped on by a bird.
it's still true that if interacting with the people in my life is like being pooped on by birds many times a day, I can understand why I'm probably avoiding it.
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