I am off to Calgary tomorrow to participate in the Mountain Standard Time Festival! David McCallum and I are performing Sticks and Stones
Sticks and Stones is a long-duration public intervention performance that makes use of knitting and the ancient Chinese strategy game, Go. The project explores the subculture of the reclamation of craft, strategy games and public gaming and the public’s relationship to these things. Go is played on a grid and knitting - as a series of rows and stitches - is an excellent medium for representing this grid. The long performance will see two competitors engage in the public knitting of a game of Go, resulting in the gradual creation of roughly 300 swatches, representing the state of the board at each move throughout the game. As the swatches accumulate, they will be gathered and presented, documenting the process of the performance.
Exhibition: October 11-28
Venue: TRUCK +15 Window
Performances: October 8-10
Venue: Art Central
Presented by M:ST
This is the outcome of this pile of books on our coffee table, back when D and I were roommates in Toronto.
Okay, so Okra pickles aren’t as thrilling as pickled eggs, somehow, but this photo is a lot nicer. So here you go. Recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. With extra garlic.
It occurs to me that I will indeed eat well through the winter, but it will be all pickles and condiments.
Okay, this is just a crafty works-in-progress list. There are other things going on.
1. Quilt for me. 6-inch squares all cut, laid out, two rows sewn together. Old photograph:
2. Crocheted granny-square blanket, in browns and orange and teal and white. All squares done, time to begin joining them
3. A Girasole! Just begun. Here is linds winding up my yarn cones:
4. Pair of lace knit socks (can’t remember the pattern at the moment). I knit one fully, then decided that I need to go down a needle size or two. So I will frog the whole thing. I’ve never done that before.
5. An Entomology shawl. Nearing completion! You might recall it from that bike and gardens and coffee day in Red Hook a while ago:
6. The thing with the hexagons. This is a secret.
7. Kindle case/cozy for my mom. In nascent stages of existence.
This is a photo of my bike at Valentino Pier, in Red Hook, from a few weeks ago. When I parked to go to Baked to get brownies and coffee before sitting down to read on the pier, I got to park up against a yarn-bombed bike rack!
The rack next to that one was also yarn-wrapped, in a different pattern:
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Red Hook is full of surprising and lovely things. Especially gardens.
As well as reading on the pier, I got in a bit of work on my Entomology shawl
which I put on hold for a while to knit some fingerless mitts as a sample-knit for Yarnia, my dear friend Lindsey’s yarn store in Portland Oregon. You can read my guest blog post about the mitten-knitting over the Yarnia blog, but here are a few photos:
2 years in America, my phone contract is up for renewal, and I am coming to realize that I just don’t want an iPhone, or any other “cool” phone. Maybe I want a Razr, they were cool phones once. It’s nice to know that my friend Kenan doesn’t really want one either.
Instead of playing word jumble or brick breaking games on the subway, I’ll read John Steinbeck (the other day a woman tapped me as I was reading East of Eden and asked if I was reading that for school or for fun. When I said for fun she was impressed; I wonder would she would have thought if I had been reading The Production of Space?)
Not that I am anti-technology, mind you. I very much appreciate my sewing machine, which I used to make a banner for the Crow Hill Community Garden, and am using to piece together some blocks for a quilt (one for myself and my home, this time).
Also, I like my new dehydrator, gifted by Emily in her going-away-paring down. Sara, my awesome new roommate, and I made kale chips, with kale she grew in her friend Stefan’s garden.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled into a plot at the Crow Hill Community Garden. I showed up to dig and help out, got offered a plot, and had it filled with seeds and plants by the end of the day. (That was also the day that Ghana beat America in soccer, and I don’t normally care about sports, but that was spectacular).
This is what my plot looked like then: Collards around the outside, beans and cilantro and peas and some other seeds in the ground.
And this is what it looks like now: My beans, getting all big and stuff.
Hot peppers, sprouting out of the ground.
A green pepper, growing.
I bought some plants from the Natty Garden shop and put them in (I wasn’t going to rely just on things from seed this late in the season), and the green peppers are starting to produce fruit.
I’m calling the whole thing the pipe garden, because I excavated this piece of pipe when I was digging up the earth, and put in it in the garden, and planted these little flowers in it.
In addition to the Crown Hill Community Garden, the Little Franklin Garden is doing alright too. Last week, someone stole my tomato, which is unsurprising, but it would have made more sense to wait until it turned red. Why steal unripe produce? Anyhow, that same plant is growing another little tomato; growing just keeps chugging along.
Monday was watermelon-rind pickling day. Man–that’s a serious process. Even just peeling and cubing the rinds is tons of work (that was done slowly, as I ate up watermelon). Then soaking in brine. Then rinsing and boiling. Then boiling sugar and vinegar and fruit. Then adding the rinds back in. Then removing them and reducing the syrup. And then sterilizing and packing and processing. I went to bed much later than I should have; I hope these things are delicious in the end!
The recipe came from Vegan Soul Kitchen, which is not a canning book, but does have a whole section on no-waste watermelon. There are recipes in 2 other of my canning books, maybe I’ll try those too. Watermelons produce a lot of rind…
Last week, my dear friend Jamie and Rufus got married! They had their friends decorate squares of fabric that were then pieced together into a chuppa quilt by some family friends.
Here’s what it looked like hanging up at the party:
Mine is the square with the little triangle trees, far right of the second row from the top.
So, as a gift for Jamie and Rufus, I wanted to make something that complemented this quilt I knew they were going to have after the wedding, so I made some pillowcases that matched (well, close to matched) the patchwork pattern of my square. Inspired by the Little Forest Quilt I made these pillowcases for J + R:
I had never made patchwork pillowcases before, and freaked out a bit when I realized that I wasn’t quilting the work and that there were all these raw edges on the back of the tree panel. Inside the pillowcase, yes, but still problematic. Their exposure would mean that they were going to fray and come apart after some number of washings. For a small while I thought I was going to have to line the pillowcases, which would require more cream-coloured fabric and not making my June 6 deadline. But then I dug through the box of craft ephemera in my closet and found some super lightweight fusible interfacing, which I ironed onto the back of the patchwork panels, sealing the whole thing up without making the pillowcases stiff. Amazing!
I took them up to Anna and Naf’s the other weekend, we ate them with eggs and they were delicious. Fiddleheads were totally destined to be the first canning project of the summer. So I bought more.
This, by the way, is the most recent Cat and Girl comic:
Close up on the punchline as Grrl tells past Grrl about the future:
Anyhow, after a bit of googling I decided on this recipe from Fat of The Land and learned that if your recipe doesn’t have photos I don’t really consider making it. Which is silly, but true.
Now the jars are just hanging out…to be eaten in November or February!
I want to post this photo and say that this is the best thing I did this week–a Brooklyn Bridge Birthday Bike Ride (the bridge turned 127 on Monday) with the City Reliquary complete with cake and pop and a band and a dance party. Giving cake to tourists and locals walking across the bridge at 7pm on a weekday is really just a lovely thing to do. This is me giving a piece with a yellow flower to a girl in a dress with yellow flowers. When her mom came up a few moments later and saw her kid with a big piece of cake, she burst out laughing at her charming cake-manipulative daughter. But it was all part of the plan.
The reason that I can’t say this was the most awesome thing I did this week is because last night Naomi and I went to Jalopy for their Wednesday night free “Roots and Ruckus” show, and we saw the best thing I’ve ever seen. The Bill Murray Experience (silly name for an amazing group of musicians), fronted by the cutest lady who sings and plays the washboard and kazoo, just totally blew us away.
I just read about the Baltimore Virtual Supermarket project–grocery delivery to libraries in the food deserts of Baltimore. It means that people can get access to fresh, good food, pay with SNAP, and not have to worry about delivery charges or minimum orders.
I think it’s really great that they’re using libraries as the hub–they are community resources that are well-distributed throughout cities (usually, hopefully).
It reminds me of this article that Kurt passed along about the US Postal Service, which mentions that post offices used to offer small savings accounts, especially important and useful for folks who live in places that banks have ignored. Seems to make a lot of sense to me to utilize already-existing infrastructure to do good things.
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