For two women who taught me.

Sitting on your couch,
Holding sea shells far from home,
I watch you crochet,
your hands and hook dripping lace
that foams on your lap.

Your children beg you,
"Come to Florida, with us"
But hills are your home,
So you teach me old ways,
hoping memory will live.

********

In the county home,
Dark, dusty, lonely, sad
I come to visit,
for you have magic hands
that can crochet new worlds

Bright colored cheap yarn
brings sunshine indoors to you,
Making new flowers
I sit on your bed, learning,
your hands guiding mine.

And the difficulties of learning the banjo

Anybody know how to get my hand to widen by, oh, say at least half an inch? It would be terribly helpful in playing the banjo. As it is, my hand simply cannot fret for both the A and the low F sharp at the same time without some pain, so my hands are kind of skipping over the neck of the banjo a bit. This is *not* in accord with my banjo instructor's dictum that we are trying to be lazy about this. I'm getting smoother, but my hand has to move somewhat more to get the same fingerings.

On the other hand, I remind myself that it's like sewing. I have sewed at least a portion of my clothing ever since I was 12, so I tend to "get" patterns, and have been known to ignore the directions that come with them. (We will not, at this moment, discuss the alterations I have had to make in a pattern I worked on this weekend.) But it's not magic. It's practice. More than 20 years worth. It's that jumper I sewed in 8th grade where I couldn't get the buttons to sit right, and the series of identical dresses I helped make for my sister when she went on mission (along with a set for me to take to college). It's the experience of designing and sewing from a young age. And those skills take a while to learn.

So, well, I figure I'm still working on the equivalent of the coverup I made at age 12 that had only two pattern pieces. It'll be a while yet before I can make the musical equivalent of a button-down top, but I'm learning.

More progress

The rhythm is sounding better still today, and the G chord is working well, but something about my fingering isn't quite right, so the C and D sound muffled unless I sit there and work at my fingering, which means that the rhythm is gone. *sigh* So I've been picking up the banjo, trying to get it until I get frustrated, then putting it down and walking away for a bit. Then trying again.

But in the arts I'm more familiar with - well, I have a temporary banjo strap in place. (Once the current project is off my loom, I intend to warp it with a threaded in crow's foot/triangle pattern that will make a nice wide and strong strap.) What's currently on is an old inkle strap that I used to use as a belt. And I modified the bag at the back of Pete Seeger's banjo book to work a little better for me and sewed one up out of some really ugly blue paisley cotton upholstery fabric I once found at a yard sale. All I need to finish it is a long zipper. (The longest one in my sewing basket was a mere 22 inches and fell about 6 inches short.)

And then I heard about the milk chocolate Jesus from Don over at Country Contemplative. An artist created a sculpture of Jesus on the cross from 200 pounds of milk chocolate. The sculpture portrays him naked and anatomically correct. Predictably, some folks pitched a fit, at least one calling it "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever" and the show was cancelled. Interestingly, when I visited the BBC site, one of the most viewed stories there concerned the suffering of lepers in India. I would have thought that that would be more engaging than a chocolate sculpture, especially given that there are already chocolate crosses for Easter, and a Jesus pan that looks like you'd maybe get a month's use out of it before the nonstick coating began to flake off. Perhaps they never saw the kick balls with crosses on them. Or the cross shaped suckers available for $4.95 a dozen. (Not to mention the kind with swirls or the ones with popping candy you can dip the cross into.) Oh, and I did find a chocolate crucifix, by the way, along with chocolate images of Jesus and Mary. And, oddly enough, a chocolate Torah. Wha?

Or maybe the problem is the nudity. Please. The Romans were hardly known for their touchy-feely, bleeding heart lovingkindness toward convicts. I mean, they'd already sentenced him to die by torture, a little exposure wasn't going to bother them even a tiny bit, especially since the local culture had far stricter modesty taboos, which would only make the punishment that much worse. And I can't imagine that this is the first such depiction, though probably the first in 200 pounds of milk chocolate. Actually, there are tons of pictures of naked baby jesus from the Renaissance. And frankly folks, I just don't see a little nudity as worse than genocide in Darfur, war in Iraq, or even than pollution in the Chesapeake. For pity's sake, can we take that outrage and channel it toward making this world a little better?

So I found myself proposing crucifixion scenes:

Jesus dressed in an orange jumpsuit with bandaged eyes. The soldiers below playing electronic poker. The whole thing surrounded by loose loops of barbed wire.

Jesus dressed in battle fatigues, possibly with one leg missing.

Jesus dressed in a bag over his head, with electrodes attached to the sites of the 5 wounds. I’d make this one interactive, with a button below it. Possibly the button would start a sound recording with the “Eli, Eli…” said not in Aramaic, but in English and Arabic.

No, they’re not pretty, and no, they’re not traditional. They’re not meant to be. I’d be very tempted to put an image of a hammer and nails on the gallery handout, were I to do this as a show.

For the record, this isn’t even close to the type of art I make, but if I were going to do a crucifixion piece, this is how I’d do it. Who are we crucifying today?

Fiber arts in wartime

As I've worked on the blanket project, I've been aware that I'm part of a long tradition. "Our boys need mittens!" "Our boys need socks!" Many people don't realize that many of the Confederate soldiers in the Civil War didn't wear grey, but butternut homespuns, because wives, mothers, and daughters made them due to shortages. One reviewer of this exhibit said that the heart of it was the "knitting for soldiers" area, noting that women have fought our lack of power over the fates of our soldiers by making handwork for them, making those connections despite the distances.

Like many women who craft, I learned from my mother and my grandmother. I know lace crochet because of a great aunt and an older woman in the community I grew up in. I know needlepoint because of another "old woman". I do crochet my granny's crochet, at least a little bit. She's now mastered a stitch that I want to learn, and I intend to, once I've got a little bit more breathing space in my crafting bags. And like the women who taught me so many crafts, I've been trying to give forward, to teach other folks to craft - braiding, sewing, weaving, spinning, crochet, knit, and now naalbinding. And yes, I'm proud to have learned my crafts from them, and to pass on their knowlege and skill.

And like so many women over the course of history, I find myself crafting "for our boys!" And yes, it's still very oriented to men. One of the requests that is made of crafters wanting to send something to the wounded is that all colors be "gender neutral" - in other words, no pastels, no pink and purple, no fuschia. Even I, who normally don't *do* gendered color, am beginning to find the restricted palette irksome. Never mind that I don't normally do pastels, it irks to be told not to. I find myself longing to do the more fanciful types of lace, or even just to do a pseudosphere. In something silky. And bright pink. And never mind that my main project, the Blanket, has some pastels in it. Even a little fuschia bow from some chain stitch by a little girl just beginning to learn crochet. I'm still tired of being told *how* to crochet by the folks putting my dad in harm's way.

And I wonder if women from other wars felt this way. I wonder if the women ripping bandages for the Crimean War wanted to embroider instead. I wonder if the women making "Union Quilts" for the Civil War sometimes wished they were making more fanciful patterns. I know they put the same wishes into every stitch, but I wonder if their own wishes might have been the same as well...