Revived and ready for school

I covered a back-to-school youth revival at a black church for the newspaper. It's so fun to be a journalist and to be invited places where I wouldn't normally go and have these experiences I wouldn't normally have. I love the way these folks made church such an enjoyable time with music and energy. Be sure to check out this photo Saul Young took of the choir.

Favorites from the AQS Quilt Expo

Beauty from Within by Renae Haddadin of Sandy, UT

I love the design of this quilt. It reminds me of stamped leather from a fancy cowboy boot. The light coloring in the lightest section was done with shadow embroidery, a technique similar to trapunto, where a stuffing, usually colored yarn, is showing through the top fabric from within the quilt. It was the winner of the Best Longarm Workmanship award.


Silverlight by Betty Busby of Albuquerque, NM

Quilter's Choice first place winner

Dae Geun (Great Piety) by Shin-hee Chin of McPherson, KS

This is a portrait done entirely in yo-yos. So impressive.














These bras were made for breast cancer awareness. The sock monkey bra is my favorite.


You can look at photos of all the award-winning quilts from this show at the American Quilter's Society website.

Quilt Time in Tennessee

Tennessee Pink Marble by Julia Needham

Today is the first day of the American Quilter's Association's Quilt Expo in Knoxville. I wrote about Master Quilter and Knoxville native Julia Needham's exhibit of 18 quilts for the newspaper. Read it here.

Find the list I compiled of all the quilting events going on in town right now here.

I missed Manuel.

Here I am in front of Manuel's Exclusive Clothiers, the showroom for designer Manuel's amazing rodeo tailor work. I only got to peak through the window at the suits inside because the sign on the door says he's only open by appointment on Saturdays. I'll have to wait until my next trip to Nashville to go inside.

I am working on a project with some local Western wear collectors that I'll post a link to once it's ready. In the meantime, you can check out Manuel's website and last week's post for more links. There aren't many photos of his work, but there is a small sampling of photos with some of the stars he has created suits for (including one of Manuel taking Johnny Cash's measurements).

A friend of mine in Nashville told me that he heard that clients don't tell Manuel what they want in a suit. Manuel gets to know the person then makes a suit that he thinks suits them.

Fancy Suits

I've been looking at more of the designer embellished suits I mentioned yesterday. These came from Nudies Online Fashion Museum.

Here's a great visual history of a few designers within style.

Next weekend when I'm in Nashville I'm planning to visit Manuel's Exclusive Clothiers, the storefront of designer Manuel (see photos of his work here.). I'm also hoping to get by the Tennessee State Museum to see Marty Stuart's collection. He owns over 400 of these suits.

Friday Find: dress for summer Saturdays

I stopped in Goodwill today and found this dress. I'm going to wash it tonight and take it with me on my little excursion to Gatlinburg this weekend.

All Knoxville locations have everything 50% off the last Friday and Saturday of each month so this dress only cost me three bucks. Yeah. I also found a couple of tshirts for $1 a piece to cut up and sew.

back from Bonnaroo

I've been on vacation since Thursday at Bonnaroo, a four-day music and art festival in Manchester, TN. I saw a LOT of live music, thoroughly relaxed, and got in some great people watching. The girl above is hula hooping to Merle Haggard playing Okie From Muskogee.

With 80,000 people at the festival, there was so much going on. I'm hoping that being over-stimulated for four days straight will do good things for my creativity for a while. I've got some fun stories lined up to write for the newspaper and I'm really wanting to get into some clothing reconstruction.

Thanks to everyone who entered my contest. I loved hearing about your childhood crafts. Congratulations to velmalikevelvet for winning the drawing for the throw pillow I made.

Small Space Gardening

photo by Kathy Kimpel licenced under Creative Commons

I was looking into what I could grow in my tiny, shaded yard and wrote this article for the newspaper about what some of my neighbors are doing with their small spaces. I also wrote this sidebar tutorial on how to grow tomatoes upside in a five gallon bucket like the plant above.

In case the sidebar is confusing, here's a tutorial with step by step photos and another with illustrations.

Images of a Missed Quilt Show

This quilt entitled Face the Music was made by Candace Tucker, Patty Ashworth, Tone Haugen-Cogburn and Bridget Wilson Matlock. It took 1st place in the group category at last weekend's Smoky Mountain Quilters' quilt show.

It’s only now, a week afterwards, that I am able to tell the story of how I let down hundreds of quilters while trapped on an island in East Tennessee. The Smoky Mountain Quilters Guild was having its annual quilt show and I had volunteered to be in charge of returning quilts, judging sheets and any ribbons to the respective quilters after the show was over on Sunday afternoon.

That Saturday morning I organized all the judging sheets into neat, labeled envelopes for the show. Then I went out to Maryville for a day of music and a night camping at Fleta Fest, a tiny festival on a little island in a fork in the river. We arrived with a cooler of picnic food and drink to this beautiful grassy place on the river with great live music.

Then that night it started to rain. It rained hard, all night long. When I woke up on Sunday the river had risen so much that I couldn’t drive my car off the island. The little stream that ran across the drive was now raging. I worried the river wouldn’t go down in time to get home, shower, and make it to the show in time to look at the quilts before I was in charge of taking them down.

A Wild Goose Chase by Carol Snapp, quilted by Denise Waymire

Hours went by and I began to worry I wouldn’t make it at all. I had all those judging sheets and a bunch of show catalogs that they needed at the show. When my cell phone would work,I was talking with the ladies at the show giving them updates on the level of the river.

In the end, I didn't make it. The guild had to scramble and return all those quilts without the judging sheets. I never got to see the quilts.

The river finally started going down at seven that evening, but by eight it was rising again due to rain in the mountains. My amazing friend, Felicia (who I now owe BIG time) drove 45 minutes to pick me up. I had to leave my car out there until the next evening.

Close up of Entry Riddle by Betsy Robinson

The photos of the quilts are from the Smoky Mountain Quilters' quilt show website. See the rest of the quilts from the show here. View some beautiful pictures from Fleta Fest, the festival I was at instead, at photographer Todd Reinerio’s website.

A bit of the Knoxville Craft Scene history

Today I am posting an article I wrote for the Metro Pulse in October 2006.

It’s Monday evening, and Claire Jamieson is rushing to her South Knoxville home after a late class. It’s her turn to host craft night. Soon her living room will fill with friends, creativity, snacks, scissors and thread.

Dawn Spencer scans a Fountain City café on a Saturday afternoon. She’s looking for the people she met online and made plans to knit with. She’s got the materials to make fingerless arm warmers for her young daughter. Once she spots some knitting needles poking from the top of a woman’s bag, she heads over to introduce herself.

Three young women sit around the bar at the New Knox Brewing Co.’s open mike night. They drink beer and discuss plans for a quilting bee.

The craft revival is on in Knoxville. My friend, Jude Ferrara, who is always on the cutting edge, explains it to me one evening over knitting and coffee in the Old City. It’s the nationwide trend of 20- and 30-somethings making things, not because they have to but because they want to. It’s about the desire to abandon strip mall homogeny, pick up some pins and needles and spend time creating something unique. It’s political, feminist and trendy—all pieced together like a quilt. That night Jude asks me to join the crafting club she wants to start.

Clubs are big in this crafting trend. Members hold regular meetings to work on projects, swap supplies, and share ideas. It’s the new book club. Rather than meeting to discuss literature, they make cell phone cozies and discuss yarns. Call it a circle, a bee, or a stitch ’n’ bitch.

Jude and I talk up the idea to crafty people and start meeting. We craft in coffee shops, living rooms, bars and restaurants. The craft of choice is knitting at first, and then it evolves into a smorgasbord of origami, cross-stitch, crochet and sewing. With the help of an online random word generator, we name the club Crafty Kittens and the Yucky Grandma.

Another crafting group is Knoxville SNB. (There’s been controversy over ownership of the term “stitch ’n’ bitch” so they use the acronym.) It has 82 members that have branched into three subgroups that meet in North and West Knoxville and in Oak Ridge. Modern-day crafters that they are, members organize meetings and post photos of finished projects online at Yahoo groups.

At an SNB gathering, I meet Kristan Wessels, a nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She’s knitting a tank top emblazoned with an image of the mudflap girl (the voluptuous, silhouetted woman who sometimes shows up on truckers’ mud flaps). Kristan says that she identifies with the image because she works in a man’s world.

Her comment makes me think about how feminist Betty Friedan frowned on knitting. Friedan claimed that such activities were oppressive because women had more important things to do. But today’s women don’t feel pressure to shun traditionally feminine activities in order to be respected. The craft revolution is, in a way, feminism at work. Instead of burning bras to demand equality, we are knitting bikinis to embrace what makes a woman different from a man and to say that being feminine doesn’t mean being less talented.

The surge in the interest in craft-making is a part of the third wave of feminism. The ideology of the third wave reclaims and empowers traditionally feminine activities and clothing. The third wave says that it’s OK for today’s liberated women to take back the domestic arts. The movement helps to equate things like embroidery and lipstick with talent and beauty—not feminine weakness.

SNB is more a knitting than a crafting club. Knitting is the most popular craft right now, but it’s only one of many activities taking a turn for the hip. People are quilting, crocheting, sewing, beading and everything in between. But none of this is new. Our grandmothers made quilts with appliquéd dolls in bonnets or crazy arrays of prints. They embroidered throw cushions and made covers for tissue boxes.

The new generation of crafters is just adding its own spice. One kitsch activity combines saucy phrases with old-fashioned cross-stitch patterns (think “Home Sweet Home” and teddy bears framed on parlor walls). A book of patterns entitled Subversive Cross Stitch by Julie Jackson holds my new favorite sampler. It has a border of pink hearts and simply reads “Rat Bastard.”
Monica Lewinsky made her knitting hobby public. She probably hoped that an activity with a wholesome reputation would sweeten her image. But anyone who still thinks that handicrafts are only made by affable homemakers should meet the Crafty Kittens.

Alison Miller is a river-rafting guide who weaves beaded bracelets. Erin Emory backpacked through Europe and surprised us with her origami skills at one meeting. Felicia McClung is a social worker who makes picture frames from hollowed books and sews covers for her fiancé’s bongo drums. Helen Yonts, an ex-truck driver, loves to knit and crochet. Alan Hollis ran a marathon and doesn’t care that her cats’ hair gets sewn into projects. Then there’s Jude, our Yucky Grandma, who practices Amigurumi, the Japanese art of crocheting small animal dolls. She just moved to New York City to be an archivist.

The Crafty Kittens haven’t been able to find any male members. There is, however, sporadic male attendance at a weekly craft night held by an earthy group made up of mostly Tomato Head employees and ultimate Frisbee players. The group’s staple female members agree that there is something inherently feminine about craft night, but that they like it when men attend.
No crafters of the male variety are present the night I attend, but the women comprise the most laid-back crafting crowd I’ve encountered yet. Some girls don’t bring anything to work on. They’re just there for the ambiance and the salsa. Moni Vincent makes cards with ink and rubber stamps while Claire Jamieson sews some squares of fabric together. She’s still making the top layer of a quilt she began when she was in high school. Now a graduate student, Claire says that she isn’t concerned with when she will finish the quilt. She just likes working on it.

Claire’s attitude on quilt-making represents the beginning of an American shift from acquiring possessions to acquiring experiences. But crafting can still become a rather consumerist hobby. Almost every craft/knitting meeting I attended had some mention of mounds, closets, or even rooms full of excess materials and yarns. Crafters just have the tendency to hoard. One knitter admitted to hiding yarn so that her husband wouldn’t know how much she had bought.

At another SNB meeting, I meet Amy and a knitter I already know, Erin Bodine. Amy’s making clothing for her iPod; I later notice that she has it dressed in a handmade corset for the meeting. Erin is knitting clothing for herself: an ocean-colored tank top.

The conversation loops around unfinished knitting projects with the occasional frustrated deep breath or outburst of, “That was the longest three centimeters of my life!” At one point, Erin stops knitting and looks wistfully out the window. She sighs and then shares her dream of one day owning an Alpaca farm. She says she would like to spin yarn from their coats. Then she could knit sweaters while watching the very animal that provided the wool.

From that reverie, I get that the craft revival is also about the desire to break out of a society of ready-made everything. It’s a part of the larger DIY (Do It Yourself) trend that promotes the ability of people to learn the skills to make, fix and do things themselves. It caught on because making a necklace or bookshelf yourself ensures that you have something with individuality, something that Americans crave in today’s superstore market. DIY includes the wave toward citizen news reporting on blogs, starting vegetable gardens, even knitting iPod clothing.

Call it a stretch, but crafters are on the same search for freedom—and a self-sufficient means of achieving it—that punk music’s ideology stands for. Neither crafters nor punk-rockers want to pay for something they could make or do in their own way. Forget matronly; crafting is punk-rock.

Charlotte Tolley is the director of the Knoxville farmers’ market and attends the Frisbee/Tomato Head craft night. She compares the crafting trend to the slow food movement, which works to protect vegetation diversity and promote regional cuisines of the world. Slow food stirred up the broader slow movement. Slow encourages a less rushed daily life to improve its quality. Slowmovement.com advises using time saved by technology to appreciate a slow and simple activity like cooking a meal, taking a walk or knitting a sweater.

Making crafts definitely goes slowly. I finally finish the quilt I’ve been working on for months. It ends up wider on one end and there are a lot of crooked lines, but I made it myself. And according to my fellow crafting friends, that’s what counts.

Felicia's Half Marathon

Congratulations to Felicia, the CrabbyCrafter on running the half marathon this morning.

fresh local eggs for breakfast

I got this dozen eggs today. There are no blue eggs in the batch this time, but I'm sure they are as rich and delicious as always.

There was the cutest story in the paper yesterday about the family farm that I buy eggs and honey from. Click here to read it.

Migoto Chou's bracelet tutorial

I wrote an article for the newspaper about the Knoxville-based Etsy seller that makes these beaded cupcakes (read it here).

The artist, Amanda Hinson, was kind enough to let me make my first video tutorial of her demonstrating how to make the Treasure Tube bracelets she often has in her shop.

Going green...

My boyfriend brought over a poster for his band's St. Patrick's Day show. I took one look and wanted to make it green. We spent some of the afternoon painting posters with watercolor.

I also found a tie perfect for the occasion, though I'm not sure he will wear it. He did nix the idea of me embroidering a shamrock on it.

UPDATE: He wore the tie.

Trapunto, my newest technique

pattern © Linda Roy 2009
I took my first quilting class today. Of course my teacher, Linda Roy, did the beautiful work above. It was one of several examples she made for the class, which was entitled "A Touch of Elegance." She gave us the patterns she designed and during the class, taught all three techniques used in the piece above: ruching, trapunto, and stippling.

Rusching (pronounced roo-shing) is what makes the scrunched up flower in the center of the picture above. It's kind of a very sophisticated yo-yo.

Trapunto (which means embroidery in Italian and comes from the Latin "to prick") is a technique used to make something three-dimensional by outlining a shape then stuffing it with yarn or batting. Yarn makes those oval outlines and polyester stuffing makes the little circular puffs.

Stippling is the type of quilting used inside the oval outlines. The stitches are REALLY close together and function to flatten down the area it is used in.

The photo is Linda demonstrating stippling. She is very comfortable with this kind of intricate work. Look at her Irish Creme quilt to see why.

Linda recommended the tools and supplies she uses and even put together a kit full of some hard to find things for the class. It was organized and though I was probably the least experienced quilter there, I had a good time and learned so much.

I have tons of ideas for adding stuffing to my projects. Some of the other students were saying that if you used a colored yarn to stuff the ovals, the color would peek through to slightly tint the quilt. I like that.

The class was organized by the Smoky Mountain Quilters, a quilting guild that I belong to. They offer a lot of classes. One I really hate to have missed was a workshop given by Nellie Durand teaching her technique of collaging small scraps of fabric. Here are some examples of work from that class.

The Smoky Mountain Quilters are still accepting quilts for the show in May. More information about that here.