Word
So, well, how’s that for slow blogging?
I have, as is obvious, been cross stitching lately. My heart got broken over Xmas and you’d be unsurprised how little cross stitch helps with that. But still – it has its own merits.
That Kurt Vonnegut sampler was made using the pattern generator available at the truly awesome subversive cross stitch. I am sure there are many other such generators web wide, but that’s the one I use.
Cross stitching words. That’s like a thing. And working a piece like this is essentially making words. Inscribing words. For a writer, or, at any rate, someone who writes a lot for pleasure, a kind of crafting that is essentially writing has many twists of interest.
A sampler like this begins the same way as any piece of cross stitch – with a chart and the slow labour of pattern matching and an eye strain headache if the lighting is not a million watts of hardcore brilliance. But after a while of checking and thread counting, the process of writing kicks in and just takes over.
Maybe it is something hardwired about language. Or just the brain, tiring of eyesite-eroding pattern matching, suddenly realises it has a well worn groove for this kind of thing. Suddenly I find I am not matching anymore but writing. The same line through its six iterations of there and back, I am saying in it my head. I begin, by line three to remember how most of the letters are formed and only need to consult my charts for the occasional moment. Okay at one point, my brain twisted and forgot how to spell crowded. But mostly, I am writing this familiar quote, over and back, slowly. Each line 12 times.
And it’s a joy to do that because I love this quote. The elevation of kindness to the only thing that matters touches me like no other sentiment. And if you find that odd; if you find that someone like me who also likes seeing men hurt and degraded is conflicted to feel that way, then you are the kind of person who pisses me right off. (Just saying.)
But that is the real point about making a sampler like this. The same reasons those puritans stitched out religious words that were significant to them once upon a whatever, still holds working with thread and words today. That sense of writing something over and over, letting the medium add unknowable weight to the message. It is easy to see parallels with other methods of adding extra sacredness to words, like monks producing painstaking illuminated text, or the weight of meaning that comes from pain and permanence when words are chosen for tattoos. (I think it is quite interesting that people seem so often to choose languages from cultures that are not their own when selecting how to have messages written on their bodies. Almost as if having those words so starkly, easily, casually readable would be too exposing of such a meaningful and intimate choice.)
That’s why this was so satisfying to make. To work and rework a sentiment like this. What else to do with those little clumps of words that feel so defining. Sometimes the favourite quotes section of my facebook page just doesn’t seem enough.
Just for fun, the next phrase I want to needlepoint is a Valerie Solanas quote. The most famous one, from the top of this page.
I also, in my idle moments when I consider desecrating my unpierced, untattooed unsullied by anything more than hair dye and sadomasochism body, I consider this quote as my tattoo of choice, right on the tramp stamp spot.
This week’s BitchCraft
Well, in addition to rewriting the words of Kurt Vonnegut using the world’s slowest dot matrix printer, I have been mainly working on the dominatrix dress made out of bin bags. I have swatched. It does work. Insofar as you can cut up bin bags and knits them and get a kind of fabric. It will be hugely uncomfortable – but that will make it an even more authentic parody of fetish clothing. So, I have been to a shop and studied the range of bin bags in the hope of finding the shiniest. The ones I got weren’t as shiny as the buffed up beauties of my dreams, but nice enough to work. Oh, and then I went crazy and bought a circular needle, which will probably cause me to knit a huge mobius strip and have a tantrum. Stay tuned for that.
***
See Also: BitchCraft, A Blog About Handicrafts by Bitchy Jones
See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Margaret Cho
