Who owns it?

Funny how you can forget about something you made right up until the moment you suspect it's been stolen. We get so weird about "our stuff" even though we're taught constantly (in the liberal arts environment anyway) that there are no original ideas.

On Saturday I was just pulling up to a baby shower with majority art/craft attendees when I got a pix message on my phone from one of my former students, the talented Chicago designer Cory Allen (Linsmeyer.) He was at Urban Outfitters and saw a particular scarf that reminded him, and me, of something I'd "invented" a few years ago, that he himself modeled for the post. You can see it on knitty, I sold the pattern. Last time I looked on Ravelry 128 people had used the pattern to make their own, with some unbelievably cool/funny innovations. I love the idea of people using the pattern to make their own. What I didn't love was the idea that Urban Outfitters was selling versions made in the third world that look a lot like mine.

And this was the second time I'd felt UO was ripping one of my ideas off. The first, in the early 2000's they started selling a cross-stitch kit with a particular word on it - a word that, when I stitched it on a heart-shaped doily, prompted a more gentle citizen to demand that my work be immediately removed from a Seattle Art Museum exhibit, on grounds that it was insulting to embroiderers, and obscene besides. I made the thing in 1998, it was at SAM in 2001. I bear no ill will towards the person who is selling these kits to UO, because at least, it's a person and she gets credit! Plus she's also developed the idea far past the point I did. (Swordsmith /artist Phillip Baldwin owns my original work, we traded for a cast-iron sink.)

Back to me in my car getting this pix message: I immediately begin venting as soon as I get into the baby shower. It was the perfect setting for commiseration. And for gathering information. Jenna, talented designer and Etsy seller informed me that there was a seller called Yokoo who made chain scarves that looked like mine too. (On closer inspection, Yokoo's are crochet, and FABULOUS. Buy from him if you need a readymade item, because they're vastly superior to anything you'll find a UO.)

But here's the thing: if you go to knitty and look at my pattern, you'll see that it's been up since 2005, and that I openly credit two other designers, Teva Durham and Marc Jacobs for inspiring me. Then, if we were to open my email in-box you'd find a lot of email from people who have made the scarves, and innovated on my original idea. What makes mine different is that it's felted after it's knitted. The Urban Outfitters chain looks a lot more like Teva Durham's from Loop d Loop. Who's ripping off whom, here? And what's the time limit on a knitted chain going into public domain?

But just beware all you young hipsters: they're stealing your cool and selling it back to you. Even cool that might have at one time been generated by an old academic thread-head such as myself. No one seems safe!

I'm reminded of an unpleasant experience one of my other talented former students, Michael Cepress, had the week he was due to start graduate school at the University of Washington (that MFA program in Textiles is now defunct, sadly.) He and his brother were at Bulldog News, near the campus in Seattle, and he chanced to see the cover of FiberArts magazine...with "his work" on it. Meanwhile, back in Green Bay, I got my copy in the mail and felt deep nausea myself; it was a pair of nearly transparent silk organza jeans, which appeared identical to the pair Mike had stitched up for his senior show for undergraduate school. But these were by someone else, a woman, who wasn't talking about the same issues as Mike was at all, and they were made far away, and nearly simultaneously. There was no real issue of one copying the other, but, there was in that brief moment the horror of knowing for sure that your "original" idea could at any moment turn out to be the same as someone else's.

So, there lies the rub: you can't always be sure if you've been ripped off, or if you're just one of many who felt the universe pulse in a particular direction at a particular time. Best advice: just keep your own work authentic to who you are, be careful where you spend your money, and make rather than shop.

Handmade Nation revisited!

One of my first blog posts was about a visit we got from Faythe Levine, one of the film makers responsible for the documentary Handmade Nation. I got a copy of the book, which she signed, at the opening of the show she'd curated, Craftivism, for the Lawton Gallery on our campus. The film had not yet been released, so I spent over a year watching premier announcements pass me by, reviews get posted in other places, and so forth, without actually seeing the film. I talked about it a lot though. And I looked through the book (at the pictures, anyway.) Yesterday I finally saw the film, on a bootleg DVD given to me by artist Christopher Cannon. (My guess is Chris applied the DIY philosophy with making copies of movies - he's a printmaker, after all and thinks in terms of 'editions.' I do plan on getting the library to buy a real copy for our permanent collection!) Okay, so anyway I was procrastinating on writing some new quizzes for 2D and found the copy in my book bag, so I plugged it in and watched it. Then I got out my book and read the essays, finally. And now I really want to talk about it like never before.

First of all, I will indeed be showing this in my Women in the Visual Arts course and in the Women, Art and Image course I just created (to be taught when? We aren't sure.) I know that my colleague Jennifer Mokren showed it in her Freshman seminar course on craft, and I'm pretty sure Sarah Detweiler has shown it in her Modern American Culture course, but the feminist aspects need to be teased out in context of a Women's Studies course. Even if I only show Whitney Lee vacuuming, this will bring all that dusty art history into some sharp focus! Well, as sharp a focus as a shag rug can offer, anyway. I think it's also important to show the entrepreneurial spirit of these women, and men. (I love the guys from BuyOlympia.com who say, artists should be making, and we will sell on their behalf - cashing in on the impulse so many have to make things, without making anything themselves, but still using their own unique skill-set to support something they thought was cool.) But the story time and again is of a crafty girl, working in a cubicle, who needed some outlet for those old creative impulses, and now makes unique things by hand for a living. The alternate story is of the girl, frustrated and bored by the boundaries placed upon her by art school, who strikes out and commits crimes of cuteness and winds up wildly successful by making mittens, not art. Who doesn't want to be that girl? It's so alternatively intellectual.

The other great thing that comes up time and again, making the film also worth showing to my Textiles students, is that the things these women and men are doing are actually kind of easy to learn but difficult to master - Jenny Hart talking about how she thought embroidery would be tedious and awful and now she feels it's better than drugs, for instance. Or Nikki McClure reflecting on her first cut-paper piece and how crude it seems now, given all she's learned by doing so many since then. I can say to my students that practice makes perfect, but it's such an easy thing to dismiss. Better to show examples, especially examples of people who's work one can admire in the contemporary context.

I think Handmade Nation will become sort of a period piece, and probably soon. We don't know what's on the horizon. Even before the credits roll at the end of the film, it self-consciously asks the question, "How many bunnies and deer and birds and owls and mushrooms can the world support?" Fear of co-optation is also expressed (see any Urban Outfitters store to find cheap mass-produced home goods sporting bunnies, deer, birds, owls, and mushrooms as well as cross-stitch, latch-hook, and applique.) I'm reminded of my old drapes-shop manager (Sheli, an original punk rock veteran) telling her teenage daughter, "They're stealing your cool and selling it back to you!" Since I'm old, I also recall Madonna and Cyndi Lauper wearing vintage "merry widows" and crinolines, and that being very original, but then about a year later, being able to pick up similar brand new versions at the Everett Mall back in the '80's. Now they sell Halloween costumes with all the 80's girl standard bits, $24.99. I wonder if they'll have Indie Craft Girl costume eventually?

Finally, I have to say that for me personally, this film made me lament being born in 1964. Twenty years earlier, I could have been the ultimate Girl Scout who grew up, found feminism and embroidered for Judy Chicago's Dinner Party. Twenty years later, I could have been one of this generation of shameless stitchers. As it was, I was actually in the right place at the wrong time. I have a clear memory of covertly knitting while sitting in my rental in Ballard, the Norwegian neighborhood in Seattle, in 1986. I was working on a sweater that was beige with dusty rose and country blue flowers - very Laura Ashley. I knew lots of musicians, artists, budding software developers, and the like - all destined to become successful once the "scene" hit Seattle. I wouldn't have been caught dead knitting in front of any of them, nor did I ever have the will to finish that sweater. I sewed a few of my own clothes because my roommate Roberta made all her own, and we had a sewing machine set up in our dining room, but after I no longer lived with Roberta, my sewing machine only came out once in a while and never in front of anyone. It makes me sad now to think of it. I thought I was behind the times, and totally uncool, and a loser for having no money and no creative ambition. Here, it turns out I may have been ahead of the trend - but you know, it's tough to sell pastels to punks until they're really really ready for them.

New Year, new work.

Last night was the end of 2009, and because we're old, and everyone was grumpy, I headed down to the studio for a little while to see if I could shake my funk. I am working on a round-ish blue basket, and last night was also a Blue Moon. Once in a blue moon, you get a funny idea with which to entertain yourself. So I worked on this basket, and might have finished it, but the whole time I was stitching away tediously I was trying to decide whether I wanted it to be my last work of 2009 or my first work of 2010. In the end I left two small seams on the very bottom unsewn, and I plan to finish them today, a little later. Officially, the Blue Moon Basket will be dated 2010. It's a very plain form, a little Modernist, even - and I'm hoping that will draw the viewer's attention to the intricacies of the materials (more vintage millinery stuff). The first piece to be shown in 2010 will actually be Cream Puff, as it goes off to Pittsburgh in February. I'll post photos of both baskets soon.

(What is it with me and Pittsburgh? Two of my most influential undergrad mentors grew up there, and now, I can't seem to get rejected from a show there. I guess I should start considering a visit. It seems to be a spiritual home of some sort.)