map of New Haven

by Starla, 8.5" x 7", 2011

love fortunes

7" x 4.5", fortunes on paper, 2011

Bear's sewing kit

4 x 2 x 2.5", cardboard, carpet thread, wood button, seam ripper, plastic thimble, felt pin cushion, upholstery needle, (on "Duff: Story of a Bear" 1961), 2011

map of Portland

by Sarah K, Spring 2010

tapestry sampler

size, wool tapestry on linen warp, 2011

Finally got to photographing this, it's from the tapestry class I took this past spring. Pretty inspiring, thinking of turning the headboard from the bed frame I just got into a monster rug loom, new frame from the complete overhaul of my bedroom space, hence the perfectly timed discovery of my most recent post of a selection from stoner by john williams by my visiting lover. I have an oppositionally tiny loom that I just warped, too. It's prob 5 or 6in by 5 or 6in, "Jiffy Loom" from the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. Excited to play around with that.

Also, this article about my friend Adrienne Skye Roberts is pretty amazing and inspiring, as is most all of her work.

stoner by john williams

p. 100 "As William had feared, the house soon proved to be an almost destructive financial burden. Though he allocated his salary with some care, the end of the month found him always without funds, and each month he reduced the steadily dwindling reserve made by his summer teacher. The first year they owned the house he missed two payments to edit's father, and he received a frosty and principled letter of advice upon sound financial planning.

Nevertheless he began to feel a joy in property and to know a comfort that he had not anticipated. His study was on the first floor off the living room, with a high north window; in the daytime the room was softly illuminated, and the wood paneling glowed with a richness of age. He found in the cellar a quantity of boards which, beneath the ravages of dirt and mold, matched the paneling of the room. He refinished these boards and constructed bookcases, so that he might be surrounded by his books; at a used furniture store he found some dilapidated chairs, a couch, and an ancient desk for which he paid a few dollars and which he spent many weeks repairing.

As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he relieved that for many yers, unknown to himself, he had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, and image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. As he sanded the old boards for his books , and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weather flake away to essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture - as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible."

rug

photo by francesca capone, photo of my old friend sophie. that rug is amazing.

by Anthony Privitera

pastel sky/sea scapes

these would make gorgeous tapestries. from here.

sea creature

this appeared in front of my house the other day.

pink tent.

photo by Sophie Stone

QIY: Queer It Yourself - Tools for Survival

(some highlights from the show, June 2011 as part of QCC's National Queer Arts Festival, exhibition at SomArts Cultural Center, SF.)

Diana Martin Lapena, My Free Personal Catalog: Tools of Survivors, 2011, Photo transparency and ribbon, prints 5.5" x 8.5"

Tammy Rae Carland, Pirate Platform (from the series Outpost), 2005, 40" x 50"

Gregory Nazareth Der Ananian, Spornography (Max 04.23.11, 2011/Paul 04.25.11, 2011/Christian 04.28.11, 2011/Ernie 05.08.11, 2011/Darren 05.24.11, 2011), cumrag: 12" x 19.5", display: 10.1" x 7.1"

My lovely friend Sarah and myself

(photos curtosy SomArts Cultural Center, their Flickr)

Bear Hat

size variable, crocheted wool, 2011

(for this very special bear.)

Auntie Rex

4" x 7", pencil on paper, 2011

Drawing I did a while back for Ali Liebegott's upcoming zine Faggot Dinosaur, after the image Aunt Georgie in The Freaks of Mayfair. It's ridiculously late and will most likely not make it in. Boo.

fist cake

roughly 24" x 13", vanilla with buttercream, 2011

half-vegan fist cake for Chris's birthday. Cake baked by Aiden, photo by Chris.
(note: cake received creamy white frosting/ejaculate right before I left, unfortunately not documented)

forever oatmeal

QIY opened yesterday, I wore my mountain finest, this is my more formal introduction of my new/old hiking boots that just feel so right. There was a lot of contemplation of cultivating body aesthetics and physical aesthetic curation, and I hope to do some more writing on this. Worried about motivation to begin working again, but today on my (8:30am) lunch (hah) break, I found some inspiring fibers:
tiny knits
what to do with old gloves
all from here.

this is not mine,

but it feels like home.

FTW

Zine submission is 8.5" x 11", mixed media, 2011
Cunt is variable size, wool felt, acrylic fleece, acrylic yarn, nylon hosiery, elastic, 2009

Piece I did for Fucking Trans Women #1 (to be titled Fully Functional (?)), dunno when it should be coming out, but I really dig it (the zine and the piece). That photo is of a plush, strap-on vag I made while I was in school, it's totally fully functional!

Raw Pie

8.5" x 11", pen on paper, 2011

Submission finished for Dirtstar's 2011 zine, Dishin' the Dirt.
Dunno if it'll get in there (it's late and I should totally know better), but here it is regardless.

Rise! Rise!

so, after months and months of interviews and try outs, I've finally gotten a candidacy at Arizmendi Bakery's newest location in my neighborhood. Literally the day after I got the call, I was asked to come be in a group photo for a potential guardian photo, and viola! I find myself on the cover while at work (the job i'm leaving this sunday) yesterday!

I'm ridiculously psyched (can you tell by the goofy and elated grin on my face?) to have this opportunity to become a well-trained and practiced baker and to get to be a part of the community at this bakery (click the photo for the article). I can't help but think about a sculptural bread book I saw at Gravel and Gold here in the mission, bread sculptures from Parsons students nonetheless. Maybe I need to start using sourdough as a medium.


maybe bread-dildos (brealdos?) are in my future?

curls

size variable, heat-set acrylic yarn, 2011

For Emma's birthday and upcoming lazy bear weekend 2011.

tattered femme

So I'll be honest, I have a bit of an interview that I'm really nervous for on tuesday, and it's moments like these that I start to think even harder than usual about the way I'm presenting, the way it seems so hard for me to dress myself up "nice" and look "normal" or "presentable." So many of my clothes have holes in them, not because I can't necessarily afford to buy new ones, but because I just frankly don't want to (spend all of my money on nice/new/boring/neutral clothing), and my big emphasis being on attributing a kind of warmth and affinity for clothes that have been worn thin, loved to death, unraveling with rich, grimy herstory, so to speak. I feel like I gravitate towards beat up things, very "this is why we can't have nice things" syndrome, I'm awfully rough with electronics and use/wear my personal items down until they're literally falling apart. This feels like a very substantial part of my presentation, a substantial part of my gender nonetheless. A not just rough-around-the edges kind of gender, but one that is intrinsically deteriorating, splitting at the seams. The question though, is how to find a way to incorporate this homeliness and comfort with a messy sense of presentation, into a means of "presentability," one that will not read as doesn't-care sloppy, but more so as very-much-cares-and-rightfully-chooses-so tattered.





photo from here

QCC Website

glazed porcelain on wood hook. 6" (cut) x 5" (girth)


So while poking around on the Internet at work, I realized that The Queer Cultural Center, an organization I work for, makes web pages for the artists who exhibited in their annual visual art shows for the National Queer Arts Festival. Last summer, I showed two porcelain sex toys in their show Chronotopia, I had forgotten my camera for the opening and then sent the work home with my good friend for safe vehicle transport (as opposed to bungee-ing them into the basket of my bike), and was so pleasantly surprised to see my work so nicely photographed.

reclaiming bear

crocheted wool.

As an introductory post, I figured it would only be appropriate to talk about my connection to beardom, particularly bear identity, as all things bear work as a nice physical stand in for my aesthetic preference, and simultaneously describe a lot of my gender identity these days. This blog is meant to work as a dossier of sorts, the fleshing out of ideas around my art and craft-making and the ways in which I'm creating and thinking about the life I lead.

Okay, so! I semi-recently made a beard for a getoutoftown trip to the russian river. Guernville hosts a pretty infamous summer event called Lazy Bear Weekend. My fellow pervy trans lady compatriot and I, naive to this bear-population being weekend-specific, thought an early fall camping trip would be perfect for bear hunting (cruising) and some trans lady skinny dipping solidarity. I crocheted the beard, patterned from a friend's similar one (he calls his a beard cozy, cuute!) an attempt to "blend in," to not necessarily make ourselves less visible as trans women (beacause let's get real, when we're clothed OR naked, there's really no hiding it) but for me, this was an attempt to appeal to the bear community more fully and outwardly, understanding that normative bear culture is a manifestation of gay male culture and a masculine culture at that, both things I am not. This beard became my first attempt at recreating myself as a bear, to make my bear identity more outwardly visible and much more of a doing, more of a deliberate gender presentation. Here's some back story.

As a young and extremely self conscious faggot i hated my rapidly forming bear body. I was infatuated with (notions of normative) gay porn culture and my growing disposition for bottom-identity, I shaved and shaved and shaved, cardio-ed my brains out, and prayed to the twink gods for smooth and slenderness. While the bottomness did in fact develop itself quite nicely, the twink aesthetic did not. I rejected my ever increasing beardom like the plague, and only now, almost three years after starting my estrogen regimen, am I rethinking my would-be connection to the community I could have found for myself then.

It's become increasingly clear to me that I cannot take up space in a community populated and established exclusively for men. As a female-ish (i recognize that I tend to "pass" as female in quite a few social interactions despite my gender queer identity and fluid/androgynous clothing choice) presenting trans person, I realize that I am not a typically attractive candidate to homo-inclined grizzly men, and I'm also aware that my previously and no longer visible faggot identity does not legitimize my taking up of space in bear communities. But I also understand my ever increasing connection to bears as a nostalgic sense of loss and letting go of what could have been a very cathartic community for the development of myself as a non-normatively bodied queer person (the way that beardom, while linked to masculine presentation, is such a rejection of normative gay men's oppressive sense of "perfect" body image), and I long for both the connection of a homo-dynamic (flirting/loving/fucking other faggots and round-bellied queers, that is), preferably with one that is much furrier than i am.

I do enjoy myself with a beard, and while this would be follicularly impossible, the crocheted, red and blond speckled wool warms my now smooth face and is a bear-drag of sorts. I plan to incorporate a draped, curly collar of chest and belly fur, but that's for another time.