crafting thanks in 2013

This year, I was thankful for...

1. My friends for donating to my I Think I Can campaign to raise money for a great organization that serves homeless youth. Thanks to the campaign, I raised $300.00 for At the Crossroads, gave up sugar for five months, and lost 15 lbs. Now, seven months later, after a breakup, a death in the family (more on that later), and many hours of Mad Men and Parks & Recreation, I am right back where I started. Luckily, the ITIC campaign is rolling into the station again, so I guess I'd better hop on board and make it year-long this time.

(On a side note, as a public health practitioner I have to look at the unfathomable amount of salt-sugar-and-fat-filled objects labelled as food to which we are visually exposed  and seduced to consume. I would love, as a public health performance art piece, to go to Trader Joe's, take out all the products that have refined sugar, put them in neat piles in the parking lot, take photographs of what remained in the store, and measure what proportion of the shelves remained empty sans sugar, and then do the same for salt and refined flour. I suspect it would be something like 75% of the store's products out in the parking lot, with only produce and raw nuts left inside.)

In lieu of structural changes to remove sugar from my environment, guilt and money work as cues; here are some of the thank you cards I made for friends who donated to my 2013 I Think I Can campaign:

Hank

Sarolta

Daliah (Front)

Daliah (Interior)

 2. Revolutionary artists like Ruth Asawa for integrating community, family, and politics into her work while transcending all of those things to make beautiful art. I was good friends with her grandson in middle school and remember him telling me she had designed a fountain in Ghiradelli Square, but I only later understood the true importance of her work to San Francisco and to my own life. Asawa survived U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans to become an influential artist, feminist, and advocate for arts education. She was a member of the board at SCRAP, where I first tried my hand at sewing after stuffing cotton prints and corduroys in my pockets during hours of sorting through donations of fabric and other recycled art supplies. She also helped found the School of the Arts, where I studied theater in high school, and which was recently renamed in her honor. Her famous Ghiradelli Square fountain showed a mermaid breastfeeding her baby, an unabashed depiction of female power and celebration of joy, motherhood, and life. According to the New York Times obituary for Asawa, the fountain "set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art." Given the need for laws allowing breastfeeding in public, the relevance of her work continues.

R.I.P. Ruth Asawa, one awesome lady. 

Card for Ken Cuneo on the death of his grandmother, the artist Ruth Asawa

3. My family, for coming together to remember the loss of my father. His death, after seven years of being missing, is a long story I will tell another time. But I was grateful for the opportunity to mourn with family, and for their support in making his memorial possible.

For my sister

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my uncle and aunt

For my brother, Eliyahu (artwork by Nikki McClure)

For my brother Sacha (linoleum cut by Melissa Klein)

4. Finally, I am grateful to my friends and coworkers for giving me love, entertainment, and support. And so I thanked them this year during the holidays (and cleared out a worrisome number of accumulated jam jars) by making  my first-ever batches of candied almonds and granola. (Thanks also to holiday duct-tape!)

For Britt and Erock

May we all live with ease and well-being in our hearts. 

Happy New Year!

creature comforts: cookies, pillows, linens, cards

In times of loss, of crisis, of love, one feels moved to make things, be it with music or canvas or needle and thread. I've recently lost someone with whom I had a shared history, however, distant, and had others close to me lose their loved ones: mothers, brothers, in-laws, cousins they never knew but heard about in the news, comrades. Here are some things I've made of late (and a few things friends have shared) in memory of friends and family members passing into the netherworld, and in celebration of their lives here on earth and all of the incredible things they taught us. If only we remembered to appreciate our friends and their tremendous affect on the trajectories and qualities of our lives while they are still very much living. It is not too late. These gifts for friends and colleagues in honor of their lives and strengths and losses are offered in this spirit.

Cookie with banner for Sarah Kirsch
 

 In loving memory, Sarah Kirsch, 1970-2012

Sarah's recent passing has left me reeling, even though I haven't seen her in a couple years. She was part of a formative period of my life, one filled with vegan food (including many carob chip cookies, delivered to my door) and thoughtful politics and potlucks and punk music, with finding straightedge to my incredible relief and then, later, drifting apart in search of queerer community, only to learn just a year before her death that she identified as transgender and had been living her life as a closeted male-passing punk for too many years. To me, it is such a testament that regardless of exterior appearances, we are all so very precious and tender on the inside and need to be handled with such care and gentleness if we are ever to grow.

 

 Pillow for Alessandra, front, in memory of her mother; the two of them are pictured here. 

Pillow for Alessandra, back

 Pillow Cases for Joan, "We are all..."

 "alone..."

 "in this world..."

 "...together."

 

(Thanks to Xylor Jane and Xara Thustra for their poster (above) and the inspiration.) 

 

Card for Joan, "May your happiness (etc.) continue..."

 

(Thanks to Spring Washam for the phrase (above) and the inspiration.)