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March 15, 2005

A getting-to-know-you game

Just like when the teacher used to make us stand up in front of the class on the first day of school and say something about ourselves (my name is Jodi, on my summer vacation I played Dukes of Hazzard every day at Dougie's house because he has a car up on blocks in his yard. . . ). Except more fun.

So here are the rules if you want to play:

1. Leave me a comment saying “interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions here. They will be different questions than the ones below.
3. You will update YOUR blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

And here are the questions posed to me by La, and my answers:

1. I think it’s safe to say that Mariah! is a big hit. Will you be publishing more designs in the future? If so, what? If not, why?
I will definitely be publishing more designs. I have a new design that will be in the spring Knitty, but sorry, I can't tell you about it. It's very different from Mariah, and might not appeal to the same kind of crowd. Think rockabilly, and bowling. I like to think it's the kind of thing Rizzo would knit. I'll also have a design in Jillian Moreno and Amy Singer's book Big Girl Knits, coming out some time next year. I'd like to do a few designs later in the spring to publish for free on my website, but I don't do as well with the deadlines when they're self imposed.

2. Regarding your art: What inspires you? What is your favorite medium? Which is your favorite creation?
This is a hard question, even though I'm getting pretty used to talking about my art. I'm not sure it's a question of inspiration (although like Hulk Hogan said, "a true artiste has inspiration, not perspiration odour"); it's just what I'm compelled to do. I think the best way to answer this is to cop out and give you a link to my artist's statement, which pretty much sums up what I'm doing right now, and why. I'm primarily a printmaker, and work mostly in lithography, relief and intaglio. I also use a lot of knitting, embroidery and quilting, usually combined with printmaking but sometimes on their own.

3. I LOVE ink! How many tattoos do you have, and what are they?
I love ink too. My mom won't want to hear this, but now that I've begun to put tattoos in places that actually show, I'm quite eager to cross the line between tattooed and heavily tattooed. I've got a long way to go though; I have 5 tattoos right now (but will be getting at least one more, maybe two, before the end of April). Here is a picture of my first one, on the small of my back:

The next one I got on my belly, and I won't show a photo because it descends into my bush, and I just don't want my parents to think I'm showing my bush to everybody. You can pretty much see it in all of my prints though; here's a detail from "dmc 666" a print on canvas with embroidery:

It looks kind of blobby in the prints, but the diamond is hatched lines just like the one on my back, and the black spiral bits are sharper.

My third was my armband, which you can see here. Then a band of stars around my calf, shown here. And number five, my first knitty tat, you can see back here.
The next one I was supposed to get on my birthday but my plans went awry. I'm just waiting for qpaukl to get his new needles sterilized and this is going on the nape of my neck:

This is the first one I didn't design myself; I ripped it off out of the Book of Kells. And since we're already pretty picture-heavy here, what's one more?

This image is from an old Punch cartoon from World War One. I'm going to do some work on it, cleaning it up so that it's less pen-and-ink looking and a little easier to read. Then I'm going to put her on my left upper arm. I like the idea of a knitting pinup that's not slutty looking, and I love the way she's clenched over the knitting in a kind of fury.

4. How long have you been knitting and what was your first project? do you still have it?
One or both of my grandmothers tried to teach me when I was about 8, but didn't show me how to cast on or off or how to fix mistakes, so I got frustrated pretty quickly and stopped. I had a spool knitting set and used to make lots of Barbie tube dresses (I was never really into playing Barbies, but always like sewing clothes for them. Then she would go out in her fabulous outfits and have terrible mishaps, like slipping on the ice and bending her knees backwards, or slipping while climbing Victrola mountain and getting her neck caught in her rope and hanging there off the side of the Victrola for days, dead but dressed to the nines).

I finally learned to knit when I was 18 and in art school, from my art history teacher, Marg Blackie. She gave a sock knitting workshop and I was the only one of the bunch who kept knitting. So my first finished object was a pair of acrylic socks, and one was purple and teal and the other was teal and yellow. I don't have them anymore, as I always had problems with the dpn join line down the bottom of the foot wearing out. They fell apart (yes, even though they were butt ugly and HOT acrylic, I wore them until they fell apart).

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it by and why?
I haven't really travelled a lot so I can't say oh, definitely Berlin or Soweto or Dublin or Addis Ababa or a New Zealand sheep ranch (although I'm sure those would all be great places). So how about this: I'll describe my ideal place to live and if you ever find it you can let me know and I'll move there. I'd like to live in a lovely old house close enough to walk downtown, in a liberal town with a diverse ethnic mix and a good university with a fabulous library and art department that wishes to employ both Peter and me. Ideally there will be a nice old lady next door who likes babysitting cats, a bunch of guys who play pickup ball hockey nearby (for Pete, not me) and a YMCA within walking distance. There is also a fabulous job in this wonderful town for Peter's ex, so that we can be close to her and the kids. In our neighbourhood there is a yarn store, a thrift store, an Ethiopian restaurant and a good pub where I can drink Guinness and not have to listen to too much tweedle-dee-dee music. I can tell you that this place will likely not be in the United States (bad governance), Saudi Arabia (like the US but more overtly misogynist), or any coastal or island nation where the main source of food is fish (or worse, fish and pork).

Posted by jodi at March 15, 2005 05:13 PM | categories:  self-absorbtion

Comments

Posted by: TheBon at March 15, 2005 06:49 PM

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