Split Needles

There is willful cruelty in the world, but there is also wonder.

I'm working on getting this poster framed:

You can't so much see the detail, but I picked up a copy when I was working the Waterloo Arts Fest about a month back. It was hiding in a stack by the door. Part of what makes it so great is that on my copy you can see places where the ink didn't take to the page, and someone worked back into the lines with graphite. The whole things just so human, and I love that.

I'm holding a Stitch and Bitch this coming Sunday at Arts Collinwood, where I work. Free beer, snacks, and fiber fun! I would love to have anyone and everyone come visit. There's a really great show in our gallery right now too, called "Latest Additions". It features the work of a group of recent CIA grads that work in different craft areas. Of everything, I am particularly found of Beth Whalley's drawings (http://www.bethwhalley.com). So it will be a really great opportunity to chill in the gallery and check out the show!

We're located at:

15605 Waterloo Rd

Cleveland, OH 44110

I left Medina for Cleveland a few nights back. Dusk was falling and the sun just barely started sinking after I hit 71 North. For the duration of my drive into the city I watched the colour spread like wildfire, twisting as it bled out into the saturated grey of the clouds. Only moments after it ducked bellow the horizon I dropped onto the East Bound bridge and swapped the setting sun for city lights.

I think I needed a reminder of beauty in change, and the worth of all things - no matter how faulty fleeting.

Porch Deprivation

While spending a little time in my home town, keeping an eye on one very ornery siamese cat I spotted this video on TV. It's simple and stunning, one of the best visual adaptations of a song that I have come across in quite sometime. I was thrilled to learn it was fan made, and that Death Cab picked it up as the official video for little bribes. This makes me really want to send them the books I made...haha

I've been dwelling on 2054 E.115th a lot these days. Sometimes I wake up in my bed in my new apartment, and before my eyes can snap open I'm convinced I'm back behind the paper thin walls that held me for just under two years. The house itself was fouler than foul, falling apart in more ways than one. I honestly felt like I would never escape, and that I lived in some sort of waking purgatory. I counted down the days until I would be free from its filth forever, and believe me I am grateful to finally be out. What I do admit to longing after is the most fabulous front porch I've ever owned or experienced. I have yet to find one that matches it or even comes close. All I have here is a shared picnic table in a grassy side yard attached to my apartment complex. My heart aches for all the old houses across the way, and for dawn breaking over the hospital just beyond them. A lot of things happened in that house. Good things grew from mostly bad, and no matter how much I am glad to be rid of it I am also just the slightest bit sad to have seen it pass out from under me. I was a very different person when I unpacked my things and moved into that space at the end of August '07 than I was when I filled the bed of a truck with everything I own and took it all elsewhere only a little over a month ago. Part of me will always be on the porch of that house watching the sun set, or the snow fall to a backdrop of trains slowing to a halt and passing through the city where I live.

(an excerpt from my moleskin.

Copic marker, Le pen, and graphite

(c) Sandi Petrie)