Lucky Squirrel

You know how I love a story about luck:


photo by Michael Doig

Read the full story! (The Swap Meat was involved too!)

Feeling lucky?

A nice article on luck, one of my favorite topics.

P.S. not the best picture, but I totally want to make a balaclava. Maybe this one:

Swap Meat

I participated in Coudal's Swap Meat this summer (you can too until 8/31!). I sent the above out in May (top, color-changing hanky from this project and bottom, 2001 book which I don't have online anymore....jeez neither of these scans do my work any justice) and today I received these in return:



Both pieces are thrift store finds from Kim G. at Pulp-It. The first piece is several layers of board cut out in progressively smaller shapes. The second is a hand tooled photo album/scrapbook. She wrote a lovely little story about the scrapbook:

I like to imagine that Sam tooled this piece for the photos of his & Rosa's wedding and then she dumped him before the ceremony.

When I first got the package all I could think about was I wonder who got my pieces! But now I suspect that there is a Kim I. out there with my book and a fading handkerchief. I will def. be googling around to see if I can find it....

quickie!

Boing Boing post about a furor over unlucky numbers among cabbies in San Francisco! Link

secrets

The website PostSecret began three years ago and is hugely well known (also for being the largest ad-free blog on the internet). The secrets very from the very depressing and scary to the hilarious. Recently the website Orato posted an article by Frank Warren the creator of the site. Orato is an interesting site in it's own right, hosting only "true stories from real people." Anyway, Frank talks about why he started the site, how it blossomed, and what he's doing now (a book and Post Secret events). At the events Frank invites participants to share their secrets in person, shows some banned secrets from the book, and for everyone to talk about secrets together.

Frank says, "I don’t think PostSecret is a reflection of a highly dysfunctional society, quite the opposite. We keep secrets for a reason, obviously. But I think the feelings, thoughts, beliefs and fears we hold in private are often the exact same thing that unite us with others. They’re sometimes the most humanistic part of us."

I think secrets are a very interesting theme, sort of related to luck somehow.....

luck

Instructables has a really good tutorial for finding four leaf clovers [via]. One of the projects I did for my MA at CSM was about how to make products lucky. I researched all kinds of lucky symbols and talismans (talismen?) before I decided to do a series of accessories that relied on luck in the making as well as in the imagery.



This scarf was the very first thing I ever knitted (beginner's luck) and I made it 21 stitches wide (3 and 7 are lucky numbers). The prints were chosen and arranged according to the "luck of the draw" and the imagery comes from lucky symbols across cultures.

I have one of my very best lucky charms out to a friend right now, and it seems to be working well for her. In fact, it seems to be working so well, I'm thinking of asking for it back! But I sent it to her (not only because she could use the luck) to test anthropologist James George Frazer's second rule of magical thinking: the law of contagion. The first rule is the law of similarity, that a charm's effects should somehow be traceable to the charm itself, which my charm possesses. Do you have a lucky charm that works?

toenail necklace

This is just the kind of thing that represents one wild end of my interest in dress! Jan Ryerse made this necklace out of lost toenails from marathon running. The Saint Louis Post Dispatch wrote about him (click the image to link to the article and see a pic of him wearing his necklace) and other runners who do ultramarathons (more than a marathon! often 30- 50- or 100-mile events).

"People tend to be less competitive in ultramarathons; they go at it at a relaxed pace," Jan says. He also contends that women and older runners have the advantage in ultrarunning because they are more patient. I wonder if there is also an emotional component in running this kind of race that would be an advantage to women and older folk, as opposed to a passionate one that would perhaps be found more in the young and male. The article says that "most ultrarunners will tell you that the shared experience of mentally and physically battling the incomprehensible is by far the biggest draw." Creating a talisman to wear of battle scars from these ultramarathons is the ultimate emotional attachment!

Full disclosure: I have many of my childhood teeth, 2 toenails that fell off, and a collection of hair (mine and others). Apparently it's genetic: my mom has a keepsake box with a piece of skin that my grandfather was born with over his face, and my aunt has a necklace that my great-grandmother wove out of her own hair (really full disclosure: I wore it on my wedding day (and it matches my own natural hair color).

[via]