You know you’d love to be sporting a fine “Make Tea Not War” bag like this, wouldn’t you?
Our good friend Jane pointed out that our “Make Tea Not War” shop on CafePress had fallen quite badly out of date, as CafePress has added, removed, and altered product options.
She was apparently looking to replace a bag that had died after several years of use, and kept getting an “out of stock” response. Looking at it from our end suggests they don’t make that kind of bag anymore, and perhaps haven’t for quite some time. Sighz.
To be honest, we mostly set that shop up so we could buy stuff for ourselves, and we don’t pay a ton of attention to it. We occasionally get a couple of bucks because some random stranger buys one of our bits and bobs, but I’m not sure we’ve ever made enough to take the three of us out to a cheap meal. This is partly because we don’t really do anything to promote our wares, but the lack of movement also doesn’t particular encourage us to put in a lot of effort watching the store.
Hence the rather nasty drift in the product line. It turns out that CafePress has added a bunch of items since I’d last paid any attention, as well as discontinuing a few. I updated things some, removing obviously discontinued items, and adding our lovely, hand-calligraphed “Make Tea Not War” slogan to a bunch of new bags, ranging from fancy messenger bags to nice looking little lunch bags.
And hey, you know that tea goes way better with lunch than war does. Way better.
Panorama photographs of the joint PRCA show with WeatherGrrrl after we finished hanging the show yesterday.
WeatherGrrrl and I spent most of yesterday hanging our first ever joint show, and these panoramas capture the exhaustion and mess and art at the end of the day.
Panorama of joint PRCA show with WeatherGrrrl (1/2)
L to R (starting at the little wall):
Two "old" pieces, our bios, & price list. The top piece ("Beyond the rim") is a sculpture of Sue’s made from wood and human hair. The bottom piece is a photo of mine from the train tracks here in Morris.
"Askance" – a large profile of Sue.
"Thought full" – a very large shot of the back of Sue’s bald head leaning slightly forward.
(Turning the corner) "Emergence" (top) – 2 horizontal shots of *very* short hair growing back in. "Home" (bottom) – Her very freshly shaved head.
Panorama of joint PRCA show with WeatherGrrrl (2/2)
L to R:
A group of 3 all coming from Sue having me use henna to tattoo "No freedom without privacy" onto the back of her freshly shaved head. First is a close up of the dried henna, the strip in the middle shows her hair growing back through the tattoo and the tattoo fading over time, and the third is a B&W shot from when the henna was still wet.
Lastly, a diptych of two very large "pages" of 420 different photos of Sue taken over a 3 month period as her hair grew back.
The Prairie Renaissance Cultural Alliance (PRCA) asked us about possibly doing a show together this time last year, assuming (I think) that we’d just collect some of her sculptures and some of my photographs, and call it a show.
We both felt, however, that if we were going to do a show together, we wanted to do a show together, so we asked if we could wait a year and assemble some new, joint material in the meantime. The result was this collection of photographs (by me) of her head; in essence she laid the tableau through various treatments of her head as a sculptural object, I shot a metric crapton of photos, and then we sifted through them together and assembled this collection.
While it’s only 8 pieces, it uses over 500 separate photographs out of the nearly 10,000 we shot over the course of 2013 for this project. (We shot over 7,000 images from late February to early May alone!) We also chose to make some very large prints, with the 8 pieces covering nearly 100 square feet of wall. I really love printing large, but rarely can justify it, so it was quite wonderful seeing some of these big prints. :-) The original plan for the big diptych was to have a single piece, 6 feet tall by 8 feet wide, but we couldn’t find anyone that could do art quality photo printing that big, which is why we ended up dividing it into two “pages”.
For folks in the area, the show opens Wednesday, 13 Feb, and there’s a reception Sunday, 16 Feb, from 7-8:30pm.
