In San Francisco, you can get into a bunch of museums for free the first Tuesday of the month. I meant to go in December, but the first Tuesday was the 1st of December, and I didn't think to check until a couple days in. Oops.
So, I was not-so-patiently waiting for January 5th so I could go see Open Source Embroidery at
The Museum of Craft and Folk Art. It was even cooler than I thought it'd be!
I hadn't read anything about it, so I didn't realize it ... well, the marketing text says it better than I could:
Open Source Embroidery includes workshops and exhibitions that investigate how the open source software development model has been incorporated into the language of cultural participation.
So ... techie and crafty, which was extra cool for me. My absolute favorite was a gigantic canvas panel with cryptic, tiny-line embroidery on it.
This was about 6 feet across. You could look at the back of the work, and all the threads started from the center of the panel and trailed out from there. The plaque said a GPS and a projector were used. My guess is that a bunch of people started off in the same spot, then left in all different directions and the maker (I didn't get the name!) projected the GPS map on the panel and then embroidered the paths. The results were beautiful.
Here's a close up of the center bit. Eye candy!
When we walked in, I saw two heavily embroidered chairs that were pretty cool. But when I saw someone embroidering on them *AND* saw the bowl of thread and pin cushion full of needles I got excited.
Here's the close up of my "DOOM" embroidery. The chair upholstery is woven, so I thought I'd do a cross stitch (see the D). But I gave up on that pretty quickly and switched to straight stitches because it's not easy embroidering on the chair you're sitting on. :)
And here's me sitting on the chair. The exhibit is only there until January 24th, so if you're in the area and want to see it, you've got less than two weeks.