I finally got the chance to order something from boygirlparty.com, the online shop of illustrator Susan Ghahremani. For a while, it was difficult to get her work in Canada unless you were able to access some of the things - magnets, journals, etc. - distributed by Chronicle Books. I think you can order through her Etsy shop to get things shipped to Canada now.
My Tiny Niece really likes this Finch Tree shirt. I and my shirts aim to please the tiny people of the world.
My art work is still not up in the latest place. I bought this little piece from Tiny Showcase because it reminded me of the bungalow in Calgary that hosted so many projects and gatherings over more than a decade.
I also ordered a Ray Fenwick shirt. It was borrowed a number of times so I had to order another for myself and the borrower. (You know who you are.) I recommend spending some time at Fenwick's website and taking the time to be on the Tiny Showcase mailing list if only to be reminded every Tuesday that people are making good art.
Tiny Showcase has a number of great shirts. I've given this Jen Corace to a friend and recently purchased this Lizzy Stewart.
And now to order in some sunny days.
There was no time for blogging. But now there is and the time between our last entry in May to now has brought some t-shirt weather. And so I happily re-begin the Hedge Society blogging with a look at some favorite wearable art.
It is difficult for many illustrators to produce t-shirts. If you produce buttons or prints, one size fits mostly all. Many independent artists make very little money on each piece and clothing requires different sizes and colors and can be bulky to mail, cutting into profit or requiring a higher price than some are willing to pay in an era of 2 for $15 mall shirts.
I'm partial to shirts that promote small causes or independent artists. We begin with Jeff Kulak, an artist I met at an independent art fair in Edmonton. I bought his book Alphabet Boys. I liked the look and feel of this collaborative work.
And I was able to pick up this fun little piece to wear on the occasional Canadian sunny day:
I wish I could find a source for this one as well. I'd take it in tiny and a little less tiny than tiny for me because it looks like a lot of fun.
Detroit's Last Vinyl Pressing Plant on the Hedge's Moving Pictures Tumblr
(also see our post in honor of Record Store Day)
Memorable Tweet: @paperedtogether
Once upon a time, we got quite a bit of mail in the office from students looking for magazine internships. We couldn't accommodate too many, being a small office with limited space and resources. But an email from Edmonton, Alberta caught our eye when a photography student pleaded: "Please don't make me spend my intern week in a Sears portrait studio." OK, he had us there.
So Scott drove to town. We met and talked about upcoming bits we might need for future issues. Then he wandered around taking photos and delivered all his images to us at the end of the week. These are the ones we liked the most. The first photo ended up on a page called Non-Linear Conversation in Issue 13: Beauty.
I don't believe Scott works in photography anymore but we hope he had a good week. Some people will always have Paris; we will always have this cat. This evil, evil cat. Here's how it turned out on the page (click for a pdf version).
(The cat illustrations, by the way, are by Aaron Leighton, who has gone on to do lovely award-winning things in Toronto. Aaron shocked and awed his way into our hearts and minds by sending us an email telling us our first design effort waaaay previous to our no-ads version needed fixing. He was right. Today, his approach is still known as the "You Suck!" method of finding freelance illustration work, second only to the "That's Pa-THET-ic!" method of finding freelance editing work.)
Tell her you were afraid of words.
It is hard to do the work of well-researched critique whether it comes in the form of satire, faux news, or in-depth analysis. But critique shouldn't be confused with the kind of off-the-cuff cynicism that is evidence of a shriveled heart. It's okay to hope that someone will be a good leader, will set a higher standard that maybe even he or she can't attain. We aren't being tricked. We aren't looking for a messiah. We're hoping for the best despite our shriveled hearts.Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
To all of you popping in from Typepad's kind recommendation. We're happy to have you here and hope you follow our feed, our twitter, and our footsteps in the snow as we discover some of the wonderful things that people are making, doing, and thinking. Check out the long story of what a Hedge Society is. And check back. We hope to give out a few things from time to time just because it's fun.
Oh, and if you are an illustrator, artist, photographer, and/or general do-gooder, let us know your story. We're always happy to point out people doing all sorts of good things.
And we think these custom munnies really belong in the Hedge. Jeremiah Ketner of smallandround provided the illustration for the cover of one of our magazines. Two of these are sold out but he has few other things for sale at his site.
If you'd like to give someone something this week, consider some of the printables available around the net. You can download some of these files for as a little as 5$ and print them yourself. Here's a few samples we rounded up over the last few days.
