Anyway, now we’ve arrived at the CVP I made. My little coat, depicted here quite flatteringly I think, is still hanging on the little blue wooden hooks my sisters and my mom made for me years ago. When we started making this book we emailed the list of participants to see if anyone had any stories or sketches to add, but nobody seemed to. Nevertheless, Diane and I dug up our drawings and notes, and spent some time writing out our thoughts on the process, so we ended up devoting a few extra pages to our projects as a way of opening a window into what it had been like. So consider your selves forwarned- the next few pages will be all about me and me coat here.

The teacher I worked for at Concordia last year used to talk about doing a gallery exhibit with the walls covered in different people’s rejection letters- from arts granting agencies, publishers, schools, etc.The CVP is similar, with the world of different experiences of the same thing that it creates, but it celebrates all the layers and facets and subjective ways of success and failure. About 80% of kits given out come back in, and those that do are differently successful. For the Indyish launch we’re going to do a 24hour CVP, where brave young and old creative folk will tackle the process of invention with constrained materials in a much shorter time then the two CVP’s attempted before. (ooh ahh.)

Maybe there will be more failure, or maybe there will be more madcap hilarity in the successes. Who knows. More news on that soon, meanwhile, revel in the lightweight and breezy quilted bag, from CVP Trial 1.

Masaru Emoto, born July 22, 1943 in Yokohama, Japan, is best known for his controversial claim that if human thoughts are directed at water before it is frozen, images of the resulting water crystals will be beautiful or ugly depending upon whether the thoughts were positive or negative. Emoto claims this can be achieved through prayer, music or by attaching written words to a container of water.

Masaru Emoto- Wikipedia.

the three designers who collaborated on this piece all work, with Clayton Evans- [tag]Consistent Variable Project[/tag] co-founder- in a studio space called the Laboritoire Creatif. They make the collections on Indyish.com called Re-Gen, Pearls Before Swine, and Hastings and Main. They are very dear and friendly, but Diane didn’t know that yet when she went in for her first ever modeling experience at the party for the [tag]CVP[/tag], and so realizing she had their creation on backwards was a bit horrifying I guess. Goes to show how unimportant embarrassment can be though, as they/we are all giggly, ice cream eating friends now.

Speaking of seeing things that I didn’t, I love these moments when Diane pops out with a little personality or anecdote. We briefly, gigglingly, considered giving ourselves names like Haiku Emily- given the sides of herself she shows here I though Diane could be interestingly summarized as Hippy Diane, but the names never stuck. It seemed to suit the encounter we were having with Emily, which in some ways was a surface experience only, mediated by computers and images and three lines of text per page. I took a hand at writing haiku here and elsewhere, and though it’s not a good haiku in terms of the turn in perspective that’s supposed to happen, I am glad that I got to say what I wanted about ambivalence. Ambivalence is much more subtle and variegated then dislike- it’s a wavelength-like tension, an inability to decide between love and hate that manages to embrace being both, which, if you can do it, is good for both brain and heart.

The shoot was an intense day- I wasn’t there for all of it, but some, and it was very fun, and I believe I even made it home in time for american idol. This piece is not practical, but it does kind of sum up the way a hurt heart feels.

Emily did suggest blended haiku, though it was more in the context of: “i’m tired, i just wrote like 45 haiku and some of these may be silly. feel free to futz with them.” They were awesome and I didn’t end up changing or editing a single one. Though some were weird, they all sparked the imagination, and the challenge was for to try and work with them and to see what she saw; or to leave the question open for the reader to puzzle out. i think by including the idea of blended haiku in the book, as an option for how to negotiate with the text, we also reinforced the idea that different people will think and like different things. Which is an obvious bit, but sometimes tough to remember.

By the way- the funny girl who made this jumper, and who submitted it with a paper which read “J is for Jumper, just put it on and Go!” is also all tangled up in Worn now. She models, she does PR, she multi-tasks like a star.