size matters.

ladies and gentlemen, please bestow a warm reception to the first two 3" buttons to come off my brand new machine. yes. three inch buttons. so now when people ask if i have anything bigger than 1 inch buttons i can say "yes, i make three inch buttons."

i told you there would be announcements after my last visit to usa buttons.

i have a couple of projects in the works related to this new machine (yup, this one puts ribbons on buttons if desired). you will hear more about that soon. but first, i have photographed the first one off the press in proximity to a child's face (for scale). thank you, max, for your ultimate cooperation. the artwork on the button below is a collaboration between the two of us.

now, off to explore saint louis.

craft my ride.

thrift store afghan + shredded bench seat = crafty answer to style and function.

apologies to xzibit and crew, but we haven't filled the trunk with plasma tv's and woofers yet. we need that space for crafts. besides, it's a station wagon.

i love how this aesthetic mess looks against the backdrop of our equally daring kansas city motel. i should have taken more pictures of the filled-in pool. next time.

hey, happy canda day. let's go to saint louis!

radio silence.

photo by art star philly

so, i have been keeping my internet yap shut for a few days. it's not that i have been inactive - quite to the contrary; i have put my craft life to sleep for a weekend while i perform, teach and observe things at an improv festival in minneapolis.

so instead of doing or saying anything productive, my only craft related activity has been replying to pressing emails and finding weird mentions of our travels on the internet.

above is a picture taken by the lovelies at art star from our booth at the craft bazaar last month. at the time of exposure, i am probably at the peak of an allergy attack that burgled most of my second day at the show. do not let my weirdness fool you. this was an otherwise splendid day.

don't fret, soon we will be back to business as unusual. we have to make it from here to los angeles. i am sure there are a few things between here and there. we'll see.

improbabilities on the highways of wisconsin.

who knew as we awoke in our luxurious madison side-of-the-highway motel room what a string of unlikely events lay between us and our destination of minneapolis. not us. and, probably, not you.

we took some time getting organized, finishing some little jobs and piecing the car contents back together like a tetris game. then we hit the road - a new scenic byway i had never taken before. on faythe's advice, we had planned out some roadside programming on the way to minneapolis (i am performing there, but that is another story/life of mine). wisconsin, it would seem, is full of roadside extravagances that we have never experienced. this, in spite of the fact that i have been through this whole corridor numerous times. but i used to be younger and i would drive endlessly without stopping. now, in my advancing years, i bother to look at things if only to give my aching back a break from the car.

sadly, the house on the rock did not figure into our plans although it was on the route. the collections there sounds thrilling but it apparently merits an entire day's exploration. it is also slicker (read: pricier) than our current mothy purses can allow. we managed to find plenty of cheap/free roadside mania to partake in, nonetheless.

on faythe's suggestion, we hunted down dr. evermor's forevertron, an entire art park of massive metal sculputres centred around the forevertron, a guinness book record-holding scrap sculpture of immense size. we wandered around the opening to the park, snapping photos and marveling.

then things got weird. as walked towards the entrance to the park proper a couple of other visitors came out and told us to take as many pictures as we could as fast as we could because the entire park was being shut down by "the government." when we tried to enter to snap said hasty photos we were turned away by a lady who said she ran the place. she was flanked by police officers and seemed quite demanding about our departure. while leaving, the other tourists informed us that a live bomb had been discovered among either the sculptures or materials on site and that officials were scouring the place for contaminants of some kind. one of these visitors also told us that a ufo sculpture on site was made out of a flammable metal. weird.

we took a few more pictures around the front of the space before being shooed out by the lady who worked there. this lady confirmed some of the rumours. a live bomb had apparently been discovered there by some visitors a couple of weeks ago and all sorts of police, government and health officials had descended on the place since. it just so happens we had arrived at a critical moment when the decision to close the park had come down.

"dr. evermor's negligence with materials," she said. "i've got to go eat at the welfare...just kidding."

so we left.

onwards towards baraboo. we had seen signs for a circus museum but got distracted by a saint vincent depaul before we even got there. we have been going pretty nuts with thrifts over the past few days. there is a big list of things to pick up and even more things by which to be distracted. but my mind was entirely blown by this discovery:

no big deal, right? just some weird tacky wall thing, right? only, if you look carefully, you will note that is it a souvenir from bruno, saskatchewan! possibly, you might remember our visit there last year. as far as we know, there is little in bruno other than 500 people, all citizens, tyler, serena (sometimes), a religious school, a grain silo and the usual trappings of a rural town (grocery, bar, pharmacy, bank, insurance, senior's centre...) i mean, it's not nothing. it's a fantastic place. but it's a tiny place, and one that we have a slim but tenacious connection to. and to find such a strange souvenir of it here, in wisconsin. and what are we even do here, in this small of-the-freeway place? and why did we stop to go to this particular shop? we drank more water and hoped we weren't hallucinating.

we plan on passing through bruno later in this trip so we have to wrestle with the final home of this object until then. we both kind of want to cling to it as a reminder of the difference between impossibility and improbability (a clear difference when living out in the world as we are). but possibly it deserves to be brought back home. tyler and serena, will you cry if we don't leave this with you? let's work it out. we are troubled and dehydrated.

after all of this excitement and confusion, the circus museum seemed pointless. and our drive through the wisconsin dells was entirely too overwhelming to digest. my god, that place is incredible. this is about as much of it as we could actually absorb in our saturated states:

...and there is so much more where that came from. maybe on the way back (with any luck). i kind of want to sleep in an elephant's trunk, or under a water slide, or in an upside down house. why didn't i listen to dr. dave when he told me to go here years ago?

now onward into minnesota to find graham. wisconsin, you have more than piqued our curiosity; you have challenged its limits.

goofing on the flattening land.

we kicked around milwaukee this morning, taking advantage of the comforts of faythe's home, doing work and making plans. in the early afternoon, we made our way back to west bend to revisit usa buttons (i have an impending announcement to make about that visit, but not quite yet). we took our time, didn't rush (a habit of mine) and did some needful thrifting. we always have a wish list on the go and, due to budget limitations, usually have to wait until we happen upon the perfect thing (aitor's portable percolator and eye glass frames come to mind). in spite of her pleading/condeming gaze, this little lady did not find her way home with us:

we ended the day very early (and not very far from milwaukee) at a motel in madison, wisconsin. sometimes the added work time is better than driving all night. also, this place boasted a pool. it's a billion degrees (so much so that the highways around here are buckling) so we took it. we had to do a good resorting of the car, anyway. the skies are really starting to open up. i love that part of driving west.

america's drinking hole.

milwaukee has the best nickname. after rolling in this evening, though, we did not have much drinking in us. we had been sweating profusely for hours as we tried to escape chicago in blistering heat with no air conditioning.

before leaving chicago, i did manage to go visit jamie at clothes optional and stock the shop up with lots of new buttons. i also bought a skirt and wore it out the door. those jeans were threatening to extinguish my will to live.

but back to milwaukee. we arrived to find faythe outside, trying to cool down. the beautiful mural had just been painted over at paper boat (or now, guess, what used to be paper boat) and it just looked like a big empty space. bittersweet, said faythe. bittersweet.

we went out to a bar where the photobooth is polaroid and aitor made himself look fat. me, i just got a headache immediately and drank gallons of water. too pooped to really party, we all walked back to faythe's through a park with a pond then settled into a quiet evening of making friendship bracelets and rehydrating on coconut milk. making friendship bracelets took me back to my arts and crafts days at summer camp. all my skillz were still there! and faythe and i imagined grown-up versions of them since we are now very serious adults who think big.

i love faythe's home; it's so easy to slip into. the walls are covered with beautiful things. faythe excels at many things, but complicted curation is surley one of them.

coming to port without a coast.

look at the care with which reba displayed my secret messages at no coast. the shop is closed today, but i have been fortunate enough to sneak in and set up office for the entire day. chicagoans (and other itinerants), did you know that you can rent this space and use its silkscreening facilities for something crazy like $50/week? it's such a deal for getting projects done.

for my part, i dug myself out of an email hole (well, partly) and managed to get the city of craft applications up online today! this year we have a swanky new online form which i am very proud of. i owe big thanks to graeme bunton for helping me through the process. nw get on down to applying, citizens.