soldiering on.

these envelope updates are starting to feel unnecessarily perfunctory which is a real disservice to the plucky people worldwide who have been sending me contributions. i will say, though, in my defense, that i have to take a trip out to the west coast to attend to some family business and am just trying to get through current submissions before i leave. i now have eleven packages sitting on my living room chair waiting to be sorted. i've certainly passed the half way point. which is good because i also wanted to launch phase two (scanning patterns) before i leave.

but back to business, above is a collection from danielle in california. although they look fairly run-of-the-mill, i compared these all to my current collection and don't have any of these specific variantions yet.



these are from katie in california. the wavy one is pretty exciting.



these are from maj in germany. sorry, north americans, but i do perk up when i see packages from overseas (actually, i have yet to get any from mexico, either). regardless, maj delivered some nice new finds, all packaged in this puzzle-like conglomeration of used envelopes. i had to carefully disassemble to whole thing to find my prizes. i especially like the one in the background which is part of a huge envelope so i get maximum use out of it. its pattern is so big that the resulting buttons are all quite different and amazing. maj also included another of the solid colour envelopes. my collection of these is becoming quite large so i will have to come to a decision about their inclusion in the project soon. any advice or influence is currently encouraged.



speaking of conundrums, here is a pattern sent in by maitreya in seattle. although i have yet to do my due diligence and poke around the company's webpage to see if this imagery comes from some sort of advertising campaign, it still brings up a question of representational imagery. when i started this project, i had seen it to be an illumination of mundane abstraction. you know...begging the question "how can the same person who feels alienated by abstract art, accept these decorative abstracts as part of everyday routine. blah blah blah. anyway, i don't yet know where i stand on images of things in this project. so far all thing patterns have been eliminated for reasons of corporate branding. but what happens when i find one that doesn't come from anywhere?



last but not least, this group comes from viki is louisville, kentucky (one of my favorite places, by the way). she had mysteriously sent me an email promising a spectrum of pink and purple patterns. i didn't let my hopes inflate too much. but look what arrived in the mail! a whole whack of colours i didn't have yet. and although one or two of these are from companies to which such girlie hues make sense, the totally pink one on the far right is from the department of defense. we can all infer whatever we like from that.

267 patterns now.