further adventures in coastlessness.

we started today early by screwing everything up and arriving late at no coast. thankfully, reba was able to rejig her schedule and i was able to stock the shop up with new sweetie pie buttons sets. so don't worry, pilsen, you too have sweetie pie buttons at your fingertips. the last time we were through town, no coast was just about to open so i hadn't seen it in action yet. the store has filled in perfectly, the stock padded heavily by the unique output of the collective members who run the space (lots of flats both letterpressed and silkscreened, in particular).

after no coast we got an early start on the road to indianapolis. indiana, to me, has always seemed a study in shades of gray. i have driven through some of the worst weather i have been in there (aside from michigan and london, ontario, but that's a different story). graham and i were convinced we were going to die by lightning there a few years back. even on the nice days i have experienced there, there is often an element of tumult and wind in the skies.

take note, sarah mcneil, most of indy is stealing your colour palettes.

we got to town in good time for once, met up with our friends jaime and jerry, and went out to pick up some supplies at the thrift store. this is the kind of place to go thrifting. and look at the curatorial care with which the shops are arranged:

we drove around a bit taking in the sites (there are, too) and settled into a night of home life and crafty show and tell with our hosts.

jaime spins, makes awesome recycled t-shirt yarn, finishes vintage quilt tops into quilts and more. jerry specializes in western wear (and does a mean business in custom work, if you are ever looking for such a thing). they also have a lovely home full of jerry's typewriter collection, taxidermy, sewing machines and equipment, state plates and jerry's garage full of vintage bikes for rebuildin'. good show and tell, guys. i like this place.

new bags by jerry lee's western wear

yes, jaime has a whole stuffed deer. yes, these things can be found here.

big day, chicago.

today started innocently enough with a trip to unique vintage to buy a few travel supplies. other than these inquisition barbies, it was a classic urban thrift experience. gems were hard to come by and pricey for people about to drive into the middle of nowhere.

we then moved on to the more comfortable climes of one of my first retailers, uncle fun. billy read us our playing card-based astrological profiles. i am a benevolent cynic when it comes to such things but they were pretty bang-on psychological profiles. as it turns out, i am a jack of diamonds. who knew?

we stocked the shop up with all manner of billy-approved buttons and stocked ourselves up with a collection of small things that we don't need (except that we totally do) - such is the particular charm of this very special shop. this time, i also made an effort to look up. the counters and drawers are so cluttered with cool junk that i hadn't noticed, for instance, the giant tiger wearing a witches hat or the (i believe) embroidered portrait of a costumed john belushi. there are a few picture below but way more can be found by poking around here.

on our last visit through town, i was sad to find the world's largest spray string sculpture to be gone (reported on here). apparently, it had lost all stability and was decomposing onto the marchandise. well, i am happy to report that it has been replaced by the (world's only?) wish-granting robot.

living in our precarious nomadic way, we partook heartily in some good fortune hunting before moving on. speaking of good fortune and uncle fun, it looks like we will be spending a weekend in their window doing things in june. but more on that later. we have other places to visit.

of course, what would a trip to chicago be without at least one incident of circling around lost due to diagonal street confusion? we found this stuff while lost...

...but it makes me worry for our upcoming visit to north america's most cock-eyed town, pittsburgh.

we finally made it to renegade handmade about an hour before they closed and loaded them with new goodies. i also got to drool over their big selection of ever-new things. this wood cut by multi polar projects caught my eye this time. it's a limited run of one million, so i should just stop dragging my heels.

we stopped in on sue but tried not to bother her for too long. she's an affable lady but she was going through applications for the west coast renegade craft fairs (to which we have applied) and we were getting worn out, anyway. plus the cell phone needed to be exchanged at some grocery store way across town. that's what this is all about:

photo by rev. aitor

exhaustion + making sure the phone worked + being on hold + getting hungry + no seating.

thankfully we finally got sorted out, i was free of my dino captor and we ended our day by being treated to a home cooked meal from the incredible reba rar rar followed by drinks at the skylark, a photo booth, and a reunion with my long-time pal, noah.

a wonderful way to end a chock-full day. the food was amazing, reba!

note to selves: we can't live like this for an entire month. let's wish on the robot gods for a slower pace once we reach indiana.

midwest is best.

today we left milwaukee after some harried running around. there were pictures to take, orders to post, questions to ask, sleeping moments to extend, and new inventions to crank out. but i will get back to that in a moment.

today we bid our sad farewell to paper boat; we won't be back through here before they shut their doors at the end of the month. if you are in the area, you should check out the amazing deals they have going on some of the indie craft community's finest wares.

muffy balls by muffy


talking painting by justin richel




ohhh bama! & snarky valentines by owly shadow puppets

we also bid a less-sad farewell to faythe. do not be mistaken, we began to miss her immediately but she will still be in milwaukee when we are back through in june.

and, yes, it is true, before we left town i actually managed to finish a small run of new secret message envelopes. "i love you" - simple, obvious, needed by the world. they are up in my etsy shop now. if you like them, i would snap one up quick; my perfect envelope supply is dwindling and i may have to switch styles for future runs.

having packed up, visited and crafted we were ready to shove off back to chicago for a couple of store meetings, or so we thought. the mixture of rain, late afternoon and chicago drivers (sorry guys, you are collectively the worst and i have been everywhere) made our trip more than double in length. we gotinto town with only enough time to drop in on paper boy.

the girls discovered the joy of secret messages (very flattering at this early stage in my invention's life) and i am happy to say that the shop is now the first chicago outlet for these mysterious marvels. they picked up a good selection and a few of the newer button sets. aitor's work is also all over that place, so check them out!

we ended our day making things and watching a fantastic documentary about song poems (because our hostess, one miss emily candini, makes us way cooler than we actually are).

i love you, chicago. you wear me out but only through constant excitement, activity and support.

buttons are born in wisconsin.

even though i have purchased many button parts (over 100,000 at last count) from various sellers and distributors, they have mostly come from west bend, wisconsin. how can i know this, you ask? well, the boxes come padded and packed in crumpled newspapers from - you guessed it - west bend, wisconsin. this crumpled paper, obviously, got me thinking about where the parts were coming from in more specific terms than i had previously considered. i knew, basically, how the parts are made and i could guess at physical manufacture processes. but, i didn't know who made them. i didn't know anything about their business practices. i didn't know what happened to waste materials. i didn't know much.

until today.

taking advantage of our proximity to west bend while visiting faythe, i arranged to visit usa buttons, self-described as "the world's largest manufacturer of button making machines and parts and supplies for the button, ribbon and awards industry" (i have not bothered to try to verify this claim, as i believe that unchallenged stakes are true). regardless of their size, they are the folks creating the button parts that i have been using and they are the folks packing boxes with their local papers.

yup, this is where the magic happens. with all the indie handmade jargon floating around (peppered with small slights towards factory production), it seemed very important to me to acknowledge the relationship between factory made materials and what i do in independent art, craft and manufacture. i do this knowing full well how widespread this factory complicity is within the craft community. yarns, beads, glues, glitters, threads, needles, paper, fabric - of the things among these that can be made by hand alone, none of them are being made currently in quantities sufficient to support the ever-growing craft economy's needs.

but back to west bend and the factory i have been supporting over the years. i had the delightful opportunity to chat for upwards of an hour with sales and customer service rep, margaret whatley, and operations manager, harry gramoll jr., who were both veritable fonts of information on the manufacture, history, trends and cultural climate of button machines and parts. and they indulged all of my questions with a happiness and genuine interest that this tired city girl was not expecting. it's the midwest.

a learned about the six inch button machine that harry had in his office (a technology that came to usa buttons through the acquisition of a defunct manufacturing company in connecticut). it never went into production in west bend, when harry priced out its manufacture at a raw cost almost $800 higher than the conneticut comapny's retail (hence their defunctitude, one would assume). also, a button the size of a salad plate might have limited appeal for the amount of effort and invenstment required to make it and all its coordinating parts.

margaret showed me square and rectangular machines, stack punches with interchangeable dies, and went over various techniques and quirks attached to the more complicated machines.

and harry's office boasted a button wall of old, new and novelty buttons of all sizes unlike any collection i have seen (although there must be a few).

margaret and harry both purport the company to be family run, well managed, and a nice and respectful place to work. the extended family feeling of working at usa buttons came up a few times. of course, i am a client of theirs - one could guess that they would want to represent their business to me in a positive light. but the atmosphere was friendly in an unforced manner that made me believe them.

i also got down to some big question i hadn't yet had found any information about concerning the environmental responsibility of button part and machine manufacture. things were much as i had imagined in that department - all metal waste (the bulk of waste from this manufacturing process) is sold as scrap to be recycled. the mylar off-cuts go to the landfill. harry did tell me, however, that they are very committed to reducing waste in their manufacturing process and recycling off-cuts wherever possible. the waste from the plastic backing used for some products (none that i use) was recently paired with a recycling depot. harry also said that they got to the beginning stages of a potential mylar recycling contract with a man in illinois, but that it had fallen through and the man had disappeared. he also said that the mylar comes from california and that he would give another look in that direction for facilities that had the means to repurpose the difficult plastic. many of the things that makes it so well suited for button making (thinness, archival quality, toughness) also make it a challenging material to break down without burning it.

clearly, there is still growth to happen evnvironmentally. and questions of waste and recycling only represents one of many levels of environmental responsibility required to run a large scale manufacturing business. but i am happy that i know a little bit more about the products i make through margaret and harry's generosity with their time and knowledge.

oh, and this is the end of their street, below.

reunions in the dairy air.

today i was finally reunited with aitor. oh, did i not mention that he and a small contingent of the toronto pipe club had come down to a resort just outside of chicago to attend the annual chicagoland international pipe and tobacciana show? with over three hundred vendors, i really wish i had been able to go, take pictures, see the sites and report back to you, dear reader. but other obligations kept my nose to the grindstone in chicago and, given that the terrible directions i got to the convention ballooned my trip out there from one hour to three, it probably just was not meant to be. aitor surely has all kinds of stories of this cultish subsection of the handicraft world - slow smoking, the attire of the pipe nerd, overheard pipey gossip. maybe this secrets will come to light if he and his collective ever get behind the routine of writing their ideas and experiences down. we'll see.

in spite of time spent lost and confused on suburban illinois highways, the bulk today's travel was supposed to be spent going on a pilgrimage to milwaukee, to visit our friend faythe. faythe does one million things so coordinating a social visit with her has taken three years. of course, no trip from chicago to milwaukee is complete with a visit to the mars cheese castle (pictured above and below). yes, that is saturn on their logo.

we got to milwaukee with squeaky cheese curds in our tummies and warm hugs from faythe all around. we got to look around her shop, paper boat, which was a bittersweet experience given that after four years of operation, the recession finally tipped the scales and forced them to close at the end of this month. but more on that later; i am working a piece about faythe for the toronto craft alert that should go deeper into some of that information. for now, though, the shop is still open, it's perfectly curated and we felt very lucky to get to finally visit it. the final show in the gallery is a collection of mixed media drawings by handmade nation camera woman, micaela o'herlihy. it is exquisite and entirely worth a visit if you are in the area.

it is a real treat to visit with faythe in her incredibly inviting home (which did not make us feel itchy at all, as suggested by some weirdo comments here). sunshine everywhere, the largest collection of our community's art that i have ever seen in one place, open space, and fresh paint. faythe's home also boasts the holy grail of itinerant wayfarers, the spare bedroom. a dream wrapped in soft natural light!

tonight we partake in the pride of milwaukee. it could be a punishing night. i'm not sure that we have the intestinal fortitude (literally) to keep pace with 'america's drinking hole.' only time will tell.

shlemiel, shlemazel, y'all!

is chicago.

since starting this little trip, i have mostly been holed up trying to hammer out some lingering work and catching the odd improv show that my friend and host-for-the-weekend, emily, has running. so it was a great treat to get out today (cubs game and associated madness notwithstanding) and do my first shop visit. chicago comics was one of the first stores that ever carried my stuff. since this is the midwest, this makes the staff there feel like friendly distant relatives. i could say that about most of my chicago shops, really (although some owners and managers are not so distant). i guess it's just this town - or the people i have had the good fortune of happening upon within it.

all this is to say that chicago comics has a hefty new selection of loose buttons to shoot some colour and joy into your chicagoan lives.

on this visit, i also became strangely aware of the on-counter display boxes that slicker companies provide to their vendors - chicago comics carries things like small art toys, art trading cards and the like. it's very sweet that they made me my own display box out of cardboard and business cards (and, somehow, this ramshakle aesthetic seems to fit my ramshakle approach to things) but i started to feel that i should be extending that kind of service to shops like theirs. emma, be forewarned: you will be getting a call from me when we are both back in toronto for advice and guidance on this topic.

it begins anew.

in all my hustling i somehow left my camera on and killed the battery so there are no pictures of sarnia, flint, lansing or the kroger where i spent and hour and a half trying to sort out the simple complexities of buying a pre-paid cell phone. there also aren't any pictures of me slicing the end of my finger off in the lock of a rest area bathroom stall. there aren't any pictures of me rolling through gary, indiana, and eating my first fast food potato snacks of this american journey. there are also no pictures of my late arrival to chicago and the feelin i get hen i come to this favorite town of mine. sure, it's not the same without alana here. but emily's no slouch. and billy's here and reba, and noah. this trip is going to be alright. i even saw one of those amazing chicago bunnies that haunt this place like cute rats. i've decided it's a good omen - mostly because it happens almost daily.