A-MEND-MENTAL

This blouse-blog is about damned time.

As I was mending this thrifted blouse I recalled the many hours of exposure I have had recently to exploring the topic of healing. Nearly all people who are close to me have had questions in mind about how to negotiate their spirituality with looming global concerns. What eases me now is the confidence to mend, heal and repair that what is authentic and original. What once was without, is now within. Looking to matters of limitation for one's real freedom and creativity is a method I discovered two years ago as I was working on my senior thesis project at MCAD. I never realized that I would share that process with my whole life.

I received this book this week (the green one) as a self-birthday-present. Thank you, Miranda July for never letting me put it down.

Reading this makes me feel at odds about having so much energy to listen, rather than tell. Yesterday, It wasn't working out for me very well...

Mike Perry week at MCAD, here.

ASSEMBLING APPETITE

This is the first book I turn to for all of my projects. I often wonder when or if dazzling designs like this will ever materialize in my work.

"There is joy in the intense, harmonic, ragged, mysterious, teetering messiness of all things that stop and start, merge and part, clash and concede. That is what gives us appetite. And that is what people want....Sometimes — a great many times — good design defies strategy. Sometimes greatness comes from the combined exuberance & thoughtful conversation between client and designer: you and us!!!"

— excerpt from Martin Venezky's manifesto for his studio Appetite Engineers

This last year in Minneapolis, I am dedicating my time to getting serious about the design world, by focusing on more design play.

"we need heirloom pieces again...grand elusion, the "escapist element"...regretting the passing of time...bringing back tradition and private pleasure"

–ANNA SUI, fashion designer NY, reflecting on her amazing fall 2006 collection