Amanda Palmer has been on my radar for a while, as someone with an interesting relationship to art, even though I don’t particularly like her music. In this video, “The Art of Asking”, she explains how the exchange between artist and fan fuels her work and is about a lot more than money.

The great thing about knitting is that you can take it everywhere you go and that there is always the perfect project for whatever you are going to be doing.

Like a sweater for a long car ride, full of boring stockinette but you have someone to talk to and space to leave the project, when you don’t want to lug it around.

Or a sock for everyday emergency knitting in your hand bag. Countless hours of knitting in a thin enough yarn.

Or a lace shawl, for those exciting knitting hours at home with an audiobook for company

When traveling somewhere the project needs to be picked with more care. It is always going to be a representative of the place you knit it at. There are weight and complexity constraints, as well as robustness constraints. For example when I walked the Camino I thought about knitting in lace yarn, but I decided against the fiddlyness, because after walking all day fingers tend to be swollen and less sensitive. Equally the project needed to be simple enough to be knitable in company and interesting enough to engage me for three weeks. I chose the Daybreak shawl.

Right now I am fighting with a stainless steel yarn. It’s not a lot of fun, but good for warmer temperatures. So yeah, this is basically why I am writing a blogpost instead. I’ll stop now and knit a few rows.

Sometimes it’s more important to make a mark than to produce a decent product. In fact putting a mark to paper and producing horrid turds is better than all the grand masterpieces in your head.

One of my little idea-projects for this year is to make a mark on a piece of paper roughly every day. I have 7,5 cm2 pieces of Origami paper that I’m using with whatever pen I have lying around. It’s a bad setup with inferior materials, but also with little pressure. Anything counts.

So this week I’ve been playing with making marks and connecting lines.

Seat Assignment. By Nina Katchadourian (permission to use granted)

The internet is full of wonderfullnesses, like Nina Katchadourian, who shot self-portraits in airplane lavatories. What sets her apart from your average toilet portraiteur, is that the photos emulate the 15th to 17th century flemish style of painting, using only things to be found in such a lavatory. Toilet paper, cell phone camera and lavatory lighting.

Often we believe that we need this, or that to start a crafty venture. We buy a book full of stamps and the fanciest knitting needles. We believe only the very bestest camera will give us a picture worth liking. And yet here is Nina moving and inspiring, in the best possible way, with no more than a bit of toilet paper and her cell phone camera.

Nina’s portraits are on exhibit starting this Saturday, April 14th to May 26th at Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

As a fan of all things crafted I adore the genius behind these marble machines. Especially nifty: exchangeable modules. This allows the player to combine different lifting engines with different coasters for the marbles. I also salute the precision with which the marbles are thrown and caught in one of these little machines.