Tiny Pricks Project – slowly she turned

Here we are on Thanksgiving week, ready to celebrate the only holiday I participate in other than Festivus. And the big news is that Sandy and I will be spending it at Lake Waccamaw at my cousin’s house, my heart space, the house that I mourned for the past year because nobody who saw the flood damage from Hurricane Florence thought that my cousin’s wife would spend the money and make the huge effort to save it. But she did! It won’t be the same – all new furniture and appliances since the antiques were ruined. I’ll know more when I get there.

And my sister and brother-in-law finally moved out of the rental house and back to their house on the shore down the road.

For the past month, I mainly concentrated on the Tiny Pricks Project, but I have done some other fun art things. My most recent Tiny Pricks project is a large tea towel so it is taking a while. I should get it done tonight, hopefully! Scuppernong Books has already started pinning up our handkerchiefs, doilies, and crafty items spotlighting the unmatched wise words of our very, very brilliant Dear Leader, and we will add a few more before we send them all to Diana Weymar and the big Tiny Pricks Project. This has been very good for me: good for my stress level, my sense of humor, and connection with other people. I made new friends, which is not easy for me. You can see the Greensboro chapter’s projects on Instagram. I have finished three and three of the four are related to hurricane quotes.

I couldn’t resist doing one of his nonsense “word salads” and this is a bit hard to read, so I’ve typed it below the photo.

I’m going to maybe and I’m looking at it very seriously. We’re doing some other things that you probably noticed like some of the very important things that we’re doing now. But we’re looking at it very seriously because you can’t do that.

Wow, that’s a very serious amount of nothing said at all!

Speaking of nothing, don’t forget to do any shopping early this week so you can celebrate “Buy Nothing Day” on Friday. So there IS a third holiday that I participate in.

I think that I’ll put the other stuff in another post.

A while back several news articles began circulating on Facebook that got a lot of attention from me and my fiber artist friends. They were about Diana Weymar, an artist who created The Tiny Pricks Project, who says this about how it began on her website:

On Jan. 8th, 2018 I stitched ‘I am a very stable genius’ into a piece of my grandmother’s abandoned needlework from the 1960s. When I posted it on Instagram, the response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. Assuming he would become more presidential over time, with only the occasional ridiculous tweet, I decided to stitch one Trump quote a week. However, it quickly became a daily practice, as I tried to keep up with the outpouring of “unpresidential” text. Friends asked if I would host workshops so that they could join the project. Tiny Pricks Project has since become the largest textile Trump protest EVER with over 1100 Tiny Pricks and hundreds of participants globally. The series will go strong until Trump is out of office. The goal is to create 2020 Tiny Pricks by 2020!

One of my friends tagged a half dozen of us to see if we wanted to participate, and thus the Greensboro chapter of the Tiny Pricks Project began. We meet on Monday and Wednesday nights in a couple of different places to stitch the outrageous and surreal words of the man currently occupying the Oval Office on tea towels, doilies, and handkerchiefs that we pick up in various thrift/antique stores. One of us doesn’t stitch but has drawn and written designs for stitchers to pick up and work on. We started out at a local brewery but as fall progressed the lighting became too dim, so we now meet at our favorite local bookstore, Scuppernong Books, in downtown Greensboro on Mondays, and just moved our Wednesday night meeting to Leveneleven Brewing, a small brewpub across from the Greensboro Coliseum on Coliseum Boulevard.

We plan to do this for at least the next six weeks, after which we will have a small show of our work at Scuppernong before sending them to Diana Weymar for her project. You don’t have to come to the meetings to participate.

Last night we agreed that this project has been so therapeutic and fun that we will likely continue meeting as a group after the show.

Here are a few of the finished pieces. The top one is mine. If you are interested, please follow the Tiny Pricks Project Greensboro Instagram page.