not my blog but your blog | gastronomical sovereignty blog swap

hola friends of kaitlyn! my name is kristy and i run a little blog called gastronomical sovereignty - it's a place where i get to yap about all my culinary adventures with an ethical twist.* i think eating is a fundamentally social, ecological and political venture. my blog affords me the ability to navigate those issues on a very intimate yet public level...with wine of course. lots of it. come share a glass! (or eight).

i was so pumped, flattered and frankly a little surprised when kaitlyn asked me to do a blog swap with her. see, she's kind of rad (but you already knew that), and one of my most lovelies in real life. we've discussed our blogs together during many a dinner and crafting sesh. but our blogs are so different i never even thought to collaborate together. but of course, she's brilliant and proposed the idea and i made a suggestion: because our blogs are so different why don't we steal eden's idea (of eden eats everything) and run a swap. the idea is to post something we ordinarily wouldn't on our own blogs. eden calls these posts "not my blog" posts. i call them "not my blog but your blog" posts. so, here we go!

art and the process of creation is a very personal thing. that being said, i was browsing the internet (probably the least personal space possible) trying to find something i could post about here while not feeling like a total a$$, and came across the work of onelonelyapricot. she's done some pretty cool stuff that explores the way we think about domesticity in modern culture and how that affects us - like food, sewing, family and personal memories and histories. part of her creative process includes browsing and utilizing thrift stores for her materials in an effort to preserve the past and allow such stories to live on. 

i contacted her and she was stoked to take part in my guest post for kaitlyn. she had a lot to say. and i really enjoyed coming to know her and her art more intimately. however, in true kaitlyn post fashion, i'm trying to keep it short.** i wonder if i've already gone over the word limit? so i'll shut up now - and pardon the copy and pasting but i figure who can say her piece about her pieces better than the artist herself. when asked about the displays in her art she responded:

"i think faux flowers and printed images of flowers are the perfect representation of decoration. if you take them away, everything still functions, but still, something is lost. we don't need floral wallpaper or floral sheets in our homes, we can have the plainest walls and the plainest sheets and the plainest things and their function remains the same. the flowers are just decorations. i think that's the way some people feel about many of the skills people use in the home. 

specifically, i'm referring to women, because as a woman those are the skills that were passed down to me and what i know best. surely there's a different but similar set of skills that have been nearly lost among men. maybe i'll get into that in the future. but for now this is about me and i am a woman. 

we no longer really need to sew our own clothes. it takes ages to sew clothing and doesn't really save money most of the time. we don't need to mend things because buying a brand new replacement doesn't cost us much.

we don't need to cook. we could go out to eat, or buy prepared meals at the supermarket. we don't need to knit or grow a garden or so many other things. yet many people today are learning these skills and putting them to use, including myself. i find this fascinating - why we want so badly to be able to create all of these things by hand when we could so easily buy them. we could save all of the time we save not making things and put it to good use doing something exciting. i guess i just don't see most people around me doing many exciting things with all of that free time.

for me, making these things is about preserving something which i feel is vital. i feel that if people stopped making things by hand altogether, as a culture we would lose something great and important. so that's what i mean by decoration. it's not out of necessity that i like to sew or cook or all of those other things i mentioned. some would say it's just a hobby. for fun. playing house. it's decoration. not important. dispensable. those are their opinions. but i would tend to disagree. the masks talk about women's work in the home being undervalued, as if it's just decoration. but i think there is something to this work that we don't give enough attention."

* did i also mention that along with being a total food-a-holic i'm also a women's studied major and a feminist?

** kaitlyn laughs.*