Ok so now we have a direction

So I have been thinking and it is probably time to be Ina full time, so I am producing some new material to do that.

The site will look a bit different and I will probably commercialise the blog.

I am tired of messing about.  It has been so long since I worked with a positive manager that work is not bringing me much joy anymore.  Most unlike me.

It does make a difference to the massive pile I am doing just now.  I have also invested in some automation, which will be interesting.

Anyway, down to a normal working week, which is kind of part time for me, I prefer to be doing more than one thing, but I think a bit of investment in time in Ina will be a better payoff.

Bawbag did me a lot of damage in terms of health, not really his fault. I had no idea I was so emotional.  Recovering well now, after much timewasting.

The fire coat is in the finishing stages, coming soon.  Little Shiva making more sense, but it does take up an outrageous amount of space, so progress is slow.

 

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Fire coat and Little Shiva

Finally managed to get Little Shiva on the way, doing a range of footstools with the new work, and working on the Fire Coat.

You may be astonished at the amount of thought and time that has gone into this new update, however it is very large and I have not worried about time whilst doing it.

I wasn’t really in an emotional state to continue after my most recent bereavement, but it has been over 18 months now, Bawbag is off the streets so I am now at the point of being able to problem solve the thorny issue of Little Shiva, which has been quite an engineering feat.

It will still be delightfully wonky, however building an egg from the yolk out turns out to be quite a difficult thing to do.

It is now four years since I saw Little Shiva, so as you can imagine it is not feeling quite as raw as it was when I started the piece of work and I am thinking in a more detailed way about what I want with it.  This means the shell is now just as important as the interior, so it is worth taking your time over things if you have that luxury.

The footstools will go well with it, and means I am going more into the sculptural elements of my creative thinking.  I do think more 3d than 2 so this makes sense.

Recovery generally is slow, but I see a difference every day.  I unfortunately tried to rush it and injured a foot, but it is healing also.

That’s it. Don’t rate my recent choices much.  Making new ones.

Ina

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The Fire Coat is on the way

For those of you following the Bawbag story, we lasted less than a week before making indirect contact, so there will be more to this story in the future once I have sorted a few things out this end.

Working on the Fire Coat follow up to the Lady Victory sweater.  I am having enormous fun with it.

Glasgow Lace is intended to become a construction grade version of Irish Lace.  I have big plans for it, but at the moment am doing the clothing items to pin down the technique and get it draping correctly before the next stage.

I guess I will be spending the next summer or two in stunning clothes whilst I figure out the tensile potential.

I should be doing some serious vocational courses just now, but too creative and I have to get this work moved on whilst in the mood.

 

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Bawbag Jailed

So, for those of you who are interested, Bawbag got roughly 9 months, which means he will be out by July.

This is absolutely no help to the film project, since I would have only about 8 weekends or so out of that time to get the entire shoot done.  It is highly unlikely that anyone will want to rent his crappy shop prior to July, so he will reemerge as a problem unless more of his cases come up before then and he gets jailed for one of those.

ASPD is a strange condition.  The people I talk to online about it share an excellent sense of humour, however despite an obsession with their reputation cannot help expressing themselves in crime.

It is an actual brain anomaly, so there is little apart from keeping yourself very calm and avoiding emotional stress tha you can do.  Bawbag’s search for a doormat wife is not far off the mark.  If someone sufficiently deaf/boring existed, it would probably help him enormously. (you really would have to have the tolerance of granite)

I do not think, however that Scotland is the right place for him to find this.  Women tend to be quite decisive and fiesty and they are not likely to want to spend their time sitting in the house waiting for a petty bully to come home and take out his inadequacies on them.

I went from being sympathetic, really up until Thursday, to not caring at all after his filming me passing.  He has just started doing this, I assume some not-very-bright lawyer or policeman has advised this.  Only a moron would advise a guy who has a history of stalking, and whom has even harassed a person (me) he dragged in off the street for the purposes of blaming for his behaviour, to then stalk the same person purchasing a cup of tea and leaving the area two or three times a week using his phone.

I took the precaution of making the police aware of the various things he was doing throughout the period of him screaming at me in the street. As I have no real animosity towards him, they knew I wouldn’t make a particularly great witness, and they were not particularly helpful. As I have said before, the best course of action with bullies is to completely ignore them.

On the plus side, this means I have never had to be involved in any of his cases, which inevitably involve people he has annoyed financially as well as personally – the ex girlfriend that just did him for stalking, in what reads to me like a very sparse and badly defended case, was pursuing him via a debt collector.  He did not mention this to me, I was told by one of the other complainants whom he also owed money. I am unsure who the third complainant was, I suspect it was the first wife but have no idea.

Anyway, it seems from what the ex has to say that he pled guilty to this one to facilitate defending the ones coming up, which are worse.  She threw the book at him, according to him because of jealousy, but he lies a lot. Anomalies in the case, having read the brief articles, were how he managed to get intimate pictures of a person he was stalking rather than, as he claimed, taking them when he was sleeping with her.  She seems to have presented this as an error of judgement rather than the marriage he claimed it was.

It was brave of her, but I’m not sure how much in the way of alternative options she had. What I do know is that he was constantly reverberating around getting her back with him, and that none of the people involved in the case, protagonist or antagonist were particularly kind people that you would want in your life.

So you are left thinking, is kindness in this situation basically a waste of time? Bawbag is brutal because brutality is what he understands of the world, which is not very accurate.  Bawbag  is amazingly self obsessed.  He has no empathy and isn’t really capable of considering other people because of his condition.  None of these things would normally require jail, especially if he was around people of sufficiently strong character to simply manage him.

Alongside that, he can be fun, considerate on his own terms – he was even polite whilst smashing my stuff – and is entirely bewildered by this entire situation, to the point that even I could defend him better than he can. Treating him with a bit of kindness is only a temporary fix, however, having tried it. He needs specialist help, and I am not at all sure he is going to get this in jail without the intervention of somebody who cares.

Ina

 

 

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You cannot force a person to accept their own worth

So went over to buy my tea with the idea of speaking to Bawbag before he heads to court for sentencing tomorrow.

Bought my tea without fuss, then circled the block to pass to see if this was a worthwhile endeavour.

The vibe was so negative that I gave up bothering to try.

I don’t know how many times I have tried forgiving this idiot for what is pretty unforgiveable behaviour from a friend, he just comes back with more hate. He doesn’t seem to understand that being a toxic friend is an entirely different ballgame from being a toxic boyfriend.  What his girlfriend finds frightening, I merely find annoying and transient.

I realised on the way home that this is all he understands.  He cannot understand that I would be positive at all, so my humour makes no sense to him and everything is reinterpreted as hatred.

It is also a lot easier for him to transfer his hatred for the ex girlfriend that is actually putting him through all this to me.  He did this three years ago and he has apparently not stopped.  You cannot fix stupid.

You might as well hate a cat for being Siamese, he isn’t tremendously capable of change, it is a waste of time.

So, rather than for the umpteenth time trying to offer the guy some help and sympathy, I was filmed with a view to his having me attacked, presumably by another jailbird, at a later date. This is tiresome and pointless and I am tired of trying.

As with the family, at some point you have to accept that people are stupid and nasty and there is no point in bothering with them.

So, rather than the post wishing him well I wanted to write, I am now left thinking it would be far better if he just goes.

It’s all very sad and pointless.

Ina

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My Dreams are Your Trash (Lady Victory)

 

Lady Victory
Lady Victory rear

This is the Lady Victory sweater, which has been named as a gag for Viscount Glasgow, who has again annoyed me this month and who will not be getting any more chances to annoy me in the future. His father apparently thought I was a baby machine and toilet cleaner, and he  cannot manage to respond as if I am human, never mind adult either. Not surprisingly, I no longer care whether they survive, which I count as a win.

It featured in my piece of performance art ‘My Dreams Are Your Trash‘ which was performed for a small audience in Finnieston yesterday.  It was an affectionate response to Bawbag’s magnificent earlier performance art piece ‘I’m so desperate to abuse you that I destroyed your work and dumped it on your car.’  which I found exceptionally charming.

I am quite sure he finds that confusing, but I loved it. It was extremely cute. (and a huge relief since he had prevented me from finishing the work on his cafe and the piece in a similar attempt to abuse me, just because he could, almost three years earlier)

He then followed that work up some weeks later with the seminal ‘Look at me, I can destroy your  film set without anyone stopping me‘ and the groundbreaking ‘I am going to insult you as much as I can in front of an audience for little to no reason‘ on the same day (probably to please his unpleasant elderly girlfriend)

He will be delighted to know that I am still fond of and use power tools despite the teachings of whatever hadith he managed to find a reference to women and the use of power tools in.

Anyway this is Glasgow lace, which is my reengineering of Irish lace, and will be featuring in several more pieces in the future as it is so much fun.

Ina

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The Inevitable Bawbag Post

 

Ok so Bawbag, of Haram Bawbag fame, has got himself in very bad trouble and managed to make the papers this week.

He has got what he wanted, which was a day in court failing to defend himself and pleading guilty to show what a great guy he is (he really isn’t, but never mind.  He is a perfectly normal level of good and bad with an unfortunate sideline).

So, to address what was in the papers, since it has come to my attention that people think anything journalists write is true, which it certainly isn’t, here is the correct information.

Bawbag suffers from PTSD, alongside his many other disorders, as a result of a very unstable history.  Libya has not been a safe place for a long time, and at the time of the events depicted his brother had been kidnapped by ISIS.

Bawbag’s politics are somewhere to the right of ISIS, and if you consider that, alongside the fact his friends included a Jewish barber, an eastern European mechanic, me and several Asian Muslims, he isn’t particularly racist.  He is however prone to lengthy rants saying whatever he thinks will hurt you most.  His ex girlfriend was well aware of this and she and his other arch enemy made the most of it.

As for tracking people when he cannot directly see them, he did this with me also, and I was not his girlfriend.  He basically lives as if he is going to be attacked all the time. Yes it is annoying, but it is also understandable.

Bawbag has been a royal pain in the ass, and it pains me to defend him after all the unpleasant things he has done to try and get me to return to his care, but I do not think his day in court was particularly constructive. I can only imagine what a wearing nightmare two years of being his girlfriend must have been, but my personal choice is always to avoid things getting as vicious as this where possible. Not casting any shade, I do understand how angry he is capable of making you and I am fortunate that he was kind enough and had the foresight to let me go when he did so that I did not have to go through the stress of this with him. He didn’t particularly want to fight it, he chose to annoy several more people, including me, instead.

What shocked me as a result of a brief canvas of joe public, was just how willing people are to take things at face value. Hence a mentally ill, emotionally distraught man was depicted as a monster and racist and this was accepted quite readily by people who were not at all interested in what had actually happened. This is going to be out there forever, which isn’t great. He will never improve his behaviour with no incentive, he will just get nastier and more frightened.

I am not at all interested in people so willing to make assumptions about me, Bawbag or anything else.  I think anyone willing to be rude to me in the workplace or anywhere else on the basis of bullshit in the news can basically stick their attitude where the sun don’t shine.  I went through enough just keeping things relatively calm with Bawbag, I am not interested in small minds and nasty negative attitudes.

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The Teapots and Some News

Ok, so the teapots were made as a word gag for Wolfe, they are named after some herbal teas that my best friend at school and I designed when we were 16. They were intended to be named as the teapots are, with personal qualities.

I see that some enterprising company has now done this, but basically the message behind the teapots was ‘do as you like, because you aren’t ever going to be everyone’s cup of tea.’

It was also an exercise in small scale sculpture, I wanted to see exactly what the medium of carpet was capable of.  The answer is actually even better than this, these I now consider quite rough, however they seem to be fairly charming, since they made it into Tatler as interior pieces.

None of these would have been possible without the ego battering that was my online relationship with Wolfe, who veered between extreme kindness and a sort of feigned ignorant cruelty.  Any extensive look at Wolfe will tell you this is normal stuff with him, but I adored him because it taught me an awful lot about shame and how useless it is.

I was in love with Wolfe for about ten years in total until we very successfully met, and from a rather uptight and very sceptical loner, I became sufficiently confident to not be at all worried about what people think nowadays, which paradoxically seems to have made me more attractive.  Rejection is always interesting, and I do love a bit of distance when it comes to creativity.

This week I met up with the previous muse for the first time, although it was brief and I do not include the box I made for his house, which I fell in love with (see the short story Kill the Cynic on the books page for another example of me falling in love with a building) He is very nice, and probably very offput by Ina, but I was very upfront about my wish for him to not be a muse at all, so we shall see what he comes back with.

Basically my creative quirk seems to be sparked by rejection, I have never been at all interested in people that I actually spend any time with, it is always from far away.  It does confuse my friends somewhat, that I will sit and stitch and think extensively about people I have no intention of actually talking to or interacting with. In this case I am more interested in the business side of things and would like to actually interact so that both of us get to retire at some point. I have been sufficiently inspired by this meeting to progress a proposed financial company and make some fresh moves towards expanding my own tiny empire.

I will talk more on this when I deal with Beach, the 1998 piece of work which in many ways I consider one of my best and most traditionally ‘arty’  pieces of work.  I kind of went off on a tangent a bit with the childlike emotion after Beach, but the quirkiness does seem to appeal to people at a very deep level. Whether elitist art fans like it or not really does not matter at all if it says something to everyone else.

The short stories are actually pretty important to the creative process, so if anybody actually wants to get to know me or what the work is about, I recommend searching your favoured bookstore and downloading a couple.  In time it will be clearer which ones go together but for now I think there are only two main contenders that I considered worth putting into an actual collection and that was The Best Ever... series for Wolfe, which is an exercise in self discipline when talking yourself out of an inappropriate love affair, and Stories for an Ignorant Man, which was me uncontrollably outputting for Little Shiva, whose chair is still under construction. Little Shiva got some real excellence out of me, I have no idea why or how, but such achievements take a little longer.

 

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Gypsy at heart, Geek Chic and Palette Handbags

These bags were made for the Sheep in Wolfe’s clothing collection, made whilst I was failing to communicate with David Wolfe, health guru, mainly but not entirely due to my crap sense of self after years of gaslighting.

There was no way of otherwise communicating with him at the time, and as I was overcoming quite crippling shyness, I was literally incoherent, so in addition to being carpet samples, effectively, they were saying something about me.

So I guess they say that I am a shy geek that moves around a lot and is rather fond of colour, basically.

The idea of the Sheep in Wolfe’s clothing collection was in the first case a tease, because the first thing I noticed about Wolfe was that he was promoting veganism whilst wearing wool.  I also wanted to make the versatility of my chosen medium clearer, and find a new way of presenting samples.  I could sit and make samples for years, but they wouldn’t be otherwise useful for anything. This was a way of getting Ina’s free marketing strategy underway whilst creating a sample.  I have never been particularly worried about sales potential of these items as they are intended to illustrate what is possible.

It is also a marketing trick, being in several tag zones is always better than sitting in only one as more people get to see your stuff, and between these and the teapots, which I will talk about in my next post, they were a good idea.  Clicking through them on the site will get you to the etsy store page, where you will see how they look on actual people.

They take about a month of fairly hard work to make, and generally speaking I start with a pile of materials and my hands kind of do it without me, so vague memories of images I have seen come through without much input from me.

I have developed a bit over the years and the visuals get more complicated with time, but generally speaking, the David Wolfe items were all simple, commercial, generated to improve marketing and widen the scope of what Ina is capable of.

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Jemima Khan is Fit for Work

Ok so it has struck me that I have not really explained any of the pieces so I will be writing a blurb for each one.

The Fit for Work collection was mainly to entertain Boris, when he was still around, and was, of course, a nod to Iain Dunkin’ Smith and his ideas about what disability means.

Therefore the people who were declared fit for work in the collection, which in time will include Dunkin’ Smith himself, were all people who either did not work, were incapable of working without displaying evidence of their innate nastiness or who were otherwise people you would not consider particularly desirable in the workplace.

Jemima was selected as she has never had to work rather than anything appalling she has done.  Had I done one for her father, there may have been less attractiveness and more ‘vigour’ involved.

From a technical perspective, it was a case of amassing the correct fabric to recycle, and then recycling it in a way that would be acceptable to modern homes.  The wedding dress that was recycled for the beaded portions was imported and the rest followed from there.

Although you can see I used a lot of fabric and the pieces took a lot of time, they are fully dustable as the fabric was set using resin, a far more interesting use of resin than much of the resin work I see online. These items are not at all cheap to produce, but they are amusingly like life sized toy versions of the entirely practical item I make as a result. I quite like the idea of giant artsy toys. It suits the subject in this case.

It is a messy process and takes, at times months, hence the length of time Little Shiva has taken.

I also had to take the last couple of years off working with resin as my health was not in a sufficiently great state to be able to tolerate the toxin level.  The current occupants of my home take first priority, therefore I have to make sure that I am in a position to continue with that before I do anything.

Finally, apologies for my miserable post over New Year, but I am thoroughly tired of being the shiny bauble in the room, so I like to make up for it during the festive season by being utterly miserable.

Ina

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