TexTile text...

At 11 pm Thursday I realized that the deadline for the next installment of artist trading cards, this time including textile artists and poets from all three prairie provinces, was Friday.

So as M tried to sleep, I madly cut and pasted text onto images then cropped and sized those images by the light from my bedside lamp.

While some people complain about crumbs in bed, M would have had cause to complain about the shreds of paper from the paper sample books that he got at one of his graphic design jobs.



That is, if he'd woken up or if he was the type to notice such things (the shreds I mean, not that I'd snafued his paper samples...he understands that what's mine is mine and what's his is also mine).

The next morning, I noticed that a few of the squares I'd cut out were a bit crooked, despite the template I'd used...and since I've coveted a paper slicer ever since I was small and my father used to take us to his office on the weekends and we'd photocopy/staple/slice paper to our heart's content while he tried to work (!), I strollered Anna to the mall and bought one.

Except that it didn't quite fit underneath the stroller. So I sort of had to wedge it underneath and hope that it wouldn't jiggle loose as I humped the stroller and the baby over curbs and cracks.



But it stayed put. And then Anna fell asleep just as I was turning the corner to home, so I was able to spend a good hour assembling, gluing, and, yes, slicing my 26 artist trading cards.

And the day only got better from there as M's parents showed up at our house with burgers and chili fries from a local diner called Mrs. Mike's.

Since I knew Sharon Caseburg, poetess and organizer of what has been dubbed TexTile Project, would be at Prairie Fire's Home Place launch (being one of 34 Home Place poets reading that night...), I dumped my ATCs into an envelope, rubbed the chili grease and dried glue from my hands, and left.



(Given how busy busy business my life has been of late, it goes without saying that I practiced reading my poem in the car on the way to the launch...)

But I handed off my ATCs on time and nearly goaded fellow participant Kerry Ryan into showing me her ATCs...but even though Kerry refused me, I was still smug with accomplishment as I subsided into my reserved chair, cracking the spine of my reading copy of Home Place...

* * *

Official description of ATCs for those of you unsure what exactly I am talking about:

ARTIST TRADING CARDS are miniature works of art created to measure 2.5 X 3.5 inches or 64 X 89 mm. They must fit in the plastic sheets designed to fit baseball or hockey cards. Poets, think of these in terms of being tiny broadsheets meeting the above measurements. ATCs are typically one-sided, with information about the artist on the reverse. POETRY TRADING CARDS would feature a short poem, appropriate to the size of the card, possibly decorated by the poet as the poet sees fit. Contact info and info about the poet could be featured on the back. Both ATCs and PTCs MUST measure 2.5 x 3.5 inches.