Auction #32: The Bees Spring To Life

“Let’s see how you look,” he says, pulls up a chair in the doorway so she can’t run out.

The mother had beautiful things, and the racks behind the governess sag with the silk and satin dresses the mother wore only once and couldn’t throw away. One is the dark blue of the night sky sewn with silver, one is the bright gold of the sun, one shines like a diamond.

When she shakes her head he says, “Come on, you took the boots she gave you. She’s not coming back for these. Let’s pick something nice.”

She feels as if his hands were on her, but he sits in his chair while she pulls the blue dress from the hangar, slides it over her naked bones. She trembles so much that he has to pull up the zipper himself.

He turns her to face the mirror.

“That’s better,” he says, moves the chair aside, closes them in.

---

After the children are asleep, the governess goes to her room and sees the dress of gold laid out on her bed, unzipped and waiting for her. The lining is embroidered with bees (from the mother’s name–the dress was made for her).

She looks out the window as if she could signal someone, but it’s night out, and the window might as well be painted over black.

She puts on the dress and goes to his room.

“Very good,” he says, and she feels like her mouth has been stuffed with cotton and no light will ever reach her.

When he zips the dress closed, she can feel the bees spring to life inside the dress, a thousand tiny stings.

---

A gilded cage is still a thorny prison, and meat is meat.

Cris Fisher

Auction #31: Write. Appropriate. Remix. Transform.

Chimera Fancies are wearable poetry made of old recycled fairy tale books made into new art, my own chosen interstitial art form. For this auction I used an ARC of Interfictions 2, so the text on these pieces is both taken from and inspired by the stories themselves.

“What He Said” is taken from the introduction to Interfictions 2 by Henry Jenkins, “On the Pleasures of Not Belonging”. Jenkins discusses what interstitiality means to him and to others so beautifully here, I wanted to make something to capture this idea. As he said, “Write. Appropriate. Remix. Transform.” Let’s all not belong together.

Mia Nutick

Auction #30: Masked Valentine

Everyone asks me the same question: How did you end up making masks?

Let me tell you:

I have a strong background in theater, and ended up spending a lot of time in my late teens and early twenties working building props, masks, puppets, and scenery pieces for a local childrens theater. I’ve made a bison head with five foot long horns, giant bugs and an elephant the size of a pony… and as much as I loved making art on such a grand scale, my favorite has always been masks.

In 2007, I got married and my husband and I had a masquerade wedding. When buying our masks, I was awed by the work that was available out there- from the elegant fantasy work in leather to the traditional papier mache masks of the Venetian masters. It was then that I decided that was the permanent direction I wanted to take my art.

I started making my own papier mache masks with a decidedly muppet-esque flair. Then I was contacted by a poi spinner who needed a mask with some very odd specifications, the biggest one being that he needed it to be fireproof.

I had always wanted an excuse to try working with molded leather, so I was excited for the opportunity to try it, and once I put my hands to the leather I knew for sure I had found my medium.

Amanda Leetch

Auction #29: Bottle Your Emotions

Shira Lipkin and I collaborated on this project, working together to record the story in as many different forms as possible: audio on cassette tape and CD, video on DVD, handwritten on parchment, computer printed on paper. I then shattered the disks, tore the paper, and cut the tape into small fragments and used one fragment from each medium in this piece, to reflect the story’s theme of data loss and recovery.

Kythryne Aisling

Auction #28: Memory Chain

Upon reading Valentines, I wondered what it would be like to have to carry and write your entire life. I translated that feeling into a charm necklace which can actually serve as a necklace, belt, or even a bracelet depending on how you wrap it. I wanted to make a piece that was functional, beautiful and useful. Something that the new owner would be able to add to with their own story as well as the story of the heroine. One of my favorite parts about this necklace is the message bottles. Ways to carry slips of paper and notes. These bottles can be left as is, or filled with your own memories. A lot of these charms were found objects in and around Hollywood, CA.

Jonaya Kemper

Auction #27: Wrapped In The Moon

I picked Bruce’s story because it was fabulously vivid, demanding and strange.

Pam Noles

Pam posted her progress in making this piece to her blog:

• Raw Materials – Interfictions 2 Auction
• This Is What 446 One Inch Hexagons Looks Like
• This Is How 446 One-Inch Hexagons Are Turned Into 40 Flowers
• Creating Stage 2 Hexes
• Assembling The Block
• Bossy Ladies
• Don’t Yell At Me For Boring You With Sewing Posts. Blame The Amish Of My Childhood, Like I Do.
• The Next-To-Last Sewing Post About The “Berry Moon” Skirt
• The Completed Piece

Auction #26: The world of the story intersects the world in which we live

To me, bookmarks are magic! They mark the place where the world of the story intersects the world in which we live, the place where the world of words meets the world of the senses. To me, this place is marvelous and magical and very, very cool. This is what I get passionate about. The magic place should be honored, celebrated, made a focus of attention.

These Jewelmark bookmarks are greatly varied in form and style; each is a unique work of art, with a character of its own. Some are simpler and more serviceable for daily use, some are lavish and better suited for use with books of special significance: favorite reference books, the family Bible, a classic volume of historic significance. Some styles are suitable to serve also as jewelry for the reader as well as for the book.

Starting with a wired gauze ribbon, I doubled it and sewed the lengths together so that the design from one side shows mistily through to the other, and I used a wandering crewel-stitch to secure the pieces together. To further the impression of heavy mists described in the story, I made lots of feathery structures with tiny translucent white seed beads and gold, garnet, & translucent-gold beads. One of the things I liked most about the story that inspired the piece was the way it had of making alien things seem oddly familiar. So, hidden among the ‘mists’ are a lot of odd little things: round and faceted agates, freshwater pearls, fish, flower, insect, and bird beads of various sorts.

Laramie Sasseville

Auction #25: Stray blots of ink, scattered from hasty scribblings

These shell beads I hunted down just for this story — I wanted something paperlike as well as just a nice bead, something that could be written on. The writing, glazed black ink (well-baked and safe for nearly anything you could do to it, this writing will not fade from memory) are excerpts from the story, of the narrator’s own musings: “movements a careful ballet of hot espresso and soup and witty banter” strung around the necklace, and “leather-bound journals with elegant heavy pens” around the wrist. The pendant is for Valentine(s): what image does his name inspire if not a heart? The black beads I chose for their resemblance to stray blots of ink, scattered from hasty scribblings.

Sarah B. Evans

Auction #24: The Quiz

When I first read “The Quiz” it seemed like, eerily enough, the piece picked me rather than me picking the piece. The story didn’t even feel like something I would write, rather it was something about me. So perhaps it was because I over-identified with the work that I choose to go with a journal. I get a twitch in my fingers and checking account every time I come across another journal I find attractive, but why not? After all, it’s somewhere to write down your thoughts, you secrets and, if need be, the Answers.

Ashly Nagrant

Auction #23: A Hat For The Moon

This cocktail hat is based on Camilla Bruce’s short story, “Berry Moon: Laments of a Muse.” In some ways, it’s a straightforward illustration of the story, which is about the interplay between inspiration and fiction, or more precisely an illustration of the words of the story, which are dense with image and texture and color. The hat is divided, with a clutter of objects – a rose, an origami frog (a crumpled candy wrapper in the story), pebbles – beneath a bent dark red moon caught in a net along with words, mostly pronouns, words devoid of specificity but full of implication in their relation to each other.

All the materials used in making the hat were either recycled or repurposed, just as the muse’s inspiration is repurposed in making fiction. Much of the fabric is recycled from Anita Rowland’s wedding dress, with the rest recycled from a shirt I made a few years ago. The fabric beads wrapped in gold thread and the semi-precious stone beads are from Anna Vargo’s stash; the small semi-precious stones used as cabochons were Elise Matthesen’s (”Here, do something with this,” she said). The origami frog is made from holographic wrapping paper.

The extremely soft-sided fabric box holding the hat is an improvised liner for the utilitarian box, intended to make shipping the hat easier. Sometimes improvisations spin out of control, and that one certainly did. It will serve to protect the hat, as long as the buyer keeps the acid-free paper as padding.

The hat has two toupee clips to hold it on the wearer’s head. They snap open like little snap barrettes, and as long as they are able to grab a few hairs in the combs, they’ll hold the hat on most securely.

Kate Schaefer