1.2 A T-Shirt Hug from Dad

Editorial advice provided by Ariana Martinez -- thank you, Ariana!

 

Music:

"This Our Home" by Blue Dot Sessions

"Spring Cleaning" by Blue Dot Sessions

"When the Guests Have Left" by Blue Dot Sessions

"Egomaniacal Pluck Melody" by FJX via Looperman.com

"Bebop intro in C" via Looperman.com

TRANSCRIPT

Mementos Season 1: Episode 2: A T-Shirt Hug from Dad

Lori: Welcome back to Mementos, where we talk to people about the personal meaning and deeper stories behind the items they keep. 

Lori: I’m your host, Lori Mortimer, and I’m excited to bring you Episode 2.

Lori: On this episode, we’re gonna switch gears and talk about a handmade gift. 

Lori: Handmade gifts connect the maker with the recipient. Both people are represented in the final piece. 

Lori: My husband – let’s call him Steve -- really enjoyed making toys for our kids when they were little. He hand carved and painted them Star Trek phasers (from the original series – for you nerds out there). He made them swords. He carved them little totems to wear after we watched the movie Brother Bear. 

Lori: And he even made them canoe paddles. We had gotten a canoe and the standard paddles that came with it were way too long for them. They were just unwieldy, and that frustrated them. So instead of just buying kid-sized paddles, my husband, Steve, bought two pieces of wood and used this hand-scrapy tool that had belonged to his grandfather, who was a carpenter. And he slowly and deliberately carved them kid-sized canoe paddles. Like the apocryphal story of Michelangelo chipping away at the stone until David just emerged, Steve scraped away and chipped away at the wood until the paddles that were inside were revealed. 

Lori: Okay, so maybe that’s a bit much, but you know what I mean. When Steve made those paddles, he brought three generations.

Lori: Behind every handmade gift is an expression of love. It takes a lot of time and it takes intention -- and especially in today’s click-and-buy world -- it takes commitment to make something for someone else. 

Lori: Today, you’ll hear from a woman who encapsulated her relationship with and love for her dad in a hand-stitched t-shirt. she brought it with her to my house one sunny Sunday afternoon last winter.

Karen: I'm Karen Krolak. I'm an interdisciplinary artist, and most recently I've been working on a project called The Dictionary of Negative Space that looks at where we don't have words for things that relate to mourning and loss and healing after trauma.

Karen: I've come with a periwinkle blue T-shirt that has in it a hand-stitched eagle that's been reverse appliquéd. 

Lori:Karen found the shirt as a do-it-yourself kit on a clothing designer’s website. 

Karen: It dawned on me that it was something I could make for my dad that he would actually wear. Originally the kit was made with a white overall shirt, and the background you would kind of choose the color on. But when I called the company to say, “I'm making this for my dad, and my dad spills things constantly on his shirts. Is it possible to do this in a darker color?” They had actually suggested that I do it in in blues.

Karen: It's the first thing that I ever had sewed the entire garment.

Karen: I first began on the appliqué part of just sewing around all the pieces of the eagle. And I was really aware of how many stitches each little section took. And I began thinking as I was putting in each of the stitches of memories of my dad and time that we spent together and both things that kind of drive me crazy about him and things that I had not thought about in a while that we did together.

Karen: You know it has all of these little knots that are the talons. And I had decided that that's what it was going to do for the foot there because I figured that would be a good place to place all the things that kind of drove me crazy about him, was to be like I’ll just knot those up and put them in there.

 

Karen: And I really kind of made a conscious choice to make sure that when I was stitching on it that I would be thinking about him and thinking about our relationship.

Lori:Karen was drawn to the eagle design because eagles are sort of a Krolak family insignia.

Karen: I made it an eagle actually because when we were kids my younger brother had been asked in school what religion our family was. And he had told the teacher he didn't know what religion meant. 

Karen: So she had said, “Well, where do you go on either Sunday or Saturday every week?”