burnt beads
we got some of these things in the other day and like any other thing that i don’t really know what to do with it, i classified it as a “wearable”. these soft plastic geometric craps are the product of a brief fad from the 90s- you lay special plastic beads out on a studded grid, then iron them and they fuse together, leaving you with a gridded design that has absolutely no practical value. while it’s possible that these litter the “mom’s attic” landscape of north america, it’s also quite likely that these were immediately sussed out as total worthlessness, and discarded while still warm, guiltlessly. to me, these things are interesting because they play on the intersection between the deerpath of traditional crafts like cross-stitch and quilting (which are indicators of a certain type of care, pride, and as such, value) and the 4 lane highway of soft fast petrochemical shit. also there’s the idea of millions of 8-year-olds simultaneously plotting out these geometric designs and huffing hot plastic off the iron. whoever made these particular examples had either a crude hand or a artist’s eye, because one side is way more melted than the other, which is cool (this effect is most visible in the picture on the boxy number in the top left). in an effort to rectify this horrible misuse of resources with the new-psychedelia, arthur magazine, god’s eye crowd, let’s say that these are diamonds hand crafted by beautiful children of their own volition out of the souls of plants and animals that died in the forests and plains and oceans of thousands of years ago, and let’s not forget that they will be on this earth long long long after we’re gone. $1.50