What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

Urbana, March 15 – Nina Paley, a renowned filmmaker known for award-winning films like Sita Sings the Blues and “This Land is Mine” has announced her decision to deny permission to screen her film Seder Masochism to the UK Vagina Museum, an organization which purports to stand for the values of respect, integrity, and inclusiveness, but which has demonstrated a pattern of behavior directly opposite of those aims.

Although Seder Masochism is Free Culture, dedicated to the Public Domain and therefore free to show, edit, reuse, remix, and redistribute by anyone, Vagina Museum Community Cinema Co-Founder Charlie Corubolo (They/Them) wrote ...

Talking about art and animation for a change.

The post Interview with Becky Neiman appeared first on Nina Paley.

A poem about connecting with my Ashkenazi heritage.

Today I am a woman.
Today I am a Jew.
Today I have an ailment
my ancestors all knew.

For many generations,
my Fathers’ guts have hurt.
My Mother can’t eat chocolate:
a most unjust dessert.

I gather all my chocolate;
I give it all away.
No more can I digest it,
And I have Crohn’s today.

I feel myself much older
than I have ever known.
Today I have a Crohn’s disease;
Today I am a crone.

The post Bat Mitzvah appeared first on Nina Paley.

Shameless self-promotion, as well as promotion of Target stores (no financial affiliation with the latter):

Chanukah looms! It starts the night of December 7! It just occurred to me that I must locate my quilted fiber art dreidels, but finding them may not be easy. So instead of starting the search, I procrastinated by looking for my PHOTOS of quilted dreidels, to see if I needed to take new shots. I came upon this very nice photo:

The photo was taken in 2018, for my pattern booklet "Quilted Treasure Dreidels". Upon close inspection, I realized the coins I'd used ...

Here's my latest commission, and although I live in California, and the client lives in the southeast USA, it was made with help from one of the best Judaica machine embroiderers on the planet, Marilyn Levy of Ontario, Canada. It's a tallit (prayer shawl) for a young man's bar mitzvah. 

Like all my commissions, this one started out with a  discussion with the young man's family. They wanted cotton, with a leafy design, in blue and grey, so I drew up choices.

They liked #1 best, the simple vines. What was most unusual - and why they ...

A Hundred Hundred-and-Fifty Dollar Drawing.  Hundred Dollar Drawings are now $150 due to inflation, but still a bargain! Available here.

The post “Torah Tiger” for Jonathan appeared first on Nina Paley.

A Hundred Dollar Drawing.

Drawing stuff like this is so fraught. A few weeks ago someone thought this $100 Copyright Troll was racist, because it looked like a racist’s caricature of a Jew (I argued that if you can’t draw evil trolls because racists use them to represent Jews, then the racists won). Some people will say this is drawing racist too, missing that it’s a satire of racism.

The post “Fake Jews” for Hans appeared first on Nina Paley.

Passover is April 8. With the world in the throes of the COVID epidemic, public health authorities and rabbis agree that people should stay home, and connect with farflung loved ones at the seder via Zoom, Skype, or whatever. 

I don't have any matzoh in my house yet - but of course, I always have plenty of matzoh fabric. So this morning, I broke away from making (somewhat) normal masks for friends and family; and I made these, just to make myself laugh.  First....

(I buy matzoh fabric here.)

The next mask covers two plagues: Frogs and hail. 

Is it a bird? Well, birds are involved....

Is it a plane? No, more like a Frisbee - if you fling it, it flies, but not well enough for a game of  Frisbee golf. Wait, I remember! It's one of the yarmulkes (little Jewish hats) I brought to last week's artisan fair at my nearest synagogue, Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center!

I rarely do fairs - it's nearly impossible for a fiber artist to charge enough for the hours we put in. Nobody wants to pay $60 for a potholder. But someone I adore asked me -  and here she ...