hOodville!

how did the hOodville flag come into being?

(and why are the o's in hOodville different sizes?)
it all started with the 2006 improved hOodville shade structure. looking at the demo model in our backyard, it was obvious that the peak of the structure needed a banner of some sort.

i thought about a flag for several months. i didn't want to make something trite like a big H. i wanted something that symbolized hOodville...somehow.

what does hOodville symbolize? it's a gathering of old and new friends: friendship. it's also a zone of safety for many of us: a place where we can be ourselves. and hOodville is open and welcoming.

hmmm, friendship, zone of safety, open and welcoming. how to express those values in fabric? friendship made me think of a 'circle of friends'. no one ever says a 'square of friends'. friends must come in circles! okay, circles it will be!

now how to express 'zone of safety'? when my daughter, emily clover, was a young girl, her father and i divorced. it was a difficult time for emily and we found a counselor for her. the counselor, a wonderful woman named bea, asked us all to come to an art therapy session. when we got there, bea asked me and emily's dad to draw a 'zone of safety' on a large piece of paper. this 'zone' would be where emily would create her art...a place where she could express whatever she needed to express without fear.

we drew a large circle on the paper with a blue crayon. and then, after staring at it for a bit, we added a ring of gold all around the inside. it seemed appropriate somehow. and so, for me, a zone of safety is a golden ring.

okay, now i had golden circles as symbols. circles also fit hOodville with our round yurt, labyrinth, SDR 3000, Evap-o-Wheel, and domes. but how to symbolize open and welcoming? i was stumped!

so, i talked with jeff. i told him how far i had gotten with a concept for the hOodville flag and asked him for input. we talked for a long time, becoming more and more enthusiastic as the ideas flowed. jeff appreciated the symbolism in the circles. he asked if there was some way i could leave the center of the inner circle 'open'. AH HA! there it was, the 'open' symbol! it was awesome collaborating with jeff on this.

time to get started on the sewing. i have boxes filled with durable fabric scraps from my many years as a 'recreational products' seamstress. i sifted through a couple of boxes looking for likely colors. a beautiful turquoise blue piece jumped out at me...and there, in the same box, was some gold packcloth. the two colors looked great together, so it was time to set up the cutting table.

i put the fabric on the cutting table and tried to figure out how big to make the flag. jeff suggested i first 'draw' the flag on my computer! what a brilliant idea! so i opened up a document and drew some rectangles and circles and filled with them colors. there is a PDF copy of this document at the bottom of this page.

the circles looked best when arranged a bit off center: an eccentric! well, of course that fits with hOodville! we're not 'peas in a pod', after all. that's another camp somewhere else on the playa!

i played around with my computer drawing until i got something jeff and i both liked. then it was out to the cutting table to render the drawing in fabric. i cut out rectangles and circles and edged them with a black nylon binding. the black edge really made the colors pop! cool!

as i cut out the parts for the flag, the leftover scraps of fabric were intriguing. i loved the way they were a 'reverse' of the flag. i decided to make them into a 'wall hanging' for our shade structure. jeff calls this wall hanging the 'unflag'. i sewed the unflag onto a large piece of mesh so that it wouldn't catch too much wind.

as i was finishing up the flag, i added five short pieces of golden 'fringe' along one edge of the flag. this symbolizes the 'fringe element' of hOodville!

we set up the shade structure early in the week on sunday...when the playa is nearly empty. that night, i could hear each individual fringe flapping as the wind blew the flag back and forth: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap! funny! one of the neighbors (geoff from the mayor's camp) good-naturedly mentioned our 'noisy flag' the next morning. lucky for us the playa quickly fills up with lots of much noisier items, so any racket from our flag doesn't stand out!

so that's the story of the hOodville flag!

after making the flag, the next time i typed hOodville, i realized i could echo the eccentricity of the circles on the flag by making one big O and one small o! fun!