BRINGING BRAVADO TO THE WORLD OF CRAFT
Eazy-E Moleskine (photo by Danijela Pruginic)
Story by Odessa Paloma Parker
During my interview with Shopgirl’s owner, Michelle Germain, last fall, she walked me through the store’s space and showed me essentially every line, telling me the backstory of all the pieces they carry. Some items really stood out, including the scores of plain pencils inscribed with poetry, made by Kalpna Patel; all the proceeds from the pencils’ sales went to the Sarvajanik Highschool in Navsari, India. The pencils were enticingly clean, clever and as per the Shopgirl’s mandate, Canadian-made.
Post-interview, I went through my notes and made sure to look up Patel with the hopes of snagging an interview. Did you mean Kalpana Patel? Google teased. No, I surely did not.
Acorn Cluster Necklace (photo by Danijela Pruginic)
After a bit of sleuthing, I found Patel’s blog, humourously titled “G-Uknit”, and was even more intrigued. Under the moniker Ghostface Knittah, Patel writes about her various projects, including jewellery making (she creates pieces using silver and brass – most notable are the cheeky ‘Gold Teeth’ earrings and pendants), knitting, creating customized Moleskine notebooks, and engraving those previously mentioned pencils.
“I had just found these blank pencils, I had no ideas when I saw them, I just thought ‘I need to have these.’” Patel recalls. “I’m lucky to know a lot of writers and poets…I worked in publishing for a long time, so books and literature are a big part of my life. So I got 12 of them to compose an original line of poetry, I think it had to be 95 characters.”
High Roller Molar Necklace (photo by Kalpna Patel)
From there, Patel engraved the lines using the laser machine at The Workroom in Parkdale. “All the money I raised from that was sent to a high school that’s in the farming village that my folks are from in India,” she notes. “I had a chance to visit there, and they desperately needed funds. Some of the kids didn’t have shoes…I just thought, that’s something I could do, and it sort of brought together the craft world and the literary world that have always been very distinct for me.”
For such an industrious figure, Patel is currently shying away from the social media spotlight, as evidenced by my inability to easily find her/her work online. “All of this feels very new to me still,” she says of her recent foray into the crafting world. “Everything I post online, it’s all just personal fun stuff. The goal eventually is to turn this into a more solid business.”
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Patel is hesitant to join the online fray. After all, her work is heavily drawn from the (traditional) written word. “I find I have about three or four different lives, and to bring them together, so far, the only way I’ve thought of is through craft.”
She notes the merging of the literary and the tangible with the Pencil Project, and then there’s her limited-edition Gocco printed notebooks, created under the series title ‘The Dead Emcees Project’. The faces of Biggie Smalls and Eazy-E are created using the lyrics to their famous songs like “Juicy” and “Boyz-n-the Hood” (Tupac and ODB notebooks are currently in the works).
Pencil Project pencils featuring a poem by Alayna Munce (photo by Kalpna Patel)
“It’s definitely an aesthetic that you don’t see in the craft, DIY world,” she says of hip hop, another personal passion that found its way into her work. “Crafters are such humble, modest people, and I kind of want some of that bravado, that kind of cockiness and ego that’s in a lot of mainstream hip hop culture – craft could use an injection of that. These people have skills!”
You can check out Patel’s skills at the upcoming Queen West Art Crawl on September 17th & 18th at Trinity-Bellwoods Park.
