iPhone baby quilt

BB pal Orli Cotel says, "My friends just had a baby and one of the grandmothers made an amazing quilt that looks like an iPhone..." There's a nap for that!

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Anonymous

Gorgeous!
legotech

Anon #21, it’s Big and it was at FAO Schwarz…for many years they kept one out at each of their locations.
legotech

How about we just leave aside any question of consumer culture and geek out over the COOLEST GRAMMA EVAR! Well, except my mom who knitted an 8 bit Mario blanket for a friend of mine when I worked at a video game company :)
erratic

Having had crafty parents/grandparents, I have a few such items. But they never featured a commercial product in their imagery. I wonder what cultural values and attitudes towards consumerism will be transferred to this child when it’s old enough to know what “baby’s first blanket” represents. Not judging, just genuinely curious.
- Boondocker
  
  Came here for the concerned, anti-consumerist finger-wagging; leaving after only two posts. That’s some reliable BoingBoing commenting.
  - erratic
    
    can you point out the anti-consumerist finger-wagging for me please? I suppose you can definitely see whatever you want to see since that’s what you came here for.
    - Boondocker
      
      Upon rereading, I agree that my preconceptions skewed my interpretation of your post, erratic. A fair point, and I apologize for jumping to conclusions.
      
      I do think, however, that tikaro makes a good point in argument to yours. NOT THAT I’M SUGGESTING TIKARO WAS BACKING ME UP. HE/SHE IS TOTALLY NOT. :o
Anonymous

I just hope Apple doesn’t go after Gramma with legal-eeze lawsuit. On the otherhand, Jobs should see it as an opportunity to create GIANT iphone floor pads that kids can jump on apps like a game board, or like that giant key board in that Tom Hank’s movie, which I can’t remember the name of, for good reason no doubt.
tikaro

From my second-hand experience (I’m married to a quilter), it seems to me that commercial products are not rare in crafts from our parents’, grandparents’, or great-grandparents’ generation.
Cigar silk quilts are one example that comes to mind:
http://www.womenfolk.com/quilting_history/tobacco.htm

I wish Boondocker hadn’t come in and snarked up the comments section, because it seems like I’m backing him/her up. AND I AM NOT :P
- David Pescovitz
  
  Wow, Tikaro. Those are really interesting designs!!! Thanks for that link.
EH

“What does that ‘f’ stand for?”
- Ant
  
  Facebook!
l’elk!

born into the blanket of consummerism
l’elk!

der… consumerism
Anonymous

best. grandma. EVER.
Anonymous

geeze, relax. it’s just a quilt.
Antinous / Moderator

My baby quilt (1957) has baby animals riding choo-choo trains. I had no idea that my grandmother’s best friend was a shill for the coal industry.
a quilter

This is such a cool quilt. As to commercialism/consumerism, I’ve seen all kinds of fabrics with Winnie the Pooh, Disney characters, Thomas the Tank, Paddington Bear, etc etc. So what!
das memsen

That’s okay, i’ll be happy to wave my finger directly.

Having a train on a quilt isn’t quite the same as having an Apple (TM) iPhone (TM) quilt. Yes, in the former example, people are indirectly accepting a form of transportation that will eventually be seen as unsustainable for the greater good, but they certainly had no way of seeing that at the time. The coal industry was a business, but it was built on genuine necessity where the pros outweighed the cons (at the time.) That’s a bit different from the latter example, where someone willingly, in the year 2010, chooses to advertise a specific product for a specific company, neither of which are doing anyone a bit of good in any genuine sense other than short-term convenience; given that we are sophisticated enough today to consciously know firsthand the environmental and spiritual damage caused by our current zombie-like acceptance of all things digital, one can’t claim ignorance they way your grandmother’s friend easily could.

What’s even more odious is the image of an innocent baby crawling on something that represents nothing in her interest- facebook, apple, these guys aren’t merely neutral in her development, they’re stunting her development as she won’t know a time in her life where she wasn’t already interfacing with a 2-dimentional screen for her “education,” or a time when she wasn’t being sold something by someone somewhere who saw here merely as an exploitable demographic. That’s the cultural value we want to teach our kids?

We’ll be looking back on our techno-lust the way we are currently looking back on our industrialization-lust of the past century.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  Well, if you cut the top and bottom of the quilt off and leave the big box with the icons, it gets reduced to a cute baby blanket with a bunch of visual stimulus. Sure, grandma and mom will always see an iphone, but baby won’t unless it’s constantly drilled into her head by mom and grandma. Context is everything.
Anonymous

There’s a nap for that.
Anonymous

Don’t worry, by the time the kid is old enough to relate to the consumerist imagery, the quilt will be safely “retro”, which seems to absolve even the most blatant of cash grabs and render them gently nostalgic, or at least “ironic”.

._.