New Year’s Resolutions… Bah!

I will admit that I dislike the whole idea of New Year’s Resolutions.  It isn’t that I’m practically perfect in every way and don’t need to do some scheduling adjustments occasionally, or focusing adjustments, or attitude adjustments, or lifestyle adjustments, it’s that I fail to see the wisdom of getting down to fixing yourself, one day a year, promising the impossible, after a month of social engorging, overeating, too many gifts and way too much merriment.  I look at New Year’s Day as the official end of party season, and now, life can resume again where it left off.  Oh, and coincidentally, there is now a new digit added to the date when I write my checks.

I prefer to do those adjustments as I find my life getting bogged down with unfavorable things.  Things I can actually control.  That happens all throughout the year.  And since I travel so much, there are always periods where I just put one foot in front of the other and get through the day, and there are periods where I am in the studio for 4-6 weeks and have piles of things calling to me and I haven’t a clue where to begin.  That’s where I am at the moment.  I try not to over think all this, try for a vague plan, contribute heavily to my Google Calendar for daily tasks like clean the bathroom and send proposals to X Conference.  And I get out of bed in the morning, and try to make the most of the day.  Some days are more successful than others, but that would be a good description of life.

One of the blogs I follow is from fiber artist Donna Kallner.  Donna actually has two blogs, but the one I instantly latched onto was her blog on compost and creativity.  Just the title makes me want to dive right in.  Donna is an excellent teacher, I met her when we roomed together at some distant conference in  Wisconsin I think, and I loved her spirit and sense of the bigger picture.  So Donna presented some early morning warm up exercises for creativity.  Sounds simple enough, and with a degree in art, you’d think I’d know to do this sort of thing on a regular basis.  We did warm up exercises in drawing,  not so much in fiber, which is pretty labor intensive.  But warming up creativity is really important and if there is one thing I do need to address in the coming year, it is just simple play exercises to wake up the muses in my head and hands.  So a huge thank you to Donna’s New Year’s post, because it got me to remember that I take my creativity for granted, and that keeping it youthful and supple and in shape takes work, just like exercising my body and mind.

Donna suggested 5 minute quick collages.  I seriously need to get an egg timer or one of the little timers from one of our numerous games.  Timers are great for stopping your brain from overworking, and overthinking.  You just do it.  I need so much practice in this area.  A graphic designer friend recently cleaned out a book shelf and gave me a couple of 40 pound tomes full of advertising art.  She was going to toss the books, but offered them to me instead and I grabbed them and hoisted them onto my cutting table and started to leaf through to find images that excited me.  Silly me.  That wasted about 3 of the five allotted minutes.  So instead I just ripped 3-4 pages from one of the books, and grabbed my rotary cutter and started to randomly cut up the images.  I assembled the scraps onto pages of my notebook, and of course way over thought the exercise, looking for compositional balance, meaning, phrases that would relate to the imagery, in essence, I turned them into little art collages, seriously missing the point of the exercise.  Oh well, I’ll try harder tomorrow.  It took me ten minutes to just glue all the scraps down.  Anyway, here is my first overworked attempt at play…

So I’m beginning the new year with a new project.  I played around with some drafts for the three warps I painted, inspired by the marble column from the Cloister’s.

I’m really suppose to be updating my sister’s website, but I so longed to start combining the warps, just to see what they’d look like together.  I promise as soon as I finish this blog, I’ll get right to that task of updating her site, but for now, I’m really loving this fabric wannabee…

The draft is a combination of structures, as many as I could fit on an eight shaft loom.  I have one of the warps weaving in plain weave, next to another, weaving a 2/1 Three Shaft Twill.  The third warp is actually a 3 shaft birds-eye, not sure how obvious the design will be but the yarn is a textured cotton lace, so the surface will stand out from the rest of the yarns making the fabric dimensional.

I’m setting these roughly 2100 yard per pound yield yarns, at 27 ends per inch, which would put three ends in each of the dents in a 9 dent reed. (I’m going for a warp face fabric here.)  I will be warping this fabric from the front of the loom, going through the reed, threading the heddles, and then finally beaming onto the back, for pretty obvious reasons.

The first step was to divide my 45″ reed (I’m warping the fabric about 41″ wide), into three levels, so each of the three yarns in a single dent has its own little compartment. Beaming this will be so much easier when the yarns stay separated in front of the beater.  I just tied a sturdy string all the way around the beater creating a horizontal line and then repeated that step with a second string.

Then I carefully followed my draft, pulling each thread in order from the warp bundle and sleying through the reed until I had the amount of threads needed to weave the particular stripe of the draft.  I’d sley one thread in the bottom of the dent, the next thread in the middle compartment of the dent, and then the next thread into the top of the dent.  It is a slow process, and tedious constantly changing warp bundles, but I love feeling the texture of the yarns and seeing the colors build across as I sley.

I’m already about a third of the way across the reed.  And I’m thrilled to have something finally going onto my big loom which has sat idle for more than a year. I have a lot of computer work in front of me for the next few weeks, two websites to build for my two weaving guilds, updates for my sister’s site, and lots of new software to learn and tutorials to play with.  I have Adobe Illustrator CS4, and InDesign CS4, both are on my list to learn or relearn (I have a really old seldom used version of Illustrator which is probably so obsolete it doesn’t count).  I also picked up a couple of books on Fashion Design using Photoshop and Illustrator, which can only help expand my knowledge of the programs and the possibilities.  But for now, my creative muses are getting some exercise, and my hands are happy, and my spirit is looking forward to the new year and its possibilities.

My husband leaves tomorrow for an overseas trip to Israel, and my son leaves on Sunday for Boot Camp for the Army National Guard.  I wish them both safe journeys, and to my son, I love you and will try to put one foot in front of the other each day you are gone, and try not to get overwhelmed by how much I’ll miss you…  Stay safe…