My Rocking Chair

All the stress of the past year is slowly melting away.  I made it through all my teaching commitments, and if I end up with the flu, I can actually stay in bed and get well.  So far, the flu has stayed away from our house, but it is everywhere, and I’m just lying low and hoping to fly under the proverbial radar…

I spent the day tackling my to do list, besides working my way through a very dirty house, I always liked cleaning real meaningful dirt, I sent out a proposal, for a weekly sewing class next spring at the Newark Museum, and I started playing around with the design for a new website for the Frances Irwin Handweavers.  I promised them their website first.  I don’t have vast archives of photos to chose from, since I’ve only been a member for a couple of years, but Sally has a computer full, and she is traveling at the moment.  So I sketched out the layout, and played around with a “look” for the pages, and I’ll wait now for feedback from her and for her return and access to the photo archives.  Each time I do this, I get another bald spot from ripping out my hair, but I learn so much…

Last night, I actually “got off work early”.  I know that sounds like such a normal thing, but it isn’t when you are self employed and your studio is in your home.  There is no huge push at the moment, just time to be creative, and rest.  The spring will come too soon and I’ll be on a plane again.  I don’t get caught up in the holiday madness, this is my down time and I’m not making my life crazy because our culture dictates it.  So I stopped working, put together some leftovers for dinner, and then cleaned the upstairs bathroom.  Then I curled up in my newly reupholstered rocker and sat by the fire in the woodstove, putting my feet up on the footstool Bri made in woodshop, and wove more inkle trim.  I blew through another two yards of trim, glued it to the rocker, and with six yards finished, I only have another two yards to go, and I warped up the little inkle loom for the remainder.  I’m so happy with how the rocker turned out, and I think my mother in law would be proud.  If you didn’t catch that blog, the rocker was a wedding present from my mother in law to my husband and me 31 years ago.  The upholstery wore out, and I found the fabric to reupholster it with on my travels last May, to Portland.

I spent today playing with my eShop on the website.  I have had “updating the shop” on my to do list for months, I finished the Website Success Monograph back in the early summer, and never got around to adding it to the site.  My goal was to ultimately put all of the work I took to the guild sale, that didn’t sell, up on a new page on the site, and I procrastinated on that long enough.  I spent the day figuring out how to add a page, update the product line, change around some of the monograph combination’s, all of it frustrating but ultimately successful.  It takes awhile to add one of the garments to the site, processing photos, and linking it to my website for further viewing, but I won’t reduce my huge body of work in my overburdened closet if I don’t at least put the work out there.  So I think there are six items up there for sale, and I’ll add to it every couple of days.

I delivered the piece for the Blank Canvas event at the Visual Art Center today, usually I’m skidding in at the last minute, so a day before the deadline is actually a treat for me.  I’m happy with the piece, it was fun to make, and I really need to play more often.  🙂

Meanwhile, I’m looking at all of my empty looms and the brain is just churning along, and I’m thinking that one of these days, I’m going to get out the warping mill and just start winding white warps so I can do a week or so of just painting.  Looking ahead, the HGA yardage exhibit deadline is sometime in January.  And I’d like to get another colorful scarf warp on the small 8 shaft, and since that has a second warp beam, I’m thinking I’d like to try to do some doup leno in addition to the supplemental warp, for additional texture.  That’s a technique I haven’t played with for many many years.  And on the four shaft small floor loom, I’m even thinking of setting up for an additional two overshot placemats for my daughter and me, since we each ended up with only seven mats each in the guild exchange last spring.  I’m not holding out hope that the delinquent two will ever show up.

So now I have some time to be creative, and do all the computer things that have been on my list, get the two guild websites designed and built, add my huge body of work to the website eShop, and before the end of the year, I want to obtain a copy of InDesign, Adobe’s publishing software, and learn to use that.  Always something new to learn and create, and invent…

Off to watch the finale for Project Runway…