Just a roll of the Dice…

OK, so I am officially overwhelmed…  (And I can hear my dear husband saying, “and this is something new?”)  I’m looking at the days ticking by, knowing I leave for a very long time with seven back to back teaching assignments, and looking at the to do list which is multiplying exponentially each time I cross something off, and I’m starting to panic.  I’ve been there before, all I have to do is reread my blog posts last June, and I know I’ve been there before, bought the t-shirt, and lived to tell about it.

I have a spread sheet across my desk, in addition to my lengthy to do list which spills over my desk, and on the spread sheet are all of the exhibits I plan to enter, and conferences I need to send proposals for, and contracts I have to write, before I leave February 13th.  There are 12 exhibits, three sets of conference proposals, a set of contracts along with a 2-3000 word article for their fiber publication, and the first thing I had to do was figure out what work I had available for exhibit, and what show to send what work to (or actually just the images).  I was told awhile back that it is a no-no to send applications with the same work to more than one exhibit at the same time.  If the work got into both, your name would be mud when you tried to extricate yourself from one of the exhibits.

Well that leaves too little work for all these exhibits, so I will do my best to put something in all of them, you can’t get into the show if you don’t apply, and actually getting the work accepted, is all basically the roll of the dice. 25% acceptance would be wonderful.

Yesterday I wrote the proposals for the MAFA fiber conference for 2011, and emailed those, and I sent out the first of the exhibit proposals, which is quite the complicated process.  Each show has very specific requirements about what the digital format of the images is to be.   I read, and reread the applications, and still have this haunting feeling I’ve missed a step.  There is always that ominous line that says, any application without …, will be immediately disqualified.

Today I got off the application for another exhibit, this one in Missouri, and then I photographed the yardage for the Convergence exhibit.  That in itself is quite the process.  I have to rip my studio apart, move looms out to the hall, hang the yardage, set up all the lights, cover the window because after two days of torrential rains and flooding, the sun decided to come streaming in the window casting sunbeams all over my yardage.  And of course this is the first time I’ve used the new Nikon D5000 I bought in December.  And I couldn’t figure out how to use the stupid thing.  I had to call my tech support husband three times…  But it did take a great photo.

Convergence applications are especially cumbersome.  Plus I had to cut a piece out of the yardage because a touch sample had to be included along with the application. And I had to come up with a good title.  The yardage exhibit is called Enchanted, referring to the Land of Enchantment, which is of course New Mexico.  Convergence 2010 is in Albuquerque in July.  So I called this yardage, “Some Enchanted Evening”.  It really does look like the colors of the mesas and the mountain ranges in New Mexico.  I think.  I haven’t been to New Mexico in more than 30 years.

Now I’m going to go and put my studio back together again.  And then I’m going to bed.