What a surprise…

Here’s the thing, I teach for a living, and I write, books, articles, essays, this blog, and all of that allows me to be creative in a different way than actually making work.  But it is important as a fiber artist, to keep making work, and to have the work out there, in exhibits, and supporting my teaching and writing.  They are all “woven” together, pun intended, and it is hard to keep track of all three areas of my creative life at the same time.  The one that usually trails along like the poor stepchild, is the exhibition part of my resume.  It takes a lot of work to find the exhibits, keep track of deadlines, have new work (usually done in the last two years, and it may take me months to build one piece…), fill out entry forms, pay the entry fee, and send off yet another application for an exhibit, which I have about a 40% track record for acceptance.  If the work does get accepted, I have to keep track of ship by dates, and then pack and ship, or pay a shipper to pack and ship, and pay not only the costs and insurance of getting the package there, but include a label for return postage as well.  That little line item on my resume, when I am fortunate enough to be accepted to an exhibit, is pretty costly.  Depending on the work, sometimes $150. an exhibit.

I recently posted a blog about an exhibit in Colorado, Fiber Celebration 2011, sponsored by the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild, held at the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising in Ft. Collins, CO.  The exhibit runs through August 12.  I sort of forgot I had work out there, I couldn’t obviously attend the opening, and since I prepaid the return shipping, the work will come back sometime in August.  I remember this being a particularly costly ship to the museum, since I was traveling and missed my window for Ground UPS.  Three day cost me $75.

I got a note in the mail today from one of the organizers, and I didn’t quite get at first what it was about.  Turns out, I won the Complex Weavers Award 2011, for my Sandstone Layers Jacket, and there was a stack of papers I had to fill out and send to Complex Weavers.  How cool is that?  It is times like this I’m glad I made the effort to apply to the show, and spend the money to ship.  In addition, I apparently won a Wearables Award, but I don’t have any other information except apparently the award is the collection of Handwoven Magazines from 2008 on disk.  That’s probably not a great prize in that I may find I like having the magazines on disk instead of taking up room on my shelf and I might be tempted to invest in the other years that are available…

The Complex Weavers Award is actually a big deal.  At least to me.  I don’t really think of myself as a complex weaver, I only have eight shaft looms, but this particular jacket was pretty darn complex.  I had at least three different structures running simultaneously with five different warps, one of them a supplemental.  That’s a lot to ask of an eight shaft loom.  Still, I never get noticed for stuff like that.  So I’m feeling a little grateful and a little bit proud.  And I’m tickled that I was accepted to teach an advanced Inkle class at their conference in Washington DC in the fall of 2012.

So there is another deadline looming (pun intended) for an exhibit with the Textile Study Group of New York.  They always have very specific theme/requirements for their shows, and I like to enter because I have to push out of the proverbial box to create exhibit specific works, which of course may or may not be accepted.  The deadline for this particular exhibit is in about 10 days, and the theme is 9x9x3.  That means the work has to fit into a 9 x9x3″ box that you had to buy ahead of time.  Photographed works are then submitted for jurying.

Sadly there weren’t enough students to run my boot camp and garment construction classes at the Newark Museum, a shame since I love teaching those two particular workshops, but that leaves me with the gift of some additional time to really play with these boxes.  Worst case I don’t get them finished for jurying, and I’m just out the cost of the boxes.

So this morning, I called the cable company to inquire about the occasionally slow internet service I’ve been experiencing, and I called a tree guy to take down a monster maple tree that threatens my second floor studio.  Then I dug out the boxes and started playing around.  One thing led to another and I dug out an old piece of plaited felt I had done that never actually went anywhere.  I over worked the piece and it became brittle and unstable.  It was cut from a poorly felted, because I didn’t know any better, lump of wool, done about 10 years ago, back when the only felt information I had was from college where they still had you stick wool in a nylon stocking and put it through the washer/dryer.  Now we exercise a bit more control…

I sort of liked the concept, and I wanted to play with it further.  So I dug out my new/used Pat Green Carder with powerpack, turned it on, and started to feed it all the wool I had dyed and teased from my crock pot dyeing adventure two summers ago after the 2009 Midwest Conference in Grinnel, Iowa, where I sat next to Amy Norris in a felt a boa class, and she told me all about crock pot dyeing.  I blogged about it quite extensively back then, and now all the dyed bags of fleece just sit in my storage closet.  So I dug them out and started feeding the carder.

I don’t know where this little adventure will take me, but the whole point here is to have fun.  I don’t know if I’ll have anything to enter for this exhibit, but I’m trying to just stay in the moment and see what happens.

Entering exhibits is probably my least favorite of all the jobs I do, but they keep me working on new and interesting things.  I just fired off a half dozen proposals for teaching online classes at Weavolution.com, and I updated my workshop/lecture lists on my website with all kinds of new proposals, I can do all that in my sleep.  But this kind of creativity takes patience, and focus, and a connection to the tools and the fibers and sometimes there are too many distractions.  So, stay tuned to see where this takes me ’cause at the moment, I haven’t a clue…