Wow. I can’t even think as far as a new decade. Truthfully, I don’t have a lot of hope of things getting better over the next ten years so I think that I’ll focus on one year at a time. Or a month, week, or day at a time. For the purpose of this post, one year. I don’t expect anyone but me to read all this. It will be a long ramble as I gather my thoughts.
The O’Neills just entered a new era with Sandy’s last day of work ending yesterday at 4 p.m. I was really happy that everyone there gave him a good send-off. He worked there the longest of any place of employment and he loved the people there, but I always felt that they did not appreciate his customer service skills enough. Maybe they did. Customer service is definitely a skill, and I’ve had to remind him of that many times. It’s a skill that I have to fake most of the time. Maybe that’s part of the skill!
Anyway, I sound like a broken record but I am seriously trying to downsize my studio, and that has come down to some hard choices. My Schacht Baby Wolf loom went to live with a friend as a permanent loan. I am selling my Dorothy table loom. Most of my tapestry frame looms have been given away. I gave a lot of yarn to another friend yesterday who makes scarves for charity and is interested in learning to weave tapestry. I’m giving all the papermaking stuff and equipment to Susanne because if I ever want to make paper again I can always go to her studio to do it. Some of it came from her anyway!
I am trying to think carefully again about what it is that I really enjoy versus what I think that I enjoy until I do it. Mostly that comes down to mess. I like the results of painting and glueing but not mess on my hands. And I hate wearing gloves. Does the hatred of the mess outweigh my enjoyment of the process? In the case of ceramics, I decided that it did. I washed my hands so much they were chapped. As far as dyeing…I guess I have to face the fact that I can’t make myself start doing it any more. If I am at a workshop, I am all in. At home, no. Maybe I should get rid of my dyes.
Collage and painting is in my future but I will have to come to terms with liquid or sticky mess. Tape and sewing are better options for my preferences, but glue will be necessary at times. I think that I might be able to get past the OCD on this. I can’t give in to OCD completely! There is some stuff I have (will have to find it) that you can put on your hands and the paint and glue washes off easily. Besides, I have some fabulous plans for 2020 in which these will be necessary components, so in this case the results will be worth it.
When I think about what brings me the most joy, it is always fiber and book arts. Weaving, crocheting, stitching. I had so much fun weaving cloth strips together in Jude’s online classes and sewing together the t-shirt quilt. Bookbinding really puts me into the flow. I need to stop being so scattered and focus on a smaller circle of media, and then maybe I won’t feel so overwhelmed all the time.
Most of my travel will be compressed into seven weeks this year! That will be a long haul of anticipation until June 12, when I will leave for the place of my heart, Ireland, for a little over two weeks. The first week I will spend exploring on my own, in Howth and Dublin for three days, then a train to Galway and one night there, then a train to Westport for three days. Then on June 20, I will go to an weeklong art retreat with Mary Beth Shaw near Westport which will be exciting and beautiful.
Near the end of July, Convergence, the biennial conference organized by the Handweavers Guild of America, will be in Knoxville, Tennessee, about a 5-6 hour drive from home. There I will take two daylong tapestry workshops from Molly Elkind and Tommye Scanlin.
Sandy will go with me on this trip.
Then I will come home for a couple of days, catch up on work, and head east to Topsail Beach for a long weekend book workshop with Leslie Marsh and Dan Essig, two of my favorite book artists.
As you might guess, all of this is costing me a lot of money but the good part is that I have paid for most of it already. I had to pay for the Ireland art retreat upfront with cash and that had to come out of my savings. I am going to be concentrating on replenishing that, but as for the other expenses, I have paid my credit cards off! So I am heading into 2020 debt free except for the solar panel loan, which I hardly think about because the payments go directly out of my paycheck each month. I will be able to take the solar tax credit this year.
I am moving my studio from the dark front room into the room where we now use as a TV room/den and moving the den into the front room. This has been part of the reason for my purge. We have a very small house and to make any major changes, we have no place to shift stuff around. This will take time. We need to repair the plaster in the front room and paint. Right now it is a burgundy color and it has never been painted since before we moved here in 2001. Painting it a lighter color feels like a good change.
Other than that, we will try to do a couple of long weekends at the lake and Sandy is cleaning out the back building to set up a game room. Gardening is on the list of course and I bought myself a grow light to raise my tomato seedlings this year.
Now that I’ve cleaned out my brain, I’m heading back to the studio where MAYBE I will finish the caterpillar tapestry. I want to put it in the unjuried small tapestry show at Convergence.
I still have hope that I might be able to retire at 62 and that gets me through a lot of my days. I got a taste of what it would be like for the past week by staying at home for our winter break. I don’t talk about it much but my outlook is pretty bleak. Thinking about travel and art retreats helps me more than anything else. I hope that I will be able to continue it on a smaller scale, after I retire, even if it means that I take a part-time or temp job or two.
slowly she turned 