Most of the time, my blog and my design practice have a lovely symbiotic relationship. I blog to clarify thoughts and ideas and write about things that propel me into action. The things I subsequently make, and the process of making them inspires me to blog again. This in turn motivates me to keep creating – and the wheel keeps turning.
Sometimes, however, the wheel spins wildly out of control, and I fall off. It has been particularly difficult for me to scramble back onto the blog wagon this time. I always seem to have more urgent things to do than blog. Recent examples:
“Oh, I don’t have time to blog today. Look at the mountain of shirts I’ve made. I need to heat-set them”
or
“Oh, I don’t have time to blog today, I need to sew labels onto the million shirts that I have just heat-set”
or
“Oh I don’t have time to blog today, I need to fold, label and count all the shirts I have just heat-set and labeled” .
I’ve been using the same excuses for gym avoidance as well, by the way.
Note that I have been laboring at some pretty mundane, tail-chasing tasks lately, which does not really help motivate me to write about my experiences. So…. there was no blog for a few weeks. But today, I have decided to bite the bullet and just blog.
These annoying, numbingly repetitive tasks are a necessary part of my work and so are the periods of low inspiration. The blog needs to reflect these highs and lows, if it is to be an authentic chronicle of my work exploits.
So let me tell you about the past two weeks
I managed to heat-seat a huuuuge mountain of shirts, sew labels, and attach tags onto them, all while watching Buffy and Downton Abbey reruns. I pulled muscles in my neck and shoulders due to the Quasimodo posture I adopt while sewing, heat-setting and fantasizing about vampire slaying. I practiced yoga over and over again to melt the pain away and it worked. I took the scary huge, unruly pile of finished shirts and painstakingly organized them by style, color and size and created an online inventory. I finally gave up on bloody Etsy (more trouble than it’s worth) opened a shop on this website, and put my first few listings on it. Woohoo!!! I painted the faces of an army of kids for three separate performances of The Lion King at my kids’ school, and still have yellow hands (why will the face paint not wash off?). I have Minion hands. I took the kids into DC three times during Spring break, flew a kite at the kite festival, got excited by the National Gallery East Wing again, ate too much Easter chocolate, and caught a stomach bug.
And there you go, now you are all caught up. My first show of the season, Handmade Arlington, is on Saturday. Yes, I know that snow is forecasted; I am not amused, Mother Nature. Come and see me… or read my blog about it next week!
