Wow, it’s been a long and crappy winter. Nothing dire, but generally a whole lot of nothing on the creative side of life while everything else got sorted out. If I’m going to be perfectly honest, there wasn’t a whole lot of good interesting work happening before that either. Some puttering, playing around, failed projects. All of which adds to base skill (and certainly to one’s humility when you fix yet another project with scissors), but doesn’t make for much in the way of blog posts.

Silk with weld, weld/indigo and indigo

Cue winter finally starting to give clues that it’s easing up. Cue some health issues settling themselves out. (Persistent pain is terrible for one’s creative brain. If you’re a chronic pain person, cut yourself some slack.) Cue the annual panic that comes about a month before Kingdom A&S.

I want this warp done!

But wait! I’m not entering this year! I’m last year’s A&S Champion, and I gave myself a year off. I can kick back and eat bonbons! (And judge ALL THE THINGS). Somehow, however, reading about everyone getting excited and posting their projects in progress reminded me about this final push and there was some conversation with friends about projects. And some acceptance that a big project was dead. (Fix it with scissors! The materials are salvagable, it was a big ‘now you know to never do that to a warp again’ lesson.) And Practicum. A&S focused events can’t HELP but inspire, the creative energy oozes through the whole building.

Brickwork experiment

So the dyepots came out. And the silk I bought in the fall got dug out (Silk! Untouched and ignored for months! A sure sign that winter had won.) A ‘I’d like to try’ embroidery project got started. The Big Scary Embroidery project took a Big Scary Step. I finished a hat that only needed ties, I decided I wanted to DO things again. It was lovely to DO things!

Big Scary Embroidery(tm)

Hello again, Muse. I’ve missed you. Please do stay a while this time. I hear you’ve been off with the bards, I hope you had a lovely time.