Good morning Sunshines!

(It’s always morning somewhere, just run with it.) Welcome to 2018! This is one of those times when the big picture was fairly miserable, but the little picture was pretty good, so I’m going to focus on the little picture. It really felt like I got nothing accomplished (handwork wise) in 2017, but when I look back at my projects, I think it is more that I got nothing big and flashy accomplished. So because I’m all retrospective, I’ll drag the 3 people who still read my not regularly updated blog along with me.

One of these years, I will make an effort to write down what I finished over the year. There was a time when I did, and those are awesome to refind years later (with projects I completely had forgotten about listed!), so perhaps 2018 will be the year I do that again. This year, however, is memory and photos and ravelry notes.

Knitting: 8 snowflake ornaments, 2 lace bookmarks

Crochet: 6 snowflake ornaments, giant lace art panel for flying mosque

Dyeing: Scattered silk skeins of weld and indigo, a swack of cochineal playing

Weaving: tablet: turquoise trim, blue and gold silk, sheepy trim, double weave samples, brown trim

4 shaft loom: leg wraps

Bobbin lace: 9 pin edging for camica

Sewing: cotton/silk camica, 3 apron dresses, 2 linen shirts, bodice muslins (lost count), linen underdress.

Misc: Naalbinding samples, dozens and dozens of jars of canning.

Hunh, not bad for what was, to my mind ‘not much of a productive year’. There has been a lot of other stuff that was worked on, but not finished, so doesn’t make the 2017 list, but should be on the 2018 list! (Like how I somehow finished no embroidery in 2017? That feels wrong, but plenty of work got done, certainly.)

2018 has more knitting, more crochet, more embroidery (lots and lots!) and zomg more sewing. I’d love to tuck more dyeing and weaving and spinning in there as well, but we shall see!

What does your list look like? Any surprises?

There are a lot of steps to a project that many (myself included) don’t actually recognize as being part of the process. They’re the boring stuff before you get to the good stuff. The REAL stuff. In my brain, I always seem to assume those will take just a blink and then I’ll get to the chunk of the project that I love.

Ahh ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Laugh. You probably should point as well. Really, that’s bloody delusional. Even I think that it’s ridiculous when I stop and think about it. Yet, I find myself resenting the time it takes to wind a warp, sley a reed, thread heddles. I find myself grumpy at waiting for fabric to be pre-washed, at the tests and trials and muslins. That’s just preamble, I can’t wait to get to The Actual Craft ™.

It took me three days (around work and social and sore and life) to measure out thread, wind it onto a niddy noddy (which irritatingly went missing and required a hardware store trip), tie all my figure 8 ties and get to where I could consider getting this thread wet. Make notes, do plenty of math. No colour yet, just ready to get wet.

Weigh out thread. Weigh out mordant. More notes, more math. Simmer and soak and rinse. No colour yet, just ready for colour.

Weigh out dyestuff, crush it, weigh it again, soak it. Simmer and filter and simmer again. Colour, but not on your thread yet.

Dunk in thread, simmer and wait and squeeze and dry and eventually wash and dry and admire. Colour! On thread!

Dear brain, those are a lot of steps that aren’t part of The Actual Craft ™, you are on crack. Enjoy the process!

Queen’s Prize Tourney, for those who don’t obsessively follow A&S events in every kingdom. A novice tourney in that only those with an Orion or no A&S award may enter and they require a sponsor to do so. The sponsor must have a Crucible (Grant level A&S award) or a Laurel and provides a token prize, as well as mentorship on the project.. however that looks. The prize (almost always) goes to someone who is not their sponsoree, which basically means this is a glorious Oprah Winfrey style of prize giving. (You get a prize! And You get a prize! And YOU get a prize!) The prizes are not supposed to be epic, they are a ‘hey, thanks for coming out’ little something.

Failures are welcome. Unfinished pieces are welcome. Pieces that you have gotten stuck on and need advice on are welcome. Masterpieces that you are super stoked and proud of are welcome.

The ‘judging’ is face to face and is specifically less about critique and more about discussion and coaching and generally becomes a glorious geekfest between the artisan and the three or so people who are knowledgable in that field. (or at least interested.. anyone can judge and many entrants are also judges.. myself included.) There are no scores. There’s no judge form where you have to come up with something to say about the details of the piece. You get to spend half an hour or so discussing what they loved, what went wrong (in some cases, what went horribly horribly wrong), and next steps. Sometimes folks want and need a lot of direction on next steps, sometimes we all just get to be super stoked on where the project is going next.

And yet, so many of us stress about it. Is our work good enough? Are people going to politely smile and privately think ‘goodness, I really thought his skills were better than that’? Are the judges going to be mean? What am I going to say for a whole /half hour/!? Is it perfect? It’s awful and no one is going to tell us that it’s awful.

Reminder literally taped to my work monitor.

It is brutally hard to tell the brain weasels that whatever you’ve got, at whatever stage its at, is alright to peek out. It’s your creation, it’s part of you and letting others into the process, which is often more failure than success, is HARD. It’s making yourself vulnerable. It’s admitting that you’re not good at something (or for some people, it’s admitting that you ARE good at something).

Samples pack small.

My naalbinding samples and I will be at QPT tomorrow. Little bits of things, with wonky parts and tension that can’t figure out if its coming or going, and a whole section that is starting to look pretty good, dammit! Like most people there, it’ll have a hidden side order of vulnerability and humility tucked under the documentation, peeking out warily. It’ll get showered with advice and love and creative energy from all sides, and it will be glorious. And I’ll even get a prize.

(NB: Apparently I’m so good at this, I left it in my drafts folder for a month.)

It’s a word that strikes fear in the heart of so many, myself included. It’s something that makes you stressed, that makes you hide, shamed and worried about what They will think. Perhaps its not even Them (you know.. Them.. the nameless faceless judgey Them), but specific people or guilds or orders that you know and respect and admire and perhaps even want to be like when you grow up. Perhaps you’re worried what they (quite specific they this time) will think when you admit ‘this went horribly horribly wrong’.

I finally waved the white flag of surrender on my fian project this week (aka mid-July), and posted to the group that I was done. /done/. Oh so very done. (Yes, that’s why you haven’t seen it in a while on here.)

I’ve been hemming and hawing and agonizing over calling it quits for a while. Like little ‘I think this might not be working’ comments to friends, and then less little ‘I think this might be dead dead’ comments to friends, and then ‘this is making me crazy and killing all my creative existence’ to friends and my laurel. By the last one, they rightfully looked at me as if I was an idiot (hint, I was being an idiot) and said ‘if this piece is off the rails enough that you aren’t working on anything? Gotta go.’ Even then, I took another 2 and a half weeks of ‘maybe I could…’ thoughts about revamping before I surrendered.