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In yesterday’s blog post I talked about my focus on writing my book for the next four months. I came to that under pressure of deadline and with some wise words from Liz Gipson, aka the YarnWorker.
Another good artist friend said something to me over the holiday break that really stuck because it was said so honestly and with a genuine intention to help me see myself better. She said,
I have lots of ideas. There is never a span of time where I don’t have forty-five things I could choose to do right that moment. At least a handful of them at any one time are projects that I feel are important and need to be done as soon as possible.
Being creative and having lots of exciting things to work on is not a bad thing. But it does lead me to feel discouraged from time to time. Because I try to say yes to it all, I often don’t finish one thing for a very long time.
I had a bit of a vacation over the holidays. A few days in my hometown of Gallup, New Mexico and some time high in the Collegiate Peaks area of Colorado. I laughed with my family and friends, took leisurely walks in the desert, snowshoed in the mountains, and while chatting, doing puzzles, and playing games, I knitted. With all that time around kitchen tables I probably could have knit half a sweater. But I didn’t. Instead I made a gaggle of tiny creatures.*
The chickens were my favorite. They showed up everywhere and eventually a gang of punk-rock chickens appeared.
Happy Holidays. Wishing all of you peace and new adventures for 2019.
The video below is a time lapse of this year’s holiday weaving. The idea came from the twinkle lights that I stapled under the latilla on our back porch. The bright mass of lights is cheering to me during this dark time of year. Solstice is tomorrow and the sun will return.
When I was a kid, my father had an ongoing joke every. single. year. He threatened to paint a Christmas tree on a white window shade* To decorate the tree, all you had to do was grasp the bar at the bottom of the shade firmly and pull down. At the end of the season, grasp the same bar, give a sharp downward tug and let go and the shade would roll up.
Needless to say neither me or my sister thought this was funny. And every year Dad stuck a real tree in a stand. In later years they were trees in pots from the nursery which were planted after Christmas in the back yard and all died about two months later.
Maybe this suggestion that real trees were a lot of work when brought inside the house has stuck with me. Or maybe I’m just fundamentally lazy. But a real tree has not found its way inside my house since I left home.**
I’ve done various holiday tapestry projects over the years. And I’m not nearly done with this year’s holiday messing-about. In fact I’ve hardly gotten started. I have two holiday-themed four selvedge tapestries in the works and another wild idea for a decoration using four selvedge tapestry which came from Sarah Swett’s tapestry bracelets. But I wanted to share the links from past holidays just in case you are anything like me and wanted to join in the fun but just never found the time.
In 2017 I decided to experiment with weaving with sock yarn. A whole fleet of little holiday trees emerged. There was an instruction sheet that went along with this post and you can still download it.
