Hi!

I’m writing to you today from deep within the trenches of personal exploration. Reinventing yourself may sound glamorous, but I’ll be the first to tell you that it isn’t easy. Two years ago my mother left her job and sold her home with the whimsy and confidence of Mary Tyler Moore in mind, no doubt.  She spent an entire year as an unwilling vagabond before she finally found her rhythm. Fortunately my case isn’t quite so serious, but right now I think I know how she must have felt. I bet you do, too.

The last two weeks have been a drudgery of research, punctuated by moments of elation, hope and sincere gratitude. But a drudgery nonetheless. It is one thing to read blogs while you eat your morning toast but it is another thing entirely to spend all day on the computer reading about other people’s successes, failures, inspirations, cravings, outfits, vacations, and aspirations. It sucks the life out of you. It makes every original idea you thought you had seem hackneyed.

The solution, I thought, would be to turn off the computer altogether and put pen to paper. But then of course, as I promptly reminded myself, I can’t draw. So I probably wound up lusting after the pages of my Pattern Sourcebook, wishing Phyllis Baron and Dorothy Larcher might rise from the dead to adopt my weary, unoriginal heart.

All this struggling had me feeling very pitiful. The real solution, as it turned out, was to take a retreat and recharge my brain. So I drove to  Seattle to spend the weekend with my road-worn Mother who, since her vagabonding, has settled graciously in a Queen Anne Studio. We went to the ballet, we spent 5 hours at Via Tribunali trying to finish a litre of wine, and we bought new shoes. I’m not suggesting that new shoes and wine should be the solution to all your problems, but sometimes they certainly do help. Especially when Phyllis and Dorothy are nowhere to be found.

The weekend was full of serendipitous encounters and many eerie coincidences, hinting that I might be on the right track after all.  And despite all the advice Corinna gave me on the contrary, my To Do lists this week are growing quite large; though she seemed proud to hear that I’ve turned them into little works of art, proof to myself that I CAN draw, even if it does look a bit juvenile.

An exercise of art in the everyday

I won’t bore you with all the items on my list, but I do want to share with you the most exciting list of all: My Creative Interests. I made this list to remind myself that this new adventure is about learning, exploration and having fun. The goal is to do 6 of these (that I’ve never done before) in 6 months.

• Knitting
• Sewing
• Printmaking
• Painting
• Drawing
• Pattern Making
• Stamp Making
• Gouache
• Dyeing
• Making Paper Goods
• Fabric Design
• Dancing
• Photography
• Designing Websites
• Designing Print Materials

This list reminds me that the trenches aren’t so deep after all. Happy making everyone.