Progress and etc.

I picked up crocheting again this summer: I have a project I started in early 2000 and put aside a month or two later that I am finally going to finish off. And because I set up an account on Ravelry a while back, when I went there to see if anyone else was using that old pattern (yes), I fell down a rabbithole or two of crochet patterns and found several that look like fun, so I’ve got one of those in progress, too. (Did you know there are some REALLY AMAZING complex-looking textured doilies out there?? There are!)

I also dug out a sewing project I started in a class 8 or 9 years ago and got almost finished with and then . . . Well.

It’s still not done, but it’s closer to done than it was a month ago! I’ll get there! It’s just that I have never sewed anything like this and I’ve gotten to a part of the pattern I’m nervous about so I’m procrastinating, besides which there are other exciting things to do, like crocheting and the internet and pretty much everything else.

And I put the Etsy store back up, hoping maybe this time around I can sell this stuff and no longer have it in boxes, and then remembered that I’d done some digital art once upon a time, and maybe I should post about that some, too, and one thing lead to another and I set up a Threadless store which also has a new design in it, because suddenly I had more ideas, and I am now in a rush to get more of them made.

The crocheting is probably going to get abandoned again until I get some of digital art urges under control. That’s ok, the shawl’s been waiting almost 20 years it can wait another week to get edged and blocked and etc.

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I’m back, I think?

I didn’t intend for a lengthy hiatus, especially one of five and a half years, but shortly after that last post, a number of unplanned things came into being and here we are. Weirdly – very very weirdly – my life right now has some peculiar similarities to my life about the time I made that last post.

In early 2012, I’d been intentionally out of work for a while, to recover from doing horrible boring jobs and get my head back into a space where I could seriously try and move towards my desired career in architecture. In April, after a few months doing art and feeling better about life, I was starting to make plans: I was looking into possible employers in Portland, Maine; I also wanted to move out of the Boston area, you see. I’d never been happy there. Not long after that post, some really not-kidding Weird things started to happen and long story short I stopped being an atheist and became a pagan/polytheist/mystic. You know, “when the going gets weird the weird turn pro” except about the “pro” part, I don’t really get paid for this stuff. I mean in a traditional sense. Maybe in a traditional fairy tale sense I get paid but I digress. My plans to take “a few months off” in early 2012 turned into “a year” before I had steady work again, and during that time I realized that Oregon, where I grew up, was home and Maine wouldn’t cut it, and I needed to move back, so in early 2013 I moved to Portland, Oregon.

I also realized that architecture also wouldn’t cut it. For as long as I’d been pursuing that as a career, it was for the opportunity to do work that would be beneficial for the planet, and “sustainable architecture” looked like a good thing, right? Also for that long I’d had this small inner certainty that there was something not-quite-right about going into architecture, that it was missing something I needed. During grad school I realized that “sustainable” isn’t good enough; “regenerative” design is what is needed, and lots of it. Couldn’t find anything much in the realm of architecture like that, though – permaculture came up instead. I didn’t want to be a farmer or anything, though.

Anyway, after some divine intervention, I had to face up to architecture being wrong for me and start looking into landscape-related work. That’s where regenerative work can best be done.

Without any experience to draw on in that field, I had to look elsewhere for paying work, so I got yet-another boring, and slowly soul-crushing, job while doing landscape-ish things on a volunteer and hobby basis (I have so many plants now! it’s great!!). Walking away from design work was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done. Also, the day job was exhausting and I felt zero interest in doing much of any creative work for myself. I mean I built some shelving, and did a few devotional pieces of jewelry, but the energy/drive/desire for more, for anything like major projects, or even doing the same jewelry work I used to, just wasn’t there. I should’ve taken that as a more serious warning sign than I did, perhaps, but the slide down was very slow for a long time, until it became a terrible fall that had to be halted.

So, now: I left my horrible boring job earlier this year, extremely, nearly catastrophically burned out, exhausted, thinking I’d take “a few months” to recuperate while looking for work in something landscape related. I think it’s going to take about a year; I’m still not back to pre-burnout levels of energy. I finished up a permaculture course this spring, too. It was terrific, and doing the design work for our final project felt so good, I nearly cried. And I realized early this summer that while Oregon may be “home,” it is Central Oregon, the high desert, that is Home-where-my-heart-is, and I need to leave this lovely city.

I’ve had a number of weird “the past is repeating, kind of, only slightly less bad this time” experiences in the last 5 or 6 years. Kind of thought I might be done with that, but here we are again.

A couple months ago I had enough mental oomph back to start working through my mending. I decided to learn embroidery, too, make the mending prettier AND do some other projects. I started messing around with some old watercolor stuff, too. That gave me a bit more of an emotional boost, which made me more enthusiastic about other creative work, and life generally, which has been long overdue.

Here’s my first completed embroidery project, a needlebook:

Front cover with glass butterfly closure

Front inside cover and first page. I used a machine to hem the cover and cover lining, but the rest of the stitching was by hand.

Needlebook pages

Back cover of needlebook. Stitches are dreadfully uneven.

I intended to use a button as part of the closure, but none of the buttons I have looked right. I felt a pull to look through my long-ignored beads to find something toggle-like. I have lots of green beads, and a lot of leafy beads, but the leafy ones really didn’t work well with the embroidered design. I didn’t even know I had the little faceted glass butterfly – it was mixed in a bag with some other green glass – but it is perfect. It doesn’t draw attention away from the embroidery.

When I was going through the bead bins, I felt some real pangs about it – I suddenly missed doing the jewelry work. So I decided I would at least finish up some long-ignored projects, including finally making something from some focal beads I’ve had set aside for myself for years (and years). I also went through the drawers of disorganized stuff – prototypes, experiments, plus a few completed but imperfect (I guess?) earrings – and pulled out things good enough, or nearly good enough, to do things with.

One of the drawers of disaster, slightly less disastrous after I picked some things out.

Salvage from a drawer of disaster.

Newly completed works.

So I made some things! I finally made the earrings to match the red stone pendant I completed uhhhh let’s say 6 years ago. Every time I’ve worn it I wished I had the matching earrings already. Two of those leaf earrings just needed ear wires, but I made a mate to the more complex leafy thing, because I need them. Not that I wear a lot of jewelry but you know. The carved stone leaf had also been carefully wrapped up, to be turned into something for myself some day, and now it’s done. It needed a tiny red stone (red spinel) at its heart.

I’ve also started getting ready to take photos of older finished works I made originally to sell. It would be nice to see them go to good homes, and also to get some money on hand for things like future moving expenses. And, since I’ve little desire to find yet-another boring awful desk job, though I suspect I could do some on a very temporary basis without my body rebelling in a major way, I’ll probably make some new things, too. Maybe a couple pairs of the curvey brass leaf earrings. Those are fun.

I don’t know where this is all going to go, but it’s good to have my hands on these things again.

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Together Festival; new art; oil paint is Bad News; probably some other things, too

NEWSY THINGS

I will be vending at the Together Festival on April 7 from 11-5. The festival itself runs from April 2-8. If you came to the Burner Bazaar in December and liked what you saw, you should come check this out, too!

And I submitted an application for this year’s CSArt program, run by the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. I won’t know for a while whether I’ve even made it through the first round of selections. It’s a really fantastic program, and I hope I get in. If I don’t, well, the proposal I submitted is something I’d like to try out anyway; it’s nice to have another art concept lurking around for days when I get bored with the same old business.

ARTY THINGS

Speaking of lurking concepts, I’ve had this one skulking about in my head for months and months, and I finally took the time to track down some reference images I could use to create the silhouette and cracked pattern:

silhouette of a raven in flight on a shattered heart

"Raven heart" needs a better title.

References used: Raven 13, by EquineStockImages, and Broken by devradiopooh (that link no longer works but it did as of 5 days ago). I have a couple other variations over on deviantART.

One of the ways I pay attention in meetings is to doodle in my sketchbook. It’s a good way to come up with new ideas and work out a million zillion variations before trying them in wire. Here’s one of them in wire now:

Variation on the tooth theme. These are rather large, but very light.

GRIPEY THINGS

OH MY GOD OIL PAINT!!!

So on the advice of several people who sell paint for a living, I bought some Serious Oil-based Paint for painting the Dig Box. And I put on a first coat, and I waited for it to dry so I could apply a second coat, because the first coat wasn’t completely covering the original paint. The cans of paint say “Dries to the touch in 3-4 hours. To apply a second coat, allow to dry overnight.”

And the next morning I checked on it, and it was NOT EVEN DRY TO THE TOUCH!!! In fact, where I touched it, the paint wrinkled up.

That was Friday morning.

Today, Monday, I came in to sand the damn thing and put on coat #2.

GUESS WHAT.

The surface is now dry to the touch, but it’ll still wrinkle up, which means NO SANDING, unless you want to immediately gunk up the sandpaper beyond salvation.

So I spent almost two hours scraping paint off the damn box, so that it might someday dry enough that I can sand ALL THE OIL PAINT OFF and go for spray paint. Or maybe latex, because that was also an option for super-duper, resistant-to-weather paint, and I should have gone with that from the start.

So. Oil paint. I have almost 2 quarts I will not be finishing off. One in a lovely dark green, the other in the wrong shade of pale blue.

Anyone want it? The paint store claims it’s awesome!!

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Now with crossposting!

This blog will now automagically crosspost to:

My account (feathersmith) on Dreamwidth from which it will even more magically be crossposted to my account (feathersmith) on Livejournal.

If you’ve been reading via the syndicated feed on LJ, I recommend adding feathersmith to your flist, because if you comment on the syndicated post, I will probably never see it. Also, the syndicated posts eventually expire, but posts made in an actual journal do not.

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