Moving On

The thing about holidays, or breaks of any kind, is that they give you a breathings space to look at work from a fresh perspective. There are things, such as the Lutradur book, which will now take priority for me in terms of how I spend my time, but I found myself with time on my hands one morning in the gite, and a small altered book to work in. The patterns I made are simple and make me think of parts of labyrinths, a theme that I've used before. One particular type of labyrinth was known as a 'spirit trap'; it was thought that the bad spirits got confused in the labyrinth, and got stuck in it, while the people they were 'haunting' were able to leave. I'm not sure what happened to the people who went in after a spirit was trapped...presumably there must have been a buildup...but who knows? It'll be interesting to see how this theme merges or changes with the 'In More Than One Language' concept I was working with before I left for France.

The first thing I did today was to start clearing out the cloth studio. Sigh. What a mess. And what a lot of cloth. I'm not sure that it's the kind of thing I want to work with any more, but equally, I'm not sure what it is I *do* want to work with. Those of you who have known me for a while, will know that I gave away a lot of fabric before we moved here, and another lot when we unpacked. Since then, I've dye painted a bit, bought a good deal of threads and yarns, and have quite a bit of lutradur to work with. I think when you have cloth there, you feel you *ought* to work with it... but I did put some aside to overdye when I'm ready. And I would like to make some art cloth, and some of this stuff would be perfect. And work with more painted quilts, like the 'Where' piece that went to FOQ. Lots of ideas, lots of materials, and lots of time. If I only knew where to start... sometimes you can have too much of good things...

So, I'm going to start by finishing the tidy up, and writing a journal, and a timetable. As we have interest from a publisher, the book needs to be ready, in draft, by early Spring, and other things need to be fitted in around it...so A Plan is a good thing to have, with due dates and the like. And there's another two book ideas floating around...so journalling will be helpful. Like art work, there's no knowing when an idea will strike...so having something to write it down in *will* help. Maybe I need more than one journal...

And thank you to everyone who has commented on the photos issue so far, I hope that this conversation will continue over the next wee while. It's interesting to hear different points of view.