The Artist Who Cried Wolf.

That would be me.  I talked for most of last year about change...changing my work focus, changing my life, changing all sorts of things.  I talked up the proverbial storm... but didn't actually do anything.  Well, I did do some things... I started two new blogs, as if making more work for myself would actually help anything (it didn't).  Recently, though, I've been talking to a business advisor, the wonderful Chris Leighton, for whom I occasionally work as a volunteer mentor.  I now have A Plan (cunning, business), and A Schedule (relentless).  And I feel Much Better about everything.

So what am I going to do?  Well, that would be telling...but right now, I'm clearing the decks and getting ready to start properly.  Part of the problem, believe it or not, is that I have too much stuff, and therefore, the more than ample three studios (read it and weep...) I have to use have Not Been Enough.  So... I've been selling off my commercial fabric, and that has given me a lot more space for starters.  I'm allocating different types of work to different places...seems obvious, right?  But it often isn't; I had two cloth studios in the attic, and pieced in one room, and quilted in another, with felting/embellishing floating between the two.  It so didn't work.  So now, all the sewing is done in one room.  The embellisher, dry feltmaking stuff and hat making lives in the other, along with all my textile books.  Wet stuff, eg making hat bases using blocks, dyeing and silk paper making, live out in the Little Green Shed.  The only strange thing that lives out in the shed is my cutting table.  Ideally, I would have it in the house, but because the rooms are attic rooms, the headroom in them is limited, and therefore, the useable space is, also.  There just isn't room for my cutting table, so anything that needs cutting has to be taken out into the shed.  It's not ideal... but then what setup ever is, unless you can build it from scratch?  This way, I get to keep bulky stuff like wadding and bolts of cloth in the LGS, and that frees up a lot more space in the cloth studios.  Hurrah!

I'm also 'clearing up' my blogs.  Rather than having several, as I have at present, I've decided to amalgamate them into one.  It seems silly to be spreading myself so thin, given that the other blogs are only really covering stuff I talk about here, anyway.  It seemed like a good idea at the time...but hey.  I will be leaving them open, because there is some useful information in them, but there will be a clear link back to this blog, so that everyone can see what's going on!   Hopefully that way, it'll be easier to keep talking; one or two blogs are doable.... five is overkill.  Normal service will be resumed, etc...

Thank you to all my loyal readers who have stuck with me through what has been a really difficult year.  I hope you'll enjoy and benefit from my change of direction, which I'll be talking more about in the next week or so... I promise!