Works in Progress

Last week.  Wonder where he is today?

It's been pretty quiet around here lately -- cold, snow, more cold, more snow.  Sewing, not sewing, writing, not writing.  Bingeing on the first season of Outlander with a good friend in front of her husband's enormous TV.  Thinking about spring projects.

Sometimes it feels like I have more ideas in my head than I can effectively get done, and other times it feels like I'm doing nothing, wasting time.  On days like that, though, sometimes I go to bed and something wanders into my brain that's the answer to the question I didn't know I'd been thinking about for days, so maybe wasting time isn't really; it's giving your brain enough white noise to do important stuff in the background.  I just wish it would let me know that it was working, so I could stop worrying that I wasn't.

I've been writing a fair bit lately.  The cold keeps me out of the sewing room except in the afternoons, so there's been a lot of evening cutting, but mornings (after the first 2 cups of coffee to get my sludgy blood moving in my veins), I've been able to settle down and put words on paper.  Or on screen, depending on my location.  I actually like to write longhand, but my handwriting has gotten so foul over the years that if I don't transcribe it while the ideas are still fresh in my head, there's a good chance I won't be able to read it all.

Icicle roses - must be a new variety

There are a couple of shows lined up already  -- three in April and one in June, and the possibility of getting my work in a new bricks-and-mortar shop in the city.  A friend is having an open house at her farm in June with an art/craft gallery space, and I've promised to send her a dozen handmade dresses.  (I'd love to send some bears, but the cost of shipping would kill just about any profit I'd make, so I've settled on dresses, which flat pack and won't be as much of an ordeal).

So I'm cutting out lots of little cute things all over the dining room table.  Yesterday I spent almost an hour looking for a lost back facing piece that dropped somewhere between that table and the upstairs sewing table, and which couldn't be duplicated because I was out of the shirt I'd cut up.  There are some limitations to recycling!  (And I did find the facing, eventually).

Today is a run to the post office through the fresh snow -- we got almost 10" yesterday -- and then home to the sewing machine.  Even though it looks like January out there, it feels like March.   And that robin I saw the other day wasn't a hallucination . . .