Week 23 in my yearlong sketchbook practice. I have 161 little squares, it has outgrown it’s box and weighs one and one half pounds. It has become a habit but I wonder what will and what should happen after the year has past, after my commitment expires.
She danced right in…..
It’s been almost 2 years since I’ve run into a perfect, ruined whisper of a gown. I haven’t been looking, and none have found me. Interests, fascinations have seasons I guess and I wondered if this particular season had faded away forever. This Edwardian lawn dress, perhaps a wedding dress, arrived last week – it has everything and just like that I am in love again.
There are particular qualities I look for in them – the lace is exquisite and the ideal scale for fancy little wedding birds – some of it is ruined by stains and tears but a great deal is in perfect condition. Looking for just this sort of lace is what sent me in search of a new /old gown a couple weeks ago. And there is so much more, the sheer cotton has worn to a silky sheen – it’s so thin and transparent it looks like it would disintegrate if you blew on it but it has a surprising amount of integrity and it makes the most perfect downy feathers for realistic birds, there is a subtle, lifelike iridescence. I’ve only come across it once or twice.
And then there’s everything else, the sweetness, the romance, the heartache, the mystery, if she made a sound it would be a far away, off kilter music box playing Chopin. She had come all undone but I stitched and pinned her together for her last photo.
Week 22 in my yearlong sketchbook practice. I get so many ideas from my little squares, for all kinds of things. This week I had lots of ideas for fabrics and ceramics. I’d love to take a hand building class this fall. And for now I’d like to experiment with Spoonflower – have you tried it? Or maybe some block printing on linen. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend a couple weeks just messing around with stuff you haven’t tried?
Mind mapping and I go way back….. I first used it during the couple of years or so I spent trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, pre – this blog, pre – ann wood handmade. It helped me feel my way through, sort and evaluate ideas and then figure out steps to begin, to make stuff happen.
My brain is not a good place to keep things – ideas chase and distract me, things get lost, when my head feels cluttered I get overwhelmed and unhappy.
Getting stuff out helps me keep moving forward. My notebooks remain my most important tool for capturing ideas but for looking at the whole picture, making complex plans or experimenting with possibilities I find mind mapping incredibly useful. And I enjoy it – which matters – it’s fun, fun is good, fun gets me to do stuff. I use software or sometimes just pencil and paper – each have their advantages, the premise is the same for both:
Organize thoughts around a central idea.
Topics, sub topics and related ideas radiate out from the central idea and then branch off into increasing detail. That’s one of the big benefits for me – details go where they belong and I’m less inclined to become mired in, or overly focused on them. I use shapes and colors and lines and size to define or highlight ideas. I see connections and intersections, relationships and priorities that I might not otherwise have seen if I was working something out in my head or making a strictly linear list.
I started a new mind map this weekend. I’ve got a wicked summer cold, laryngitis, zero energy and large sections of me are covered in calamine lotion (unprotected walk in a swampy forest) – I’m wretched and itchy and generally poorly so I took to my bed on Sunday and played with Xmind all day – it’s free unless you want to get super fancy and I love it. It looks snazzy and you can add hyper links, images, reminders – all sorts of useful stuff. The image below is the beginning of my map (it has gotten much bigger) and I blurred some stuff out so as not to spoil any surprises.
My central topic is broad – my plans for the second half of 2015 – products, artwork, marketing, workshops, blog stuff – all of it. I’m just getting started and it’s already helping me generate new ideas and have a sense of direction and priorities for the rest of the year. I start messy and inclusive, brain dump style – and then refine – wether I’m working on paper or a program. As my focus gets clearer I start to add action steps. I love the structure around my ongoing projects and it makes space for new ideas. It’s not a to do list but it helps me build meaningful to do lists. Excellent and entertaining use I think, of an entire Sunday in bed.
Week 21 in my yearlong sketchbook practice. This was an extra busy, extra tense, summer coldy, sore throaty, foggy brained week and it was hard to focus on the sketchbook part of the day. To make it feel do-able and to refresh myself I mostly finger painted – I highly recommend it as a loosening up, getting over yourself exercise. Sometimes I felt like I got somewhere interesting and sometimes I didn’t but it mostly felt loose and free and experimental – so much of what I look for in this daily practice.
Everything you need to know to make fabric mushrooms is in this sewing pattern. Two sizes are included plus it scales easily up and down – so you can make a variety of fungi. Beyond making fabulous toadstools I hope you take away some new ideas about shape building in textiles. (photo by Chistine Chitnis)
On a scale of 1-10 for introversion, 1 being an actual hermit and 10 being the super extroverted end, I would place myself at 3, or maybe 2 and 1/2. I don’t mind it, don’t want to change it and couldn’t if I did. It’s not a condition, it’s not better or worse than the other end of the spectrum, I do like people, I’m not sad or lonesome in any general sense, I’m just wired in such a way that solitude, and lots of it, is where my energy comes from.
I would like to be a BETTER introvert though in three ways I’m clear about:
Figuring out how not to feel bad about it or at least feel bad about it less often. I waste so much time and energy on that.
Being a more diligent and intrepid explorer of myself. I want to reach past the comfortable territory I’ve already navigated and develop more skill at sharing that world.
And by challenging the edge of my natural inclination more often, not in an effort to be someone else but to expand to my full capacity, to explore and experiment outside myself and collaborate more – in ways that respect what I need but push me past what’s entirely comfortable and familiar.
P.S. If this is something you relate to check out Jonathan Field’s conversation with Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.
Week 20 in my yearlong sketchbook practice.
I got about 85% done with my mushroom pattern and decided to scrap all the photos and start over. The text for the steps is all good but I didn’t like the photos. I struggled with them throughout the process, re-shot one section to try to make myself feel better about them, re-edited, applied some photo shop magic but it was all for not – they weren’t what I wanted and they were not frankly – good enough. It’s so painful to come to that place and make that decision this far into a project. Or rather- it’s painful UNTIL I make that decision. I agonized over it for a couple days – wondering if I was being too critical or using perfectionism to procrastinate because I got cold feet – sometimes at the end I get nervous and look for flaws so I can delay – this is not that. They just weren’t good enough.
So I decided, started over and felt better right away. The extra work is far less painful than publishing something I don’t feel good about. I put together a new step shooting set up before beginning that made everything easier. It’s not fancy but it works well and I got through half the photography today.
I’m much happier with the new photos – they are simpler, clearer, more consistent and prettier than the others (gorgeous fabrics courtesy of Sri Threads). I’ll sail through the rest of the photography tomorrow morning and drop them into the document over the weekend.
And in other news – a little more progress on my Fortuny creatures: a recently finished owl – in Fortuny Simboli (cinnamon and copper).
Happiness is good for creative work – it’s an open place, a place of ease and flow, curiosity. I think of myself as a happy person and I think of myself as someone who deals well with failure but I, and I think most of us, can relate to the tendency to focus on negative experiences – the way one criticism can outweigh heaps of praise. And I’m pretty sure a big success has never woken me up at four in the morning. It turns out it’s our default setting – it’s called a negativity bias.
Dr. Rick Hanson:
“Unfortunately, to help our ancestors survive, the brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it less adept at learning from positive experiences but efficient at learning from negative ones. In effect, it’s like Velcro for the bad but Teflon for the good.”
Accomplishments get blown right past but what’s not working, what isn’t done, failures, fears criticisms and negative consequences are dwelled upon – I’m a champion at this. Stress is a powerful motivator and very effective in the short term but I think for a lot of my life I convinced myself it was a good place to be, a sort of no pain no gain mentality. Chronic stress eventually becomes self perpetuating and the physical and mental consequences are real and painful.
I came across Dr. Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness on this episode of one of my regular listens – The Accidental Creative. I hope you’ll listen, it’s fascinating and his advice for changing your brain, teaching it to learn more efficiently from positive experiences, one thought at a time, is practical and pretty effortless.
“Passing neural states become lasting neural traits”
There are so many little positive moments and accomplishments throughout the day, little successes and moments of gratitude and connection that aren’t acknowledged – ordinary moments, ordinary happiness that we are apparently neurologically designed not to notice. Giving attention to these little positives, spending an extra moment with them can add to our bank of well being, our happiness.
Week 19 in my yearlong sketchbook practice. I love having a record of the days – it’s an extra bonus that comes with this sort of daily practice. It’s a different kind of remembering – looking back at each days little experiment. The memories are of sensation and mood, the little squares mostly don’t relate to external events – except when they do. Today’s experiment refers to the world – the strange, disturbing and fascinating events surrounding the prison escape upstate are on my mind – the intensity of it, the ideas of desperation and flight, the reality of truly dangerous humans and the massive, harsh and beautiful forest where it’s unfolding. From here it’s surreal and it almost feels like fiction – how terrifying and disruptive it must be to people in the vicinity.
The toadstool pattern is just about done. I’ve got a few steps to reshoot and then a little more work on the document and it’s ready to go. I’ve taught this class a couple of times and that definitely helped in writing the steps.
It took two years of experimenting to get the shape I wanted in my toadstools. Two years of almost there but not quite. I am pathologically persistent – relentless. The most difficult part was finding a reasonably efficient way of making the concave shape for the underside, reasonably efficient and reproducible. I tried so many things – some with interesting results – like foam padded bra inserts – but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. What I ultimately came up with is simple and has a lot of flexibility – the shape and effect can be varied with little adjustments – it’s fun to play with.
(photo by Andi Schrader)
I loved teaching the class – the steps seem odd until all of a sudden a toadstool appears. I hope one of the takeaways from my botanical experiment classes and this pattern is thinking innovatively about shape building and materials.
So stay tuned and if you would like to be notified by email when new patterns are released you can sign up here.
