It has been a busy year. We came back from our Christmas trip last year in the knowledge that expat life was about to end and that we were lucky enough to be coming home to the UK. Something like our 6th move in 11 years. It took two months for our main shipment to arrive (including all my art materials and fabrics).
We settled into our house, just the two of us only to find our son descend on us from Uni for the summer. Then our daughter came home in October, bringing with her our beautiful grand-daughter, after the breakdown of her relationship. So here was my favourite little person in the house to play with and my textiles sat untouched in my studio (that's the conservatory to everyone else). Then with the colder weather it was too cold to work in there, it had a heater but who on earth can afford to heat a conservatory all day at the moment? Thankfully my lovely husband worked on a Saturday to move all the dining room furniture into the conservatory and all my materials into the dining room.
Enough procrastination yet? No, I had Christmas cards to make. If I had put as much effort into my painting and printing on fabric section as I had those cards, I'd have been onto the manipulating fabric section back in June.
I feel incredibly disappointed in myself. I was actually firing on all cylinders and doing very well I thought. But if I look back at the past 9 months with a fresh eye, I have actually done very little. What did I think I had achieved? And was I pleased with how I had achieved it? In a word, no. I think I thought that I could simply wander through the coursework, picking it up when the mood took me, when I now know that I should have been eating, drinking and sleeping Textiles.
Although I can see that I've done quite a few physical pieces, my sketchbook has been left seriously wanting, I haven't been particularly vigilant about research either. I'm determined to fix this. I have made the decision to go back to the beginning of the painting and printing on fabric section and work through it, adding and expanding on what I have done already. Obviously Christmas is about to hit and so this next few weeks is going to be busy. I'm not procrastinating! I'll be working on my sketchbook. The sketchbook has been a major stumbling block for me. I have only really sketched to set out some basic designs for my textile projects. I know that I need to fill those sketchbooks with all sorts of things, ideas, fabrics, papers, photos. I bought Kay Greenlees' book 'Creating Sketchbooks for Embroiderers & Textile Artists' back in June and it has been inspirational. Now I just need to pull the proverbial finger out and get down to some hard work.
I'm going to try to sketch something each day for the next couple of weeks and will be putting the results either here or on my tumblr.
Wish me luck!!
