Is It Still Thursday Already?

Let's see.

No photos today. My camera is in my purse, which today is behind the driver's seat of Ben's car, which happens to be at work with him, so I can't show you anything that got done, or not got done.

This morning the lights in my studio were fixed. Nigel, my sparky, took off the halogen spotlights and installed industrial-looking fluorescents. At first I didn't like the idea of fluorescents, and I still don't like the color in comparison to the halogen lights, but the new lights make the room lighter all over and I don't get shadows, so it will work. Other/new halogens were not an option because of the irregular height of the ceiling and the space between it and the upstairs floor. And because Nigel is 6'2", I didn't even have to move the loom because of his reach, and there are no holes to fill. One tick off of my Weaving TODO list.

Now that the lights are fixed, and the loom's oil doesn't smell so bad any more, I can go and warp a baby blanket; this one will take a while to thread and sley because I'm weaving it doulbe-width, (my reach is limited; it's not a king-size blanket,) but not long to weave.

Regarding the research for the design course, I could not think of anything else, so I went ahead with the landscape of a (mildly) depressed mind. It ended up being perversely enjoyable, (masochistic comes to mind,) because I know it so well. I'd need nice visuals at the workshop, so I gathered a few attractive shots from interior mags, and a few of my photos of Nelson, my yarn stash, and cakes.

It also happened that I went to see a psychologist on Monday, who put me to task to read up on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, (a suitable method for a control freak), so what little I learned in the last few days went into the research. Though the more I read up on it, the more it feels like I have a grave personality disorder for which I am responsible, rather than an illness that "happened" to get me. Anyway, enough about this subject. I have a couple of interesting doodles, and I bought these ball-point pens in gold, silver, bronze and white, and am having a ball highlighting everything with the white pen. Another tick.

That I got an email from Randy this week about his illness was strangely coincidental. I'm supposed to present, at my guild meeting Monday evening after the design course weekend, a PowerPoint presentation on Randy's workshop of 15 months ago. I've been reading my unintelligible, illegible notes and looking at photos and trying to reconstruct the workshop enough so Marlborough Weavers can get a feel of it, but it's been a while and I've thought about it a bit, so I can't tell how much is what Randy actually said and what are my interpretations/opinion. I guess I'll just have to tell them so. I'm wasting a heck of a lot of time feeling nostalgic.

Bonnie Inouye's study group is the one that's been put on the back burner. I have no intention of quitting, but I'm not a multi-tasker, so I'll have to hustle after I finish the baby blanket and the PowerPoint first, and others, (some very young minds) are going at break-neck speed. Ditto with my annual sample exchange; I think I received about half of my samples. The very first set sent out this year, NZ Post lost my package, so I'm feeling a bit let down, but I do enjoy not only receiving the samples, but the challenge of making samples to specification and describing them in a way everybody else understands. (I haven't kept tidy weaving records for the last 18 or so months, though somewhere in the four notebooks and the photo and draft folders I should have enough to reconstruct the records after this hump.)

I bought 2kg of very nice merino in greens, oranges, a bit of yellow and a bit of pink a few years ago. I bought this (and in this amount) because I thought I needed to challenge myself color-wise. I've been wrecking my brains how to use this yarn, and yesterday, brought it to Sue's gallery and asked her opinion. Along with real help, she commented I am too hard on myself and I might consider sticking to colors I like and I do well. And when Sue says it in her nice, soft way, it made me think I should enjoy weaving a bit more, and suffer a little less. As well, though she didn't know I was amidst a magazine-subscription crisis, she has been cleaning her studio, and gave me a few years' worth of the Australian Textile Fibre Forum, which I knew about but had never seen, and half a dozen other textile/fashion magazine. These will keep me very busy for a while, (especially if I read the articles.)

So, what's on your loom? What are you doing in your sketchbook?