New Year, New Start

This past November, I signed up for a "sampler" class at the International Quilt Festival in Houston. I tend to enjoy this type of class because it's pretty much unstructured. There's usually 20 to 30 teachers, each with their own little space in a large ballroom area. You go from table to table while each teacher does a presentation on whatever their chosen topic might be. I especially like that you can spend as much or as little time as you like at each place. So this year, the sampler class I picked was titled "Mixed Media Miscellany" - interesting title, presentations ranging from beading on kimonos to collage quilting to screen printing. I wandered around the room when I first got in and quickly realized that I wasn't that interested in most of what I was seeing.



But then a presentation by a Texas artist named Susie Monday piqued my interest - this involved making a road map of your creative year. Susie literally took an old map and used it as a background for illustrating her "journey" through the year - complete with doodles, sketches, swatches, accomplishments, ideas, etc. This was my "aha" moment! I'd been feeling completely overwhelmed by all the old projects I wanted to finish that it was keeping me from new ideas I wanted to try out. Could Susie's roadmap be my path to organizing the clutter in my mind (not to mention my studio!)?



After letting some of this gel in my mind for a few days, I made a plan for how I wanted to adapt this idea. I bought a large (18x36) stretched canvas and blocked out a space in the center of the rectangle to use as a monthly "calendar" for 2009. Then I assigned spaces along the outer edges of the canvas and posted categories of things I wanted to accomplish: quilts in progress, dolls, rug hooking, embroidery projects, etc. I glued swatches, photos and drawings for visual inspiration. My goal is to move the projects from the outside of the board to the inside as they are completed (into the block for whichever month that happens.)



What I really like about this plan is the idea that I won't be able to forget about a project or an idea just because I put it away in a cabinet - its picture is right out there on the board for me to see (no more "out of sight, out of mind"), and I can still easily move from one thing to another without something getting lost in the shuffle. And while I have way more projects going than I can hope to accomplish this year, my ultimate goal is to finish as many of them as I can. Hopefully, this will keep me from feeling so overwhelmed and will also help me to see what I DO manage to finish.



So this blog will be my written observations on this yearlong journey - wish me luck (and thank you, Susie!)