I work for Shopify. I’m still quilting, sewing, knitting, creating and generally making things that look different to how they did before I got involved with the base materials.
After a period of having completely lost my mojo creatively, I’m generally expressing myself artistically in whatever way I feel like in the moment. I suspect it is displacement activity since one thing that hasn't improved since I started this blog is my ability to express and feel my feels. In fact I'd say that it's got a lot worse. The six years I've spent here living with Pooch have not been easy, and the last year in particular had been especially hard. I'm no angel, but when I let my eye drift back over the vista of those years I can see that I've been manipulated and used. Of course, I brought some of it on myself by marrying him again after the first divorce. The fact that I don't feel particularly angry or upset about this split is what I'm currently working on with my therapist, and what I'm trying to express creatively. I was thinking about this earlier and the phrase I've used as the title of this entry is what kept going around in my head.
I signed up for Joe Cunningham's quilt classes when he moved online, and one thing he said in the first class has really stuck with me.
"If I want to communicate with you I'll give you a call. My Art is what I want to express."So not only am I trying to express myself by feeling my own emotions, but also by expressing myself in a more abstract form.
The class was about interpreting a classic block (in this case an unnamed one of HST flowers in a vase) using Joe's techniques. This is what I ended up with.
I've been knitting scrappy socks as a mindless exercise to keep my hands occupied. I'm onto my fourth pair, having not knitted any for a few years, and they are starting to pall. I did break out and make this yesterday, using two pieces of english paper piecing I'd had in a drawer for years.
The next step in the dissolution of my marriage is to find a new place to live. I have one option with an awesome friend but there would be a clash of cats. I'd love to find a 1 bedroom apartment of my own and am open to anywhere in the SF/Oakland/Berkeley area as long as it's got some sort of public transport. My dream, and what could have been so beautiful, was to have a little house with a garden. I thought we were there last Autumn until I got played on that too. That was really the end of the beginning of the end and made it a definite thing. So for now I'd settle for a tree just outside so Charlotte can watch the birds from the windowsill.
