Friday 21 February 2014

A year of thoughts and no wiser

I have just realised it's been almost exactly a year since I started writing this blog. It has been an interesting journey and rather an enjoyable one. Call me vain but I do quite like the sound of my own (written) voice. I annoy myself when I'm talking out loud: lots of missed witticisms, words mixed up, no time to think through my sentences so I sound like an eejit. But written down or typed out, I have more time and it all gets a little bit better. I started out this blog in a vague attempt to publicise my felted pictures and make some sales but as time goes on I think I'm actually just emptying my head onto the computer screen, and then editing it a bit to make sure nobody sees the really ugly scenes. I don't know who my target market is. Sometimes I think it's just for me - but if it was completely private I'd write some very different subject matter. Sometimes I write with someone particular in mind, in my fantasy world where everyone finds me fascinating. I know of just a handful of people who do look in on me every so often, and I installed the map thingy down to your right so that I might be able to get a handle on who pops in - but it hasn't given me much of an insight at all. On down days I get the feeling that most people who end up here do so by accident whilst searching for something else. On up days I realise that it's all a learning process and once I've really found my groove, I will get some steady viewing and enthusiastic comments left for me at the bottom of my posts. In the early days I discovered that sometimes I got more viewings if I put in a recipe than if I showed some felted art ("there's a surprise", muttered beleaguered husband) but there are thousands of food blogs out there and only a handful of felting blogs. Food, though very close to my heart, isn't what I was meant to be flogging. Not that I've shown you much felt recently. Anyway I am very close to getting my 4000th page view so it can't be too bad.

So, to myself, or to you, a friend or family member, or to you, a passer-by who was expecting something more useful and informative and looked in the window by accident, here is what I can show you today. I've finished it!




I have read every bit of advice online I could find about taking good photos of quilts, and this was the best I could do. Draping it over the wall on my own on a windy day in between showers was no mean feat; I had to weight it down with stones and was terrified I'd get concussed if the wind blew up any harder and the stones flew off. I'm still thinking I might need something professional done to really do it justice (and make it sell well in auction). But I am really rather pleased with it, and I have well and truly got the patchwork quilt thing back in my head. I have a new bit of inspiration, in the form of Malka Dubrawsky whose quilts are like the most fabulous SAD light, and whose fabrics I have been snapping up online left, right and centre. I am wrestling with the fact that I really need to finish my other brown quilt first and am trying to get my heart back into it. And then of course my head keeps coming back to the felting. Can I incorporate patchwork into my art somehow? Is the quilt above Art, as much as my felted pictures are? Could I try to amalgamate the two in some way? Would I want to? An identity crisis ensues. Or at least it will do when half-term ends and I have some headspace to myself. 

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