Part 1 of 4: In the sun
Three weeks. I haven’t managed to post in three weeks! The days really crept up on me like bad spandex this time, just a little more silently and stealthily. I’ve been doing my usual things, just a few more dozen of them than usual. So in exchange for my absence, I humbly offer you some beautiful butterflies and flowers today.
People think I must spend simply acres of time on the computer, due to my being a geek, and at work that’s true. But at home, outside of comics and digital manuscripts, I tend to avoid my computer. I wrestle the dog and cook and sew and since it’s summer, I’ve spent time sweating on edible plants and weedy trees outside. Also, lately, I’ve been building websites, which has taken up what little time I spend on the computer at home. Ironically, one reason I’ve neglected the blog writing is to create a new blog template. Hmm. Methinks I should remember Content Before Design.
I also just realized my third blogoversary was yesterday! I started my blog in 2007 after playing around with a bunch of short-lived and hopefully no longer extant websites and blogs. I was mostly practicing HTML and CSS. In the process I wrote various silly pages on trivia, ancient manuscripts, recipes, traveling, and other exercises in existentialism and futility. I recall writing something called the League of Extraordinary Monkeys at one point.
One day I put together a page on crafting, and it turned out I had more stuff to put on that page than any other page. So my next experiment was a crafting blog. I tried LiveJournal, Blogger and Typepad, but really they aren’t so much fun when you want to get your hands dirty. And at the time, I was all about doing the coding myself, all from scratch. Actually, I’m still into that, and it takes forever. Anyway, I migrated to WordPress next and I’m still here.
My first few posts were random, and then I wrote about making beer. My dad and I made a batch of beer (which didn’t turn out at all) and I wrote about making it, and the ingredients, and all sorts of stuff. I took pictures. I made chemical diagrams. I did research. And it was awesome, because it was intellectually interesting, and I got to do something fun with my dad, and because of the blog I had a reason to record it in words and images. And now I have that memory preserved, like many others. I can go back and read all about the things I’d normally forget.
Anyway, I’ve uploaded pictures, an Im going to start updating about all the various things I’ve been doing since I wandered off into la-la land three weeks ago. Like flaming dogs, and muslin, and tailoring, and more!
I’m pretty sure I had a clever title earlier
As these things go, however, it has vanished. I’m not even sure what I was going to post about. Seriously, if you people want to get something clever out of me, you should figure a way to get me to write posts while walking home after work. But right now it’s 10 pm, so my brain can only offer up the dregs from a long day of the usual daily fare.
It’s the daily routine that concerns me today. Life amazes me in its infinite variations on the unchanging daily routine. Today I woke, went to work, walked home, cooked and watched TV. Three years ago, when this blog started, I had the same daily pattern. Now I have the same job, same husband, but many things have changed in that unchanging routine, and I have changed along with them. It seems that life is a type of evolution, the constant incorporation of new ideas and knowledge into life, and the constant response to what we encounter.
Now for an apt aphorism: change is the only constant. I have often created change in my life when it was not otherwise forthcoming. I was an impatient young woman, and did not appreciate gradual evolution. When I wanted something to change, I wanted it to happen RIGHT NOW. I still struggle to appreciate/acknowledge incremental patterns of change. I suspect that, when I am older, I will conclude that gradual is a great deal more powerful than sudden change, no matter how dramatic it might be.
An example. Today I cooked zucchini-basil soup: I sauteed a mirepoix base, then stewed it with zucchini and vegetable broth. Finally I pureed it with fresh basil and silken tofu. We ate the soup with spicy kohlrabi and green garlic latkes with mint-yogurt sauce. Except for the tofu and yogurt, it was all vegan and all farm fare, down to fat little carrots from my MIL’s garden. Four years ago? I was likely to be found eating a BLT from a sandwich shop, and didn’t know what a mirepoix was. Why the change? Mostly, because my encounters with my own and others’ illnesses during the past four years inspired me to be conscious of how I treat myself. I know now that my body believes in tit for tat: it treats me as poorly as I treat it. And I figured, while I was at it, I might as well figure out how to make healthy = tasty.
Food is but one example. I still have a cat and dog, but not the same ones. Caring for my sick dog and cat through their long illnesses … I don’t even have words for that experience. I now live in a house half the size of the one I used to, and have about 40% less stuff. I have taken interesting trips and seen new places. Valued colleagues have come and gone. I defied Texas and chose to walk a lot of places now instead of driving. I think much differently about my crafting now and the place that making stuff has in my life. I have new skills, new ideas, and new confidence. I have learned more about myself.
The discipline of staying put is hard for me. I can be mercurial and unpredictable. On the other hand, assuming that life stagnates if you’re not on the move is just dumb. Although I still believe in forcing change to avoid habitual ruts, at nearly 35 I am starting to appreciate how the small things cause transformation as surely as tiny roots break apart huge rocks.
A note on photos: I am starting a small container garden. Plants, I think, are a great metaphor for incremental change. Take the last photo, for example, of roots I’m growing from an ivy I bought nearly 10 years ago. It joins an older sibling I started growing three years ago that is now taking over a windowsill.
The value of skill
One of the blogs I read, Bobulate, contained a musing on the importance of skill the other day, drawn in turn from a Boing Boing article. The relevant quote is
Ever since Andy Warhol made “ideas without skill” fashionable back in the 60s, it seems to me that popular culture has been playing a game of “skill limbo”. How low can we go? How badly drawn can a cartoon be and still be considered a cartoon? How many drum machines and sequencers can we stack up to avoid having to learn a real instrument? How much plastic surgery does it take to make acting skills unnecessary? I really don’t know the answers to those questions. Every day is a new horror.
But when I see someone who has both an idea AND skill, I’m reminded just how doggone powerful and dynamic a creative artist can be. I’m sick and tired of accepting “half a loaf.” (Boing Boing)
I wonder, sometimes, what value we place now on skill in the current crafting arena, the arena that’s visible on so many blogs and internet stores today. Is it enough to have a good idea? How necessary is it that skill be involved as well to render an idea well? I wonder about the cross-section of skill and art as well.
There is of course value in that I can pick up an X-acto and try something new one day – because we all have to start somewhere, sometime. In the middle is my own sewing and crocheting, which I’ve practiced for years but still, I’m nowhere near satisfied with the skills I have. On the other end of the continuum are people whose practice of a skill go back years. My grandmother, who has been sewing and quilting her entire life, whose seams are a marvel of precision and her garment fitting a thing of wonder. The 70-year-old crocheted potholders I have that astound me with their intricate attention to detail, evidence of a long life of practicing fine handiwork.
I think about the sweater that I am struggling to finish, the hat I’m now making for my brother, the needlework that I do, and I wonder myself about what value I place on my own skill. Do I turn away from the hard thing or persevere, hoping to add another aspect of a skill to my arsenal? Do I place enough value on my crafting to put in the work it takes to be really good at something, to really understand how it works and be able to use it as a tool for expressing my ideas?
Just some things I was thinking.
p.s. The mountain in question, as guessed correctly by my brother who has been there, is Denali. Because Denali is awesome.
p.p.s. This hat I’m making for Jeremy also features mountains.
