Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A studio habit

In February and March, I had only a couple of hours each weeknight to make strip-pieced ribbons. Usually I'd get into my studio about 9pm. I would even claim 15 minutes as mine.

It was easy to focus once there. Without a clock, the television served my time keeper. When the 11 o'clock news came on, it was time to finish up. If David Letterman came on, I had to hustle to get to bed by midnight. Two hours often turned into three.

There were gazillions other things I could've done instead, but I claimed that time for me in my studio. If I didn't, detritus would take over my life. Time would be given over to things that didn't matter as much.

Many of these things are still waiting. And new ones too. Taken singly, each is light and small, but cumulatively weighs heavily on me. This is not an easy choice. However, I am glad to have achieved my short term goal: to show that, even without a finished quilt, I did work on and developed techniques and ideas from the last workshop.

Now it has been two and half weeks since I've returned from the Barn. I made a self-imposed deadline to clean up and re-organize my studio yet again. At least I am there.

I want to keep up this habit: to carve out studio time. To paraphrase a comment on The Painter's Key "quilting isn't the hard part, it is sitting down to quilt."

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