Monthly Archives: April 2013

It has taken me a whole month, but I have finally organized, photographed, edited and listed all the of the fiber I dyed in January and February. (I didn’t do a whole helluva lot in March, I’m not going to lie. I was in a late winter funk. Most of this work has been done in the past week.)

I dyed a whole set of wool in an interpretation of different sky scenes I’ve witnessed in the past few months. I was really proud of them, and I think they turned out just how I imagined. I was happily adding the braids of Falkland wool to etsy when I realized that all of the first names that popped into my head happened to also be the titles of all of the books in the Twilight series! I wrote a paper (for myself, which has never seen the light of day) that was pretty damning of Twilight on a literary level. (I was working on Tess of the d’Urbervilles for school at the time, the contrast was night and day, I tell you. Night and bloody day.) I thought to myself, while those names are succinct, you can be more specific. You can do better. So, yes, I changed the names of what I was going to call my braids of hand-painted fiber because I didn’t want them called the same thing as Twilight books. I kept one (New Moon) because there was nothing else I wanted to call it, that I felt fit. Everything else went.

Why?

Because I like to bash on teen vampire angst-drama? No. I mean, I think it’s an horrific series of books for all numbers of reasons, but you can blame that on the high-falutin Creative Writing degree if you like. No. I changed the names, because once the thought occurred to me that I could do better, I had to try.

Telling myself that I can do better has been a great motivating factor for me these past few weeks. I have been scheming and planning on how I can once again work for myself for a year. Since the day I went back to being employed by someone else, I have been thinking about how I could get back to working from home, and actually making money at it this time. Knowing that the second time around I won’t be so completely zonked from the marathon that was finishing my degree and working a pre-dawn, low-wage job for years, so I won’t need so long to recover is in itself a huge leap forward from before. Building a confidence in myself through my current place of employment has certainly helped. It has reinforced that I am good at what I do–which is a much better feeling than not being able to find a non-pre-dawn, non-low-wage job after busting my ass to get my diploma. It’s easy to caught in the security of the steady paycheck and just give up trying to do what I want. But you know when you leave for work in the morning and you know you could easily fill the next 10 hours with your own creative work that the job is just a temporary solution. And here’s the thing, I really flippin like my job. It’s exactly the perfect fit for me if I am not going to be working for myself. I feel blessed–ineffably lucky–to have this job. But at the end of the day, I know I can do better.

I have had it in my head for so long that I need a three-year plan to be back to working from home again, but even with the best intentions, I don’t sit down and try to outline this plan. I keep putting it off month-by-month so that my three years has already nearly become four. I would like it to not become five. So I am endeavoring to start putting as many hours in on the work I would like to make money from as I do on the work I do make money from.

You came here to look at pictures of pretty hand-dyed fiber and I tricked you into to reading an hour’s worth of belly-gazing. Aren’t I sneaky?

Here’s the wool:

Foggy Morning

New Moon

Summer Skies

Starry Night

Sunset

Dawn

Thunderclouds

And no, I’m not telling you which ones I changed, but I’d love to hear your guesses in the comments!