Nest "ing"

A student came into the yarn shop yesterday looking for materials; a project with the prompt "nesting."  Today I woke up with an inspired list of things that could improve my living, including closet rearrangement and accumulating just one more bookcase. After dropping off another load of items at the thrift store donation center, I browsed for homeware. My errands closed and I went home to block some projects I had begun/finished. I submerged them and lined them out to dry, my rug a disappointing conical shape. I dreamt new forms for it to take, perhaps I rip it out or shape it into a pillow—both still round, domestic ideas. 

I spend all of my energy on building a home. Keeping my apartment clean, accumulating a surrogate family, claiming a gas station, grocery store and route to work. I can trace this mode all the way back into July, when I attended Mildred's Lane. All along I thought I was meant to study knitting and its construction. Study the history of software in contemporary media today. Pull these ideas together with everything I've read about folds and the electromagnetic spectrum, a stake-out while I want to fly back "home."

The funny thing.

Waits

A lot of people have asked me what "being a fiber artist looks like." Fiber artist because that is my identity at the yarn shop I frequent/work for. Fiber artist when introduced to directors at the gallery I intern at. Fiber artist as told by my bachelor's degree.

And yet I never willingly made any work out of fiber art, until lately. I am a draughstman, I tell myself. I make perfect, controlled imagery unless I am in over my head—my thesis, the reflection of my tulmutuous last semester. 

I tell them I intern at a gallery and work for the yarn shop part-time. The other time I spend in the studio. But is that true? Have I really made any of "my" work lately? I opened an Etsy. I made myself a capelet, a business card holder, numerous necklaces. I set up a Wordpress blog to start writing "my thesis." 

One long, ugly drawing does not count as "my" work. 

Remix

So much time has passed and many things have happened. I am moved into my new apartment in Los Angeles, I am back from my residency stay at Mildred's Lane, and I am very much ready to begin work again.

It is hard to dream when I circle into worry about income, but I have many books waiting for me to organize. I am halfway through Toni Morrison's Jazz. It is a lovely thing. I am knitting a scarf and nearly finished embroidering my second city map of the summer. 

I am missing the fellows I met a couple weeks ago, and the moments we shared together. It was a fairytale, what we lived in. I was lost in Brooklyn and found in Narrowsburg. I met more mountains I do not know the names of, collectively the Catskills, and I sat very still. I learned to cut away my negative and jailing thoughts. I loved so many humans, many bugs, many things. 

So here is to bringing Mildred's Lane back to "reality," back to earth. That I can live a daydream and still pay taxes.