How Do You Handle Fresh Goals?

 When you have a set of things to accomplish do you just get to it or do you have an organized way to go about getting them done? I just returned from the third session of my Art Cloth Mastery Class in San Antonio feeling so refreshed and ready to go with a new set of goals. In this session, we learned more about color theory, printing, dyeing, composition, layering, and a myriad of other topics. Here is a silk cloth (which I had never worked on before) that I had printed with dyes. It's over a yard square in size.

printed silk cloth

It has a lovely hand to it. I love how the complementary colors overlaid with each other and gave beautiful browns and muted hues. My plan is to cut it up and piece it into a scarf and then to boro stitch it. That will take quite awhile and I have other more pressing homework assignments so it may be several months before you see it again.

     Here are three pieces I took to the class as semi-finished pieces.

Three in-progress works

The one on the left is 24x48 to give you an idea of scale. My plan is that these will represent Autumn and I'll create companion pieces for each one for the other seasons. As I go, I'll come up with a plan for stitching. That will give me 12 pieces for my body of work for this class. Two more sessions to go and the last session, a year from now is our showing of the works. I have a lot of work ahead of me.

     I just returned from class yesterday and am starting my homework today. To accomplish my many goals, I set up a series of notecards on the airplane with tasks written on each that I have to finish before the next session of class in September. I plan to go into the studio each day and tackle them one by one in order to finish. Some are very small tasks, like a daily 20-minute stitching on small collages and some are large like finding the right dye hue for creating backgrounds for the big pieces. It's all feeding the brain and soul to me and I love every minute. Some days, I'll look at the cards and choose what I'm in the mood to do and other days, I'll tackle what needs to be done in order to move forward. I think having those cards will be the key for me to keep it doable without feeling pressured and without feeling like I forgot something.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.