A New Dawn, A New Day...A New Year

I don't make resolutions at the beginning of the year.  New year resolutions seem so....in the face of how many are made and forgotten before the week is out...tenuous.  Instead, I found myself today making a decision.

With Doug retiring and us needing more income I'd seriously thought of being a lot more aggressive in terms of seeking out opportunities to teach.  But today I decided that I was going to leave things as they are.  Rather than send my resume and workshop info out to guilds across the continent, I am going to just let anyone interested in my coming to teach contact me.

I know this is a bit iffy.  I've just had an example in the last week of two emails having gone astray - emails that were pretty important.  :(  So I know that email contact isn't guaranteed and I may miss some opportunities because of that, but so be it.

With the dawn of a new year my deadline status is as follows:

A Good Yarn: Rayon is all but complete.  I'm just letting my editor do her job and send the files back to me. The stapling is complete.  I still have to design the cover but I'm pretty sure I know what I want to do - it's just a matter of opening Word and fussing with it for a few minutes and see if that idea works.  If not I'll need to take more photos and try again.

The proposed article for Handwoven is all but complete.  Still have to generate the two weaving drafts, print everything out and copy everything to a cd then package everything up and mail.

The cloth for the designer is done.  Just have to measure it, generate an invoice, package and mail.

The tour is as complete as I can make it - in spite of not getting one of the crucial emails with details.  A phone call finally put things to rights - or at least as right as they can be.  I'm sure there will be a bit of juggling to be done once I'm on the ground.  This trip has turned out much more extensive - and therefore complex - than initially thought, requiring a lot more time than I'd expected getting the details sorted out.  A good lesson for future bookings.

Things are under enough control that yesterday I dressed the loom with another 'short' warp for towels that I'd wound a few days ago.  Today I finished weaving that and started dressing the loom with the next.

As I sat at the loom threading I thought about how peaceful I felt.  A peace that has been lacking the past 4 months.  I thought about how much I loved being at the loom, handling the thread, watching the cloth grow.  And I realized that I wanted that peace in my life as much as possible.  Which meant not trying to find more out of town teaching, but to somehow generate an income from home.

And so I will plough ahead with #3 of the A Good Yarn series.  The next one will be on linen (flax) and hemp.  I expect to spend some time with my yarn catalogue in the next few days so that I can order the yarn to come in while I am away and be able to start weaving the samples as soon as I am home.  You see I'm planning a trip to Sweden (hej Kerstin!) and my friend has a big cold mangle.  I can take some of the 'after' samples with me and mangle them properly with her big cold mangle.

Sounds like a plan, anyway.  :)

(All of that said, I have no bookings for 2014...yet...)