The Time Between Seasonal Affective Disorder and Allergies

Just in time spring arrives with it's wind-driven pollen blowing away the grey clouds of crappy winters.  But it's just one more red, itchy eyeball and sneezing fit to me.  Luckily the studio is a pollen free zone (although a suicidal stink bug breached the barriers).   I am really enjoying the two day workshop classes, and especially the current Two Day Resist Dyeing Blowout of last weekend and the upcoming one.  Blowout is a weird word to describe the little rays of electricity and puffs of smoke of the quiet but powerful brain waves emulating from student heads when confronted with lilac, grey and orange dyepots!

And just in time for this Blog, I have had two cancellations for this coming weekend's class (April 14 & 15th).  If you want to come and put your brain in the dyepot, please email me.  It's delightful. Here are some results of last weekend.

Yum Yum. It is hard to concentrate on just one thing as the spring picks up strength and knowledge of the upcoming teaching season dawns on me.  I want to live in my dye studio, I wanna open all those containers of awaiting natural dyes; the cochineal, the lac, the 35 gallons of heavenly stinking walnut mash. 

When the resist tools are sorted out, all in their precious little plastic tupperware containers, they get so lonely and cry out to me, disturbing a good night's sleep. "Clamp me, squish me, fold and pinch me!" What shall I do??

And upstairs I hear the grumblings of the book studio, the bone folders clackering in their boxes, the waxed linen drooping.  "Come work with us," the sewing needles plead.  Papers start to silently wrinkle.  Buttons disappear off the table to be at the mercy of the cat.  The scissors decide to rust.

It is a scary house in which to be living and artmaking.  Luckily I am working in one area - that of testing local brews.  Asheville isn't called "Beer City" for nuthin'.

And in the midst of ignoring calls from the studio tools and while enjoying brew test number 12, I hear screams from my side hosta garden where the gnomes are being overwhelmed by leaves, weeds and large ants!

I tell ya, Teaching season can't come too soon.  So please check out the teaching schedule page on this blog - right up at the top, and come and play with the dyes and felts and books and even the gnomes if they haven't gone on strike and wandered off to a more hospitable garden.

Below is my 'gardening shed' with evidence that I have a history of procrastination.  The oil tank was redundant four years ago when I switched to gas; the tools are bound with spider webs and the moose is dead.