A Funky Kind of Week
It’s been a funky sort of week. Not bad, not sad, just… strange. I have things I should be doing but can’t seem to muster the energy for, and the things I want to do feel slippery and out of reach. Too many ideas swirl around in my head, and the more I think, the more muddled I become.
Still, I’ve found small moments of making. I spent time painting fabrics, leaning into a soft palette of light grays and gray blues. I keep picturing them in a cascade book, but they’ll need a few more layers before they’re ready to sing.
One playful experiment kept me smiling: flour resist on fabric. I mixed up what I thought would be plenty, only to discover it barely covered a single piece. Washing the flour out proved more stubborn than I expected, but after a couple of tries, the fabric revealed a beautiful surface. It was not-too-messy, surprising, and full of potential. I’ll definitely be trying again.
Beyond the studio table, I’ve been clearing space. Yesterday I took boxes of books to bookstores, donated the rest along with three bags of odds and ends, and felt a real sense of lightness. Slowly, I’m reorganizing my basement studio to teach classes there. Moving things from shelf to shelf, repacking, tidying up … discarding.
And yet, despite these accomplishments, I feel restless. Deadlines loom, my mind is buzzing, and Unbound—the course I’ve been following—has filled my head with more ideas than I can possibly process. Then I go into the group and see all the amazing work others are posting, and I feel the tug to join in – only I don’t have anything ready to share. There’s this competitive voice whispering that I should be producing, keeping up, posting. And yet, it feels like I have nothing to show for all this making. Fabric takes time – layers need to dry, surfaces must be treated, marks have to settle – so what looks like “nothing” is really quiet work in progress. Still, even knowing how much care paper projects require, fabric unfolds at its own pace, and I can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt for not yet holding something tangible in my hands.
So I sit with this odd mix of momentum and pause. Maybe that’s part of the creative cycle too – the swirl before the next step, the clearing before the making. Sometimes progress looks like flour stuck to fabric or boxes leaving the house. Sometimes it’s simply being patient enough to let the right idea float to the surface. I’ll trust that these quiet, slow steps are building toward something, even if I can’t see it yet.
Until I write again, here’s to waiting, working, and wondering – funky weeks included.
Ana
