Work? What work?

I have been shamelessly celebrating my lack of work. (To be honest, although my biggest case settled and eliminated the nastiest projects on my to-do list, I still have work on the list. Just nothing pressing. So I can pretend like it's not there, for the moment. You know how that lawyerly procrastination thing works. If I ignore it, it really might go away.)

Anyway. Yesterday, I had my art group meeting, followed by the second "Practical Design" workshop with Marilyn Felber. At the art group, we revealed the "brown bag" challenge quilts we've been working on for the past 6 months. The assortment of small quilts was wonderful to see. You can see them all here, on Gerrie's blog.

The design workshop with Marilyn was thought-provoking and very interesting. Marilyn has such a calm, careful presence about her. One of the big themes I'm taking away so far is the sense of doing whatever it is I do in my quilt art with deliberation. Why am I doing this? Why am I choosing this technique? Marilyn throws out a lot of questions to think about, with the basic premise that usually it's the process of asking the question that is more useful than actually answering it. So, for example, we talked a bit about the skill and craft that goes into making an art quilt, and learning the techniques (and confronting one's fear of what one cannot do) so that the inability to do some aspect of the craft won't impede your progress on a partular piece of art.

Many in the group were startled, to say the least, when Marilyn presented us with the next challenge: to use a particular complex traditional block (the Star of Bethlehem), reduce it to its basic structure, and then redesign a block that is true to the structure of the original but different in appearance from it. The diagram of the block flat out stunned some folks. All those triangles! All those points! (The group did not call itself "the Pointless Sisters" for nothing.) But many of us are enthusiastic about the process of taking an existing structure and making it our own.

And today? My sister and I tried out a new hamburger stand in town (with gourmet hamburgers and serving sweet potato fries...this IS Healdsburg, after all, where gourmet food rules and wine is served with everything) and then went home to watch a fluffy movie and happily tear inspirational pictures out of our old magazines. I"ll tell you about my inspiration notebooks another day. Now, all this leisure activity has worn me out and I'm headed to bed with a good novel.

Ooh--bathroom report-- the painters finished today, the toilet is now reinstalled (and not perching along side the bed, which is a refreshing improvement in the bedroom) and there are only a few minor things to be fixed before the master bathroom is ours again. I see a long bubble bath in my future...