“Speed of Life” is the opening track on Low, one of my very favorite albums by David Bowie. The first side (remember when records had sides?) is pure melancholy rock ’n’ roll perfection. Superbly orchestrated chaos. A flow of Sound and Vision you can dance to and cry over at the same time. I could go on, but I won’t. Just go listen to it.​

Like many people, Bowie has been much on my mind since his passing on Jan. 10. I’ve been a fan for such a long time (since the late ‘70s or so—yikes!) it’s hard to believe he’s not in the universe anymore. At least not corporeally. 

So when I realized the other day that most of the things I’m working on are slow-moving, “Speed of Life” popped into my head. The speed of my life, my work, is generally slow. Embroidery, beadwork, writing fiction and poetry, reading—all take time. Not that I’m complaining; I like it that way. 

When I got to contemplating it, though, I realized that the activities I engage in aren’t so much slow, as they just take the time they take (which in some cases can be a lot!). Finding the right word for a poem or tone for a scene takes time (as well as an inordinate amount of refrigerator cleaning and sock drawer organizing). For me, writing also requires time away from the writing—fallow time to let things gel, for new ideas to percolate. I usually write first drafts in long-hand (with an actual pen). It helps me access the non-linear part of my brain, and is less intimidating than a blank screen. But it does take time.

The kind of art I love to make also takes time. I’ve estimated that one square inch of dense embroidery takes about an hour—choosing colors, stitching, threading needles. I don’t time myself while I work—partly because I forget to, but mostly because it seems antithetical to the creative process. 

So it is a slow form of art, but again, it takes as long as it takes. Which doesn’t bother me while I’m stitching or writing, but at the end of the day when I have a few square inches of stitching done and some words on a page, I kind of wish I had chosen faster creative forms. I wonder where the day went. I start to feel the pressure from the outside world creep in—the dozens of productivity gurus telling me how I can get more done in less time, the world that seems to be screaming faster, faster, better, more! 

Which leads to an uncomfortable paradox nibbling at my gut. I love the pace of my work, the deliberateness and attention it requires—and I find myself wanting to see results more quickly. I want to get more work done so I have a larger body of work to show and to shop around. I want to finish a first draft, damnit! I tend not to buy into the productivity craze, but I do sometimes find myself evaluating how I spend my time outside of creative work. Should I turn off email? Only respond once a day? Quit Facebook? Work till 10pm? Then of course I think I’m spending too much time figuring out how to save time, and my head starts to spin. 

I tend towards cutting out a lot of the noise of the world, self-censoring my intake of pop culture and news. But I also sometimes feel like huge chunks of modern life are flying by me, and I wonder if I’m missing anything of value (usually the answer comes back quickly—no). 
I’ve come to see that this process of slowing down and cutting out much of the speediness of the world is a way of stumbling toward contentment. I know the speediness is there, and I certainly fall into it at times, but I know it’s healthier for me not to get too immersed in it. I also don’t want to feel resentful of the speediness or reject it completely. That would just make me angry and unsatisfied. There has to be a balance.

I think what I’m writing myself toward is that the speed of life is variable, and that’s a good thing. The second side of Bowie’s Low is slow, brooding electronica. Bowie and Brian Eno playing with sound and voice. I admit that I haven’t listened to it nearly as much as side one, but it is starting to grow on me. So R.I.P., Mr. Bowie, and thank you for showing the way once again. For showing how to balance the speeds of life.

I left my day job about 2 1/2 years ago. In order to help me feel OK about leaving a secure job, I gave myself a six month ‘sabbatical’—in quotes since I didn’t plan to go back to that job. I knew I needed time to detox from 20 years of working regular jobs, to figure out what direction I was going, to make art and write. To play.

It was time I really needed. After about five months, though, I began to get bored. I was floundering. I knew I wanted to make my living with my art and writing, but I didn’t want to get another job, even an art- or writing-related one. But I found it hard to impose on myself the kind of schedule I would need to get work done. I needed some outside input.

I started taking classes in creative entrepreneurship (which I knew nothing about—I’d spent 20 years in libraries and academia). I started a creative business, entered my art in shows, started two novels and submitted poetry to literary magazines. My work was slowly being recognized  (emphasis on slowly). I found I worked better if I had a deadline.

But even though things were happening, and I was beginning to see how I could help make them happen, I still felt adrift. I didn’t know what this new life looked like, or should look like. (I have since learned that a ‘should’ popping up is a big ol’ red flag—as in “danger, danger Will Robinson, you’re buying into other people’s ideas about you again!”) I was very familiar with what the life of an 8-5 job looked and felt like—and I was determined NOT to recreate that. That’s why I quit, right?! But this amorphous artist-writer life was a mystery.

I’m old enough that people asked me if I had retired when I left my job. No! I wanted to yell at them. I’m just now getting to my real work! But many people don’t understand any work lifestyle outside of ‘job’ and ‘retirement.’ And I realized that I didn’t either. 

What I was doing was fun, it felt like play—it was what I had always done outside my job, for myself, for fun. It was not-work. Which is a wonderful thing, except that I equated work with legitimacy. This thing I was doing—play, not-work—was therefore not legitimate. It was not something any serious person would do with their ‘work’ time.

It took me a long time (and numerous conversations with my coach) to realize that’s how I had set up my work life. And that I could change my mind about it—I could view my art and writing as both play and legitimate activity, a serious contribution to the world that others would appreciate and find helpful.

But I still felt like I was spinning my wheels half the time. When I had a deadline I was motivated, I was productive and excited about my work. When I didn’t have a deadline, there were just too many possibilities for what to do with my time. Start another piece? Maybe a new series! Or work on the languishing novel. But I should really work on something more likely to make money—the business. But what about studio time? I don’t want to neglect that. I’d spin around in the little hamster wheel of my mind and usually end up reading email or Facebook.

Then the other day I had an aha! moment. I sing in my church choir, and when we first start working on a piece, we bumble our way through it a few times to get a feel for it. When things start clicking, at least for enough of us that it doesn’t sound completely awful, our director will say, “Yeah, that’s the shape of it. That’s the shape of the piece.” 

I realized that that’s what I’ve been looking for—the shape of this new work life. And I’m starting to get it, the shape of this creative life. I’m putting the pieces together. ​

But even more important than the specific pieces that compose the shape is that I now know it has a shape. An outline, a form I can return to when I get lost. And I know it’s my shape to form, to construct. Which is what I love about it, now that I know there is a form to compose. A simple thing, I know, but it makes all the difference for me.

There are few things I enjoy more than buying beads. I have a lot of beads, it's true, but it seems that a new project almost always requires new beads. Unlike painting, where you can mix pretty much every color you need, when you need a new bead color you have to get new beads. What a shame!

Of course, it might not be that you need a new color, but you need the same color in a different texture--matte, transparent, opaque, opalescent, matte opaque, matte transparent, silver lined, metallic. Etc. Or another size--15s, 11s, 8s (most to the left are 8s), 6s. (The smaller the number, the bigger the bead.)

I would like one of each, please.

My husband often asks (usually after a bead shopping trip), "how many beads do you have, anyway?" A lot. A s*&# load. More than I thought I could count. Then I found a chart that shows how many beads there are per gram, of each size. (Thank you, Beadstuff!). Hey, I could actually figure this out!

I started weighing the 8s (I have fewer of those; mostly I've worked with 11s). And realized how long it would take to figure out how many I have total, even with the cheatsheet. 

These two bins to the right have most of my 8s in them. That's a pretty small subset of all my beads--I have lots more 11s and 15s (which are really tiny). The photo below shows my stash. Each large box (10"x13") has 50+ tubes of beads in them. 

OK, some math. There are approximately 40 size 8 beads per gram. I have about 1262 grams of size 8 beads. Yes, one thousand, two hundred and sixty-two grams. So that's about 50,480 beads total. 

Yikes! 

There are about 1,040 size 8 beads per 6" tube. Almost 3,000 size 11 beads per tube. I've pulled out about 16 tubes of size 11s for my next project--about 47,520 beads. But of course I won't use them all on that project. 

How many beads do I use on each project? Well, it certainly depends on the project--how large, how bead-intensive. And counting the beads as I sew them on would certainly take all the fun out of beading! 

Here's a guesstimate: I have one piece that weighs about 30 grams. I'm guessing about 27 grams of it is beads. About the same weight as one tube of size 11 beads. Not all the beads in the piece are size 11, though. So using the bead chart, I'm guessing there are somewhere around 1,500-2,000 beads in the piece. 

So there you have it. I can say I have thousands of beads, possibly over 100,000. But if anyone asks, I think I'm going to stick with "s&*# load."

I'm excited to be part of another show at the 40West Arts gallery, "Art of the Wheel." 40West Arts is just off Colfax - Highway 40 - and is part of the burgeoning West Colfax Corridor, which is now a Colorado Certified Creative District. In this show, they're celebrating more than a century of the wheel along this road, the longest commercial street in the country.

I had a lot of fun creating my piece for this show. I knew I wanted to embellish whatever wheel I chose with beads and thread, my favorite media. But what kind of wheel? Bicycle wheel? Skateboard wheel? Lawnmower wheel? I wanted something a little different, but something that had a connection to my life in Lakewood. Then I remembered the 3.5” computer diskettes I had saved from my years working in libraries. They were wheel-shaped (the inside, anyway), and a now long-forgotten part of one of our newest forms of transportation—the Internet, or Information Superhighway. Perfect!

Inside each 3.5” plastic case is a black, shiny flexible plastic disc with a metal center. I embellished the edges of these “wheels” with beads in a rainbow of colors, and then stitched designs with thread—a sort of hieroglyphics—on the surface. The discs are mounted on a board backing so that they are allowed to spin freely. And they are meant to be spun! The stitching is designed to be kaleidoscopic when spun. I love the idea of re-purposing, re-beautifying old objects. These discs were once used to move data—to transport ideas—but now are obsolete in that function. Now they are  transformed into something new, beautiful, and fun.


I hope you'll come out to see the show! It runs July 29-August 29. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1-4pm, and is located at 1560 Teller Street in Lakewood. Opening reception is Wednesday, July 29, from 5:30-7pm. Hope to see you there!

10 pounds of plums from Mom & Dad's tree, plus another pound from a neighbor... equals lots of plum juice for jelly!

I'm going to try out making a batch of plum-hot pepper jelly. Been making plum jelly for a few years, feeling the need to spice it up - literally! Will post pics of the finished jelly. Right now I need to find room for another 5 or 6 cups of juice...

My yoga teacher asked me the other day if I teach. Yes... Well, uh, not exactly. That is, I work for the school district, where I do training, but I'm not a classroom teacher. I do teach, though, in my other life as an artist. So we got to talking about the benefits of having multiple work lives. Balance and variety. 

I've struggled my whole adult life with work-work-life balance. Working a day job, "working" at my art (though I prefer to call it play), and having time to enjoy my family, garden, biking, reading, etc., etc. This week alone I've swung from hating my job, to getting excited about it again (thanks Dave!), to working late, being tired and not wanting to do anything, to getting 3 pieces accepted into a show and wanting to drop it all and get beading again. Cycles in cycles in cycles. Strangely, I still have a hard remembering that things change.

So it's good to hear about other people who have multiple work lives, and enjoy it. My yoga teacher teaches yoga (duh), and owns/operates a lovely little cafe. Do you combine work and work? I'd love to hear about it!

After I wrote and published my last post (Doneness, 8/6/12), I realized it was a cleverly disguised complaint about uncertainty. At least I thought it was clever--I admit was pretty enamored with the metaphor. And disguised even from me!

But an artist complaining about uncertainty... sort of like an Inuit complaining about the cold. Huh. Comes with the territory. The whole process of creating is a dance between knowing and not knowing, the seen and the unseen--or as yet unsee-able. But in a weird way it's helpful for me to complain and then catch it, to see what I'm doing. I see more clearly the places where I'm still working, where the fear comes up.

That's really what it's about, I think. Fear. Not knowing, thinking I'm not up to the task, not good enough, not whatever enough. Fill in the blank. Then seeing it, and going back to work. No need to fret, just go back to work. It's only if I don't go back to work that the fear wins out.

Sometimes I wish art were more like cooking. Say you want your steak medium rare, warm pink center. Theoretically (i.e., don't ask me) you know how long to cook the steak, given its weight and thickness. Cook to X (again, don't ask me) temperature, and voila! Steak, medium rare.

Art just isn't that simple (and granted, I'm probably over-simplifying the steak cooking). When is a piece done? When it's you reach the deadline? When you're sick of it? I find I get to a place in a piece where I've done what I know needs to be done -- often most of the beading -- and then I sit there looking at it for a couple days. It needs something, but what? I start trying things, hoping to god I don't do something that irrevocably screws it up. And I keep doing some more things... and some more... and maybe just a little more...

And sometimes, with all this futzing, it turns into something completely different than when I started out. That just doesn't happen in cooking. You don't put a steak in the broiler and cook it a little too long and oops, it turns into a pork chop (of course, it might turn into charcoal).

Actually, I would say that artworks usually turn out to be something different than what I started with. In fact, those are the good ones, the ones that move to a different place than where they began. That's often the point of art, isn't it? To find yourself in a new, unexpected, sometimes gorgeous, often surprising, place?

Which doesn't answer the question of when you know something is done. For me, it usually just feels done. Yep, medium rare. Yum!