Teresa of SliverMade Studio is this week’s Cleveland Handmade featured artist. Read her interview here.
Cindy Benson of Simple Elements Design is this week’s Cleveland Handmade featured artist. Read my interview with her here.
Jodie Pastor of Lake Erie Beach Glass is this week’s Cleveland Handmade featured artist. Read my interview with her here.
The book project is coming along. It is every bit as tough as I thought it was going to be, and I do struggle a bit sometimes, but it’s a good feeling to make progress. I’ve cleared my schedule of everything I possibly could for the next two weeks to make it happen.
Speaking of clearing schedules, my etching class that was scheduled for Wednesday didn’t get the minimum signups necessary to be a go. That gives me another full evening this week to focus. My class tonight in North Olmsted is almost full, so that will give me a nice break of creative goodness and being out in the world to sustain me through the week. I’ve been a bit of a hermit through the month of January, and I fear I’m starting to lose some social skills.
I added two more etching classes in March, one each in Chagrin Falls and North Olmsted, and a Saturday Beading 101 class North Olmsted in late February. The schedule is over there to the right in the sidebar.
Two book projects that I was expecting to fill the first week of February have miraculously both been delayed, so I am going to end up with a little bit of a break to relax and work in the studio on a couple things that have been floating around in the back of my head. And get out of the house to have a cup of tea or lunch among other real live actual human beings.
Colleen Fitzpatrick is this week’s Cleveland Handmade featured artist. Read my interview with her here.
I’m a bit behind on making the obligatory post on resolutions, but that’s okay, because I didn’t really make any this year. I won’t go into a convoluted wrap-up of 2008, either, other than to say that the last quarter of the year was one of my busiest ever for both businesses, and that the busyness forced some reflection on how I was spending my time, which led to a realization that I was going to have to do some rearranging of my priorities and how I choose to spend the free time and energy I have.
The biggest change is that when my term as communications director on the board of the OSU Alumni Club of Greater Cleveland is up in February, I will not be seeking reelection. I’ve served as communications director for three years and as a rank-and-file board member for three years before that, and I’m a bit burned out. I’m pleased with what I’ve accomplished: a good-looking, properly spelled newsletter and website; a discussion list for board members; an e-mail announcement list for members; some automation in event registration; getting to a place where we can accept credit card payments for our big event; shared master documents for our membership database; a much more streamlined and less labor-intensive way of sending out paper newsletters; and a bunch of other little things. As with most such things, there are always some things I had hoped to accomplish but didn’t get to, the biggest being some kind of self-serve membership web thingy where people can join or renew their memberships online and handle their own address and similar changes. C’est la vie. This change alone will give me a couple hundred hours of my life back over the course of 2009.
I returned to yoga in the fall, and find that I really look forward to it every week. It’s been helpful both physically and mentally. My instructor usually asks us to set an intention for class, and I find myself returning again and again to the concept of flow, not just for the hour on the mat, but in my life. And when she asked us in the first class of the new year to consider an intention for the new year, my mind instantly returned to flow. So, in lieu of a list of concrete new year’s resolutions, I’m dedicating 2009 to finding a state of flow, eliminating or working around the dams erected by myself or others, dealing with the here and now rather than slogging through outdated intentions I’ve set for myself or letting things pile up to the point they become inpenetrable.
I will continue to be scarce and in communications triage mode for the month of January. A plum, door-opening writing project landed in my lap, but with it came a crazy deadline, and it is sucking up most of my time lately. I’ll be in a better place to talk about the project once I’ve wrapped up my piece of it.
And with that, I’ve used up today’s allotment of “free time,” so back to the grindstone. Happy new year!
This week’s Cleveland Handmade featured artist is Gina DeSantis. Read my interview with her here.
This week’s Cleveland Handmade featured artist is the lovely Erika Laine Hansen. Read all about her and her work here.
Meet Rob Merwath, this week’s Cleveland Handmade featured artist.
I am this week’s celebrity, and you can read my answers to the off-the-wall questions posed by the lovely smashing, who also took the photo of me that accompanies the interview, on the Cleveland Handmade site.
December has been a whirlwind so far. I was expecting a quiet month, just a couple of little proofreading projects, then a plum writing project dropped into my lap. I’ll share more about the project when the details are more settled and I have something to link to rather than trying to explain it in all its quirkiness, but the jist is that I’m coauthoring a fun book about cats with two other writers. What this means in my universe is that those people who usually get a personal, handwritten note in the holiday card I usually mail on the first of December will get a form letter in their holiday card that might get mailed tomorrow. Or Saturday. And I’m going to continue to be really rotten about returning nonessential e-mails and phone calls into the beginning of 2009.
This weekend marks the last of my 2009 shows, the Cleveland Handmade Last Minute Market. We had such a great time at the last CH Market that we decided to do it again. This time it is in a warehouse space in Westlake, on Canterbury Road to the north of Detroit Road (that link will lead you to more details and a map). I hope to see a few friendly faces on Saturday evening — come on by and say “hi” and see some really nice stuff from 22 Cleveland Handmade artists.
PS: I’m using Twitter a lot to post little tidbits a couple of times a day when I don’t have time to write full blog posts. If you’re a tweeter, you can follow me there, or just check in under “What I’m Doing…” in the sidebar over there to the right —>
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