Back again

That's my pretty girls, giving you the eye.  Pohaku, on the left, is a seal lynx-point Balinese; Lehua, on the right, is an Oriental shorthair whose coloring is called something like "ebony silver-tipped tabby patch".  Also known as Lehua The Witch-Cat.  Ages 18 and 16, respectively, in good health and pretty agile still.  An integral part of my life.

It's been a long, wet, chilly Winter and Spring, and Spring isn't anywhere near over.  Today is sunny and clear, but started out cool.  Rain will be back on Monday.  Spring in the Maritime Northwest is a chancy thing, and every time (often several times in the same day) you think it's in full flower (as it were) it turns around and gets unpleasant again with rain and wind and raw temperatures.  The silver lining to all these clouds is that the flowering shrubs and trees, the daffodils and tulips,  stay in bloom a long time, so there's plenty of time to admire and enjoy them as they provide their welcome antidote to the cruddy weather.

My work goes well, and I've settled into a steady production mode. 
 

This is the African Savannah series, recently finished.  Hand-dyed rayon and cotton warp, wefts mostly tencel, though the second from left has a hand-dyed rayon/cotton slub that I dyed years ago in a long-discarded idea of becoming a Real Dyer.  Never happened, never going to happen.  These scarves are exceptionally lustrous and drapey.  Very elegant.

Some elements of catastrophe, most notably a burglary and theft in my studio, resulting in the loss of both laptop computers (which are needed to run my looms) and some cash which I'd hidden in a file drawer.  A bad blow, the most painful part of which was that I'd not backed up my files and so all the designs I'd created in the past several years were gone.  Not to be retrieved.  Some of them were really terrific -- complex, interesting, original.  

Silver lining again -- once I got new computers, I realized that I know a LOT more now than I did a couple years ago, and could get things up and running more quickly and with greater ease than I'd imagined.  Also, I've been able to generate new designs at a good pace, including ones that are quite complex.  I'm backing everything up now on Dropbox -- easy and quick, and therefore it gets done consistently.

This week I figured out that my reluctance to write here frequently seems to be generated by a concern that I have to do it "right".  Decided to ignore that silliness from now on, and just write whatever I want.  Long or short, it doesn't matter.  Coherent or not, it doesn't matter.  And it doesn't have to be about my work and nothing else, so I'm going to be throwing in bits of my life that surrounds this work and in some ways feeds it.  This quiet studio is often a respite from other things, and I need that.  It's also the essential core of my life, which is in its entirety full, rich, interesting, challenging.  It's all of a piece.