Athena Dreams Design

Getting it Right

Sometimes getting it right means doing it a few times. 

Sometimes getting it right means re-doing it a few times

Sometimes getting it right means starting all over from the beginning. 

There are those "other" times, those wonderful occasions when getting it right happens the first time through, and you can be sure that I celebrate those moments.

This frothy, cabled piece of mauve fluff is one front of a cardigan that I've been working on for a few weeks. The back, the sleeves, even a very complex collar, just poured out from beneath my needles, but the 2 fronts, were just not that cooperative. This is the left front. It is now finished, but I started and almost finished it 3X before this version you see, and the right front has had much the same journey.

Sometimes we just don't get it right: with a project, with a friend, with a partner, with a business, with a guess, or even a particular path we have chosen to venture down. Sometimes, we have to keep trying, sometimes we need to look at it from a different perspective and there are those times we choose to just give up.  

I remember when my grandmother first started to teach me to knit, and I wanted to do something fabulous and she said a scarf and just plain garter stitch rows was the place to start. I was so disappointed. I had visions of a cabled hat and matching mittens, or a poncho (it was the 70s after all) with just the right length of fringe. But I started with a scarf, and yet, even with the easiest of stitches and acres of knitting back and forth across my needles, I made mistakes, I dropped stitches and created holes and as the 10 year old I was, I ended up throwing it in a corner and howling at that pile of wool and sticks. 

I could envision what I wanted but my hands couldn't yet take me there. 

As you can see, I did pick up my ball of wool and sticks and try again. I tried again many many times until I started getting it "more" right each time I tried. And with each try I managed to garner more patience for my fumbling fingers and my klutzy hands, until they were less klutzy and fumbling. 

So, these cardigan fronts made me think about some of the things I have set aside because I couldn't get them "right": the projects I have started and re-started, the canvases I have painted over and started again, or left languishing long enough that I now have the solution I needed months or years before.

There is a phrase that I found totally annoying: practice makes perfect. It is really more true than I sometimes want to see. Sometimes much of the "doing" we are participating in is all about the practice. Sometimes a painting that is started 3, 4, or 16 times gets you to a place where you had only dreamed of going. Sometimes going back to that work project again and again gets you further along a path that you have wanted to venture down. And not just sometimes but very often, practicing to make it right with the people in our lives gets us more deeply in touch with them and also with our own selves. 

So, getting it right really may be all about practicing until the moment arrives that it (whatever the it is) actually feels right. And then, hmmm.... my mind leaps to: perhaps those rare moments when we feel that we have gotten it right the very first time really are not so miraculous. Perhaps the first time wins have their grounding in practice we haven't even realised we were doing.

What are you practicing these days?

The Holiday of Love

I know that there are a lot of people that feel that Valentine's Day is a Hallmark card invention, and more about commerce than love, which may be partly true, but according to an article this week in the Telegraph, its origins are most likely traced back to ancient Rome, among other places. 

Apparently in the days of old Rome 13-15 February was a pagan fertility festival called Lupercalia. And, OK, so it seems that the main part of these festivities centered around young men running naked in the streets using goat or dog skin whips to smack young women's bums in order to improve their fertility, but you know, it was a festival, and, all festivals usually include some wild aspect... uhm, haven't we all been to Burning Man, or heard the stories...

So, more history in a nutshell for you (PLEASE NOTE: irreverence ahead): in the very early years of A.D., there were several martyrs with the name Valentine or Valentina, who probably perished in some unspeakable ways, and then the Catholic church came along and called the 14th of February a saints day, no doubt to upstage those naughty pagans. Fast forward quite a few centuries and Chaucer comes along to write something naughty (again) in old english about the engagement of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia (mm-hmm). Now, fast forward another century and we have the first Court of Love, in Paris (of course), which deals with legal matters of the heart, and ya da ya da, and now onward a few more centuries to Shakespeare mentioning Valentine's Day in his play Hamlet - a long soliloquy by Ophelia, before the drowning.

So, that's probably more than enough to give you the idea, that the symbols and beginnings for Valentine's Day were around long before Hallmark opened their doors, I guess they saw a good thing and jumped on board, so to speak.

I want to say too, that I know there are people who loathe this day because they are single. For me - someone who has spent many a Valentine's Day without a true-love - this day has always been less about romance and flowers and having an "other", and so much more about carrying along that tradition begun in elementary school of giving a valentine to any and everyone that you love or even just like a lot. 

I loved the day of the Valentine at school. We would tape paper bags to the sides of our little desks, and everyone would put valentine's in each others bags. Most were handmade and handwritten, some the hallmark variety, but all of them were so very sweet. Did you all do this too? I remember coming home with all my Valentine's in my little paper bag, and sleeping with them under my pillow, until they got all ratty and bent, and my mother probably whisked them away.

And so in the tradition of my elementary school experience, I give you a Valentine, along with an envelope for you to print and use to your heart's content. You can download it here: Download Valentine Gift. Or leave me a comment here and I will send the file directly to your in-box. It is a 3 page document, one page for the card, one for the envelope and a page of instructions for printing and cutting and pasting. 

Happy Valentine's Day, and may all your heart's be full to overflowing.

PLEASE NOTE: This card is for your personal use only, please do not re-sell, change or modify the artwork in any way. Thanks.

6 Weeks In

• The weather people here say that we have had 28 days of rain in the last 30 days, and man am I ever feeling it. Wet has reached a new level of soggy, AND I hear that there is sun in Portland these days. Go figure. 

• OK, so I know I wished for rain, and so I will again learn to be much more specific in my wishes, and next time ask for a few days of rain, followed by a few days of sun. This perhaps goes under the heading of moderation in all things...

• A broken toe and all the above mentioned rain have found me in my studio. A lot. That has been a wonderful, wonderful thing.

• I am settling into the view out of my studio window, and recognizing the birds that come to socialize and eat the pyrocantha berries until they are too stuffed to fly. They sit and stare and blink, and fluff themselves up, I am thinking this is the bird version of a nap.

• Business plans are not for cry-babies. Oh, and while I am on that topic, marketing plans are not for sissies, and though there has been some wimpering over here, there have been NO tears. [Thanks Erin and Jaime]

• Does anyone else hear the days whooshing past them, like some kind of crazy interstellar rocket ship?

• There is a little red squirrel who likes to bury things in the pot outside the window where I am sitting, and then comes back a few hours later to unbury it. He kind of does that all day: buries his treasures, and then comes back to make sure they're still there. I can relate. 

February 2010 .:. Monthly Goals

 

Did you all catch how quickly January just passed us by? I have to say in all honesty that the start of the year, which I was looking forward to greatly, didn't begin with the beauty and grace that I had envisioned. The first few weeks were full of long deadlines, and a stubbed and broken toe, and lots and lots and lots of rain, and no feelings of "aaahhhh, here begins a fabulous new year". That all changed last week, well, the deadlines ended, the rain is still coming, but thankfully, and I now feel ready to begin this year with a (tiny) hop in my step, whilst singing a happy song.

So January was: 

1. Creating a plan for my business(es) - my artwork and my design work
2. Researching and contacting 3 galleries - DID research, no contacting, but have a really great list going!
3. PAINTing at least 2 hours a day - YES!
4. Writing at least 2 hours every other day - hmmm, nope

#3 is the only one I can say that I accomplished. Since January ended up being all about design deadlines, all the rest fell by the wayside, and I had a small epiphany moment about #2, and that is that I need to get more work painted, so I have something of substance to show a gallery. Yup. That little item, needs to be accomplished.

And so on to February:

1. Bakery's Half Dozen course - and it looks like it's starting off BIG, with the Biz Plan - who else in this group is doing the Bakery course?
2. Continue researching galleries
3. Same as last month: PAINT
4. Focus Focus Focus: what is my next destination with my art/design/writing? A vision in my own mind needs to be conjured up. Less metaphorical rushing around putting out and starting fires, and more clear and focused thinking
5. Decide what classes I want to take at Squam this september. Registration is OPEN as of today. Anyone thinking about going? Elizabeth (the brainstorm behind Squam) has a great quote up on the Squam Art Workshops site:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

OK, let's go forth and experience February!

IF you are new to the Meet Up, here's the scoop:

• Post a list of your business related goals for the current month on the 1st of each month on your blog. {If the 1st falls on a weekend, post on the following Monday.}
• Come back over here and leave a link to your goals blog post in the comments of my current month's goals.
• And then {and this is the most important part, since we are a community} visit all the links in the comments, stop in and say hello, have a conversation, meet and greet and etc.