in the quiet

in the quiet of the past week I've been puttering away at organizing my studio working space

I am forever dealing with an incessant array of paper scraps with scribbled notes on everything from creative insights to process revelations and everything in-between along with small stacks of supplies for works-in-progress

those have now been brought back under control and as the quiet days of winter are here I finally find myself in a place where its time to choose what I'm going to work on for the next while

so back to the river I go

I have a loose plan for the work I want to do, based on the same ideas I've had for many, many months, some for a couple of years, but as time passed I found some of those ideas had lost a bit of their lustre; they are now getting a boost from new insights

to feed that thinking, and perhaps take some of it a step or two further, I pulled out a sketchbook where I had worked through different ways of depicting aspects of the river in paper, cloth and stitch

organic lines, straight lines - tucks and gathers and random stitches became water, ice, current, drift wood

lace for the water froth at the rapids

marbled paper for a swirling current

and thankfully, all are fully annotated

(insert a smug smile here)

I think this next page of work holds a lot of potential, especially that piece of ragged grey lace

it has me thinking of the small channels that open up in the ice only to disappear again

over the next few weeks I'll be taking some of the ideas shown here and working them in to what I'd been doing and try to finally move some this work forward

and there goes the state of the studio again!

Thanks for stopping by,

Jillayne