This coming Saturday I’ll be attending the Jim Victore event Take This Job and Love It. It captured my imagination ever since I read its promise to help me access a higher level of badass-dom.
While I think that badass-dom is one of those things that you can’t consciously work on or even really talk about lest it slip between your fingers, I am anxious to get some sort of kick in the pants about what it means to work creatively and how to be part of the bigger art world. Just leaving home for a day and meeting a big roomful of strangers and hear someone outside any of my normal realms talk is a great start.
I’m not even hoping anything about this. I remember once attending a workshop about clothing design in my early quilting days. I was so excited to be in the class with the teacher whose work I’d long admired. Clothing design wasn’t my particular interest but design process is always good. And, in fact, her ideas of how to gather ideas, try them out, play with them were all valuable and important.
The woman next to me showed up with several BOXES of fabric and stuff. (For a design class!) She sighed and muttered and sighed all day long. When I asked her, after awhile of this, if she was ok, she said she had come to this class hoping to get assistance in making patterns fit, because try as she might she could never get clothes she made for herself to fit and look good.
I thought about the description of the class (and that this was being held in a fairly large quilt show). I gently said to the woman that this was billed as a design class, not a pattern-fitting class, so it was unlikely she’d get that information and even unlikely that the teacher had that expertise. She just fiddled for the rest of the day with what she’d brought. The rest of us had a great time.
I tell that tale just to say that sometimes it’s better to keep an open mind and not hope for one thing or another from a single event. I never took a class hoping to learn a particular technique from someone but often did learn some gems that were almost throw aways. One time I learned that my design tendencies trend to high contrast – I’d just never really looked at or thought about it. I often learned a lot about teaching styles.
So here I go open to whatever happens.
Meanwhile I began to stick small squares up on the wall last night in a personal experiment of not putting anything down on paper before beginning. Yes, I do have a sort of size in mind. Yes I have the merest bit of an idea but I’m going to see what happens vertically for a few days and then decide what to do.
