Going with the flow

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Mary Beth Frezon

thanks to Valley Fiber Life for pointing me to this nice piece summing up Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on what is common in those wonderful moments of flow:

4. Concentration on the task at hand; irrelevant stimuli disappear from consciousness, worries and concerns are temporarily suspended.

5. A sense of potential control.

6. Loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of ego boundaries, a sense of growth and of being part of some greater entity.

7. Altered sense of time, which usually seems to pass faster.

8. Experience becomes autotelic: If several of the previous conditions are present, what one does becomes autotelic, or worth doing for its own sake.

The Evolving Self – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 178-179

I’m curious about #5 since I think when you feel part of what you’re doing control isn’t really such an issue or elusive target but I thought #8 especially was spot on.

2 Comments

Times the light bulb goes on

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Mary Beth Frezon

As part of setting up the link overhead to “My Quilts” I was checking links and just clicking through stuff. Pondering future re-orgs and such like things. And then I hit this picture:

And realized that I’ve been making these silly pieced blocks for a long long time. LOL.

1 Comment

A fix is a fix

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Mary Beth Frezon

Sometimes it’s better not to waste a lot of time trying to get someone else’s code/plugin/whatever to work and just figure out some other way to do it. So, dear readers, please note that the links to my quilt photos and all my other links have moved to the bar above. This has a bonus in that the sidebar is now shorter and hopefully more user friendly.

I’m sure this will change some more but for now at least it works for me!

At the top of my to-do list at the moment is the idea of gathering all the better images of completed quilts and putting them in one gallery for viewing. That’s one of the problems of long-term blogging and web page building. Things change over time and get spread out over the interwebs.

Posted in Administrivia | Tagged | Comments Off on A fix is a fix

What is it you do again?

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Mary Beth Frezon

“Whatever the many failings of my work,” he concluded, “let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”

The above quote grabbed me from a NYTimes article about John Updike.

Someone recently asked me what kind of quilts I made and as I tried to explain this no-where land between “Traditional” and “Art Quilt” I finally said — I don’t really care how people describe me. I am a contemporary quilter. Someone down the road in time will figure out what we were all doing. In the meantime I seem to do my own thing and occasionally serve to explain a couple of things to the people who don’t want to claim me or what I do. One, that “traditional” is a reflection of people doing what they wanted to make things, express themselves using the materials and tools and ideas they had. And two, that all this “art” stuff has been done before: printing on fabric, putting photographs on fabric, surface design, embellishments etc. Not new. Been done before. Stop thinking you made it up. Or at least stop being rather snobby about it. And three, just do the work until it is your own.

Posted in Art in the world | Tagged | Comments Off on What is it you do again?

Tuesday

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Mary Beth Frezon

Yet another Tuesday. Went up to see the folks Sunday night and drove back Monday, and had a nice visit while there. Dad liked the new Mr. Coffee and the new Suduko book will keep him out of trouble awhile.

Spent today at a shop getting a whole lot of work done to the car. I keep telling myself that it’s worth keeping this car going but it’s annoying and scary to spend big hunks of money now and again on it. But now the 2002 saturn has a new exhaust system (its first replacement!) and the standard oil change/let’s see how many other little things we can throw in too sort of thing. I had a 30% off coupon on the exhaust work which I think says a lot about the pricing schema there…

Needless to say it all took awhile. I was quite prepared for this. I did a lot of surfing, emailing, facebooking, chatting and actual pencil and paper working. Meanwhile an array of type-A, twitchy, whiny, angry people came and went. One woman went totally ballistic at her husband who said nothing and did nothing to alleviate the situation. Always two sides of the story and I could understand both sides but yelling and throwing a lot of language around and flouncing out, spending time sulking by the big trash container outside and then flouncing in to yell some more ummmm smacks of tantrum. Or, to be kinder, the moment you realize your marriage should have ended about 5 years ago.

Much facebook fodder there.

Then some grocery shopping. Yes – a bunch of guys cruising the aisles, LOL but more interestingly, there was a big Hannaford managers meeting/store tour going on. The one I nabbed to present my über tech idea to, pretty much gave me bare time of day. You snooze you lose folks since I already presented it to a rather enthusiastic local competitor.

Now I’m home with a bunch of food to make me hungry for all things good for me. Hope that works out!

Posted in In the neighborhood | Tagged , | Comments Off on Tuesday