immediate gratification...

"Scorpio - The work that you recently invested in yourself is almost ready to be presented to the world. Although it's not wise to stand on the sidelines and watch silently, you aren't quite ready for prime time yet." 

This was the horoscope that popped up when I went to check my e-mail this morning after spending most of the morning packing and repacking some pieces to send off to Belle Armoire Jewelry.  I'm not sure how I want to interpret the second sentence.  I've worked myself into what I can only call a tizzy.  I keep reminding myself to have no attachment to outcome.  It is was it is and whatever it will be - will be.  


I was not always so Zen about this kind of thing.  I came across a portfolio with some prints of a few of my quilts while cleaning up my very disorganized workspace tonight.  I thought I only had slides but I must have had these printed for some reason.  I was always entering shows and they all had different requirements.  I got into some and didn't get into others.  The big show that I was heavily invested in emotionally was the biennial Quilt National.  My work never made it in and it was always a crushing disappointment not to get that validation I wanted so badly.

"Motorola 68000"  pieced quilt, featured in a Japanese quilting magazine

A fancy schmancy Japanese quilting magazine did a multi-page spread on my stuff.  I never found out what they said about me, since I don't read or speak Japanese.  That might be my name on top.  Who knows?

This one and the one after it were based on computer chip circuitry designs and were representative of my tight-assed accountant mind set.  Those are called prairie points around the edge of that bottom quilt.  There are about a zillion of them, all folded into perfect points, perfectly spaced and stitched in place.  All this while working full time, raising three kids and going to school at night.  I must have been insane.  Actually, I'm really impressed that I made them.  My attention span must have been a lot longer back then.

"Monolithic Memories" , machine-pieced, hand-quilted

And here I'm starting to lose the ruler and rotary cutter and get a little less obsessed about making all the corners line up perfectly.  Hmmm.  If I didn't know better, I'd think that a progreesion like this shows some kind of mental breakdown.

"PMS 2", machine pieced, hand-quilted

"The Empress", hand painted, machine-pieced, hand-quilted

Tie-dying and hand painting.  This is what happens when bookkeepers go wild.

"Root", hand painted fabric, machine-pieced, hand-quilted

"Root" was one of my last quilts.  By this time, I had started to study shamanism with a student of Michael Harner's and I felt like I had found my path back home to my real self.  I dropped out of my accounting and finance classes and started stringing beads together.  

Immediate gratification.