so many possibilities!

I have been looking through the Dharma Trading Co catalog and am a little overwhelmed. So far the options for playing with fabric include:

• marbling
• silk-screening
• inkjet photo transfers/fabric
• stamping
• batik
• silk painting
• tie-dyeing
• shibori (a subset of tie-dyeing)

and that’s just the start of it! Handspinning and knitting (with which I was getting emphatically bored) are just the tip of the iceberg.

I think this weekend, with my mom, I’ll tackle marbling, dyeing, and stamping, plus some flat pattern drafting and crazy-quilting. I think she’d enjoy any and all of that, and it is kind of magical watching the patterns appear. I have the materials for everything except stamping, and I think I can pick those up pretty cheaply at Jo-Ann’s Fabrics on the way home tonight.

There are moments when life is so shiningly brilliant that I want to roll in it like an overenthusiastic dog…I go through phases of being relatively uncreative, and then there are times when life just explodes with possibility.

I’m still not sure if this goes with being bipolar–mood swings are the hallmark of the disorder–but I don’t show any of the usual signs of mania during these phases, so I think it’s just the life of a creative artist.