Goals for 2012

I’ve been percolating on what I’d like to focus on/accomplish in 2012, and have decided to focus on fashion design and pattern drafting.  I will do plenty of other stuff during the year (including weaving!), but my goal for 2012 is to learn how to draft flat patterns for any piece of clothing I care to make, and how to drape clothing  directly on the dress form.  I feel like I’ve made considerable progress this year, but I want to develop real expertise.  This will mean drafting lots of patterns, which will in turn produce a bunch of “concept muslins” – muslins that will show whether my method worked, but which probably won’t be made up into an actual garment.  That’s OK; you get to be good by practicing, and this will be good practice.

I have a number of other ambitious goals for 2012.  Top on the list is finishing Autumn Splendor, of course, but the second one is buying a house!  Housing prices have dropped considerably in the Bay Area, and prices in our area of Sunnyvale have dropped by 30-40% from their peak, if Zillow is to be believed.  That’s low enough to tempt us into purchasing our first house.  That means we will likely spend at least part of January and February house-hunting.  We’ve already started drawing up lists of what we want in a house, and I’m reading up on the prep work involved (getting preapproved, finding an agent if we want one, etc.).  We’re not in a hurry, but we also don’t have particularly stringent requirements around a house (I couldn’t care less if the bathroom has solid gold fixtures or if the kitchen has granite counters), so I imagine it won’t be too hard to find a place.  But we’ve never done this before so it’s quite an adventure.

Other goals for the year include:

• finishing the first draft for the book.  I’d like to accomplish more but there is so much else going on that I don’t know if I’ll finish more.
• write more articles for Handwoven, if the new editor is still interested
• start up a new study group for Complex Weavers (on designing fabrics)
• work more on Complex Weavers publicity (I’m Publicity Chair for CW)
• study weaving
• play around more with my stash of surface design tools/materials
• reduce the amount of $$ I spend on projects

I do not plan to do another Major Project (as in, something that takes more than three months) next year.  I’ve decided, tentatively, that I will work in biennial cycles: one year studying, one year working on a Major Project.  This is mostly because I need a break between big projects – do you realize I’ve been working on Autumn Splendor for eight months already? – and partly because it fits nicely into the rhythm of the big weaving shows/conferences (which tend to be biennial).

Looking at it, that’s a fairly large number of goals, and I’m sure I won’t get to all of them.  That’s OK; life is all about exploration, so if I get sidetracked, that’s just fine.  (As it happens, I didn’t complete a single one of my goals from last year, but am still very satisfied with what I accomplished and learned.)  But it gives me somewhere to start from.