Thursday, December 31, 2015

Looking Ahead

My community of online friends is discussing goals and plans for 2016 and I am looking ahead myself. I always make personal goals and fiber goals, and tend to skip the personal goals and only work on the fiber goals. I do have several fiber goals for the year, but above all is to learn.
I always feel that there is so much for me to learn. I am mostly self taught, and am not part of a living textile tradition. The learning curve is steep and unending, since I can and do try to learn different fibers, tools, techniques, etc from all over the world.
When textile work is a hobby, even an obsessive one like for me,  there is always room for improvement, for skilling up, for extending knowledge. I want to learn more, and this year I will be focusing on weaving, on my rigid heddle loom.  I am a novice weaver and need to work more on understanding the mechanics of the process. I will be weaving cotton, wool, and hopefully linen (if I can spin up my flax).
My other goal is to continue to spin down my stash of fleece. I let my enthusiasm take precedence over my available space and have more fleece than I have room to store. My long suffering partner is putting up with fleece in the living room and fleece piled up in my half of the office. I have all this wonderful wool, but kept acquiring more, even though the sheep are always growing more. My goal for 2016 is to continue to spin these fleeces up.
In between the weaving and spinning I want to knit myself some more socks, as mine are wearing out, and I hate darning on top of darns. I also need to knit some more sweaters that actually fit me.
My final goal is to blog more. I have many opinions about many fiber related things (no surprise there) and I want to share them. I also want to document what I achieve, as I feel unproductive much of the time, even though I know that I am getting a lot of textile work done. As a result I am making it a goal to blog at least twice a week.

I wish all you readers a wonderful 2016 full of fiber fun and happiness.

1 comment:

Lynn said...

You know, I think you are part of a living textile tradition. Not an "ethnic" one, in the sense of Andean weavers or expert indigo workers in Japan, but in the sense that you participate fully with a very hard-working group of fiber people world-wide, who are connected through Rav and Ply and SpinOff and the fiber festivals and classes. We are creating our own traditions, our own oft-used motifs. We learn from each other, and you contribute quite a lot to the teaching of all the skills we need to know. So, embrace the textile tradition going on all around us - we live in Fiber Paradise!