hitting a wall

it's probably not that great to start off the new year with a downer post, but sometimes that's just the way things work out.

i've been pretty down lately in the studio and feeling listless.  in addition to things that i needed to get done, like making new shirts, i've been working on a bunch of other things too.  i made the warnings, and had some ideas for other embroidery projects too.  one of which is this image of an accurate star field that has been flipped 180 degrees with an additional star added directly in the center called "way home".  it would essentially be as if i was looking through space toward planet earth.

someone left this outside of my job and my boss said i could take it home.  it's a saarinen knock-off executive chair.  it's got great bones to it and i thought i would reupholster it.  well, i'm about half way done and whoever upholstered this thing the first time did it with about a million staples and i've got blisters all over my hand from trying to pull them out.

i've also been trying to remake this sweatshirt.  it never really fit quite right.  i made two attempts with a pattern that i had made, and then i broke down and got a simplicity sweatshirt pattern to make a better pattern out of.  still doesn't work.  i'm on my 5th attempt and it's super frustrating.

the chair and the sweatshirt are just annoying things that i would be working on anyway that just add to the frustration, but the embroidery projects are different.  i'm about a quarter of the way through the star field and i totally don't want to work on it.  i was excited about the embroidery projects because it would give me an outlet for other ideas while still continuing with the quilts, but now i'm not so sure.  once i've started working on them i've lost interest.  i'm starting to think it was just a way for me to stall on working on a quilt.  i'm not even sure if i want to still make the quilts at this point.

of course there's other external factors that are tying into this as well.  i've got the grad application in and i won't hear back from them until around april.  with the likelihood of getting in being low (there's 900 applicants for 35 spots), there's also the consideration that maybe i should just buck up and get a real job; something that's arts related and i could just focus all my energy into that.

i'm all shook up and i don't really know what to do at this point.  i called my friend judith and she was really helpful.  she reminded me that these things come in cycles, and i have been doing this for a while now (about 6 years).  she told me to take a break from the studio and do something else.  don't think about art.  so, i'm trying to take her advice.  maybe this is good and something great will happen for the new year.  who knows.  guess i'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.