turning the corner of the year
It’s just past solstice now, the dark nights still long, but now getting shorter. A candle glows, the radiators keeping us warm in the storms. I’m drinking a pot of black tea, sitting at the desk in the living room; the ground outside is too icy to walk to the studio.
In November’s top of mind, I ended by saying: feels like a new era is starting, I have a big desire to reflect, finish, clean, organize, tidy. A phrase written without too much thought — those top of mind process notes for my personal blog are dashed off stream-of-consciousness-style and posted without a reread — but it rattled around in my head since then, popping up in morning pages, while washing dishes, taking a walk.
feels like a new era is starting
The Artist’s Way talks about refilling the creative well after an extended period of work has been completed, and that’s squarely where I am: recharging my creative energy. Since December 2020, I worked on How to Sew Clothes for thousands of hours, so much focus. (Mark your calendars, the release date is Feb 28th & I’ll be Elliott Bay Books for an event March 6th at 7pm!) As soon as manuscript and layout edits were complete in late September, I shifted fully into risograph artist-publishing mode, and Adam and I spent a lot of time at the studio. A concentrated six weeks of collaboration, writing, design, printing, and book assembly to release five new publications in time for Short Run. (I wrote about those in the last newsletter.) I also collaborated with Amy on the newest All Well zine Patchwork Alphabet, doing the editing, art direction, book design and print production. And wrote the All Well holiday gift guide. And co-organized an an afternoon-long Show & Tell / short talks event for risograph printers. A lot of doing things!
Now, I’m eating soups, resting, and tidying in the KonMari method. I re-read Magical Tidying and Spark Joy and am going through the house and studio, gathering things by category, touching everything, finding things that are no longer needed. (Here are some other reading recs along those lines.) I’ve been thinking of what’s next in 2023. It is time for a new era. Katie Mae Hafner of Chatterbox Press made a post saying:
Active artists, artist-wannabes and makers of all kinds — here I offer you a gentle reminder that you can & should make art. Not products, not product-like creative objects but ritual focused, magically-minded, risk taking ART!
That really resonated with what I’ve been thinking. After two years and thousands of hours working on the sewing book, I’m feeling the pull to make art that’s new to me, weird and imagined and still partly unknown. In the past few weeks, I made the shift from research mode into the physical parts of making light sculpture and working with circuits, and it’s as messy and fumbling and hesitant and right as I expected. (I’ve forgotten so much from electrical engineering school…) I want more essay writing, new experiments, more pen and ink drawings, and more artist-publisher zines. I want to look at the lichens and mosses in the park and learn their names.
Also, after all that sewing-product-work, I am going to do more sewing! Currently top of mind:
Helene Jeans - a five pocket jean (36-53” hip circumference sizing) with some width options. I have some deadstock american apparel denim set out for it, I’m going to try the top down, center out fitting method.
Add Functional Clothing Lab’s AEBWB waistband to a pair of our all well studio pants. Although on a hot tip from my friend Sarah, I got some hiking pants from Outdoor Afro’s collab with REI (35-56” hip circumference sizing) — high waist outdoor pants!! So perhaps that project isn’t as urgent now.
High waist outdoor shorts design for our long summer hike plans
ANEMONE studio updates
We’re working on our New Year’s newsletter and a fridge calendar, to mail out soon.
We’ll have a new version of Spectrolite soonish; mostly bug fixes and subtle improvements. Adam and I are in the review stages, there’s just someone (me) who wants to do juuuust a little more UI updating while we’re in there.
We’re doing updated book design for the third printings of Sensitive, Bike Rambles around Seattle, and Lichen the Lichen. Adam has been messing around with LaTeX typesetting where we pull text and images in from google docs, and then it does the page layouts more in the style of Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. (Fellow nerds: see page 365 of the memoir package PDF manual.) We both used LaTeX in grad school, and in our 2009-14 era of publishing the literary journal Open Review Quarterly — now it’s coming back into our dreams of collaborative publishing in new ways. (LaTex is also what I used to do for zine imposition, before we put it into Spectrolite’s layouts.)
Also cleaning and tidying the studio, reading books about book design, re-organizing supplies. Lots of change in the works for the year ahead. Right now feels quiet, good, fresh, new.
Currently reading
This infrastructure agenda for municipal eco-socialism covers a topic I think about a lot — ideas include a municipal goat herd, county owned heating contractor, town sauna, municipal nursery, natural building corps. (And part 1 of the thread has municipal food forests, composting, coppice agroforestry and construction wood lots, town-owned grocery.) I’m also in favor of community berry patch surrounded by a ring of goats to keep the berries from taking over everywhere.
Some things I read and watched that you might like:
Metafoundry 75: Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization — “Mitigating climate change is often framed as requiring money, effort, and sacrifice to keep something bad from happening, usually to other people. But we finally have the tools we need to create something new and better”
The Pumpkin Hider, a 2-minute animation by Erin Tanner.
The Dark Divide, a 25 minute film featuring my friend Eva! (Don’t miss the bike frame building process she shares on Liberation Fab’s instagram, also.)
Ode à l'Oubli by Louise Bourgeois.
I’m a bit behind on keeping my list up to date, but I think I’ll finish out the year reading 150-175 books or so. (Reading recs in zine form here and here!)
I can’t stop thinking about Hiron Ennes’ Leech, a very gothic book I knew I had to read when I saw blurbs from Tamsyn Muir, Peter Watts, and Kameron Hurley on the cover — IYKYK. I picked up Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirates from the Peak Picks shelf at the library, and read it all in one sitting. It’s literary fiction about infrastructure and storms and society and family, and probably the closest thing I’ve read to how I imagine Florida will go over the next decades. (Here’s an interview with the author.) I’m in the middle of In Search of Mycotopia, have The Mountain in the Sea that I need to get to quick before it’s due back to the library, and then Nona the Ninth after that. I’m also enjoying the very beautiful cookbook Cooking with Mushrooms by Andrea Gentl.
Hope you’re staying warm if you’re in the storms, and that the solstice is bringing some good shifts and a time for reflection; a reset. Hit reply and write back if you’d like… tell me about what you’re reading, what “ritual focused, magically-minded, risk taking ART” you’re making, or what you’re cooking these days. I’d love to hear from you!
-Amelia
(Adam says hi too!)
ANEMONE — anemone.studio