Yesterday,  I started out with my new resolution of doing half as much in a day.  In fact I did just as much as usual, but much of it included screwing around on my computer trying to download podcasts and photos.  I had a look at my product photos.  They are a little better than the last ones (you can actually see the shirts) but not very good.  Master photographer I am not.  I am limited by my point-and-shoot camera, but I have managed to take decent photos with it before, so I think it might be my skill that's the problem.  I will need to work on that.
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Non-Etsy quality product photo.
For my warm-up I was to choose a motif to explore over and over again in my work.  I think there is a motif that has found me: leaves.  I don't know what it is about leaves, but I keep using them.  They all look different, of course.  At least most of them.  I would have liked for my motif to be trees (which are very symbolic for me) but my trees never really turn out.  So leaves it is.

For my podcast, I listened to the conclusion of the lecture that I was previously listening to, about craft and social movements in India.  Today, there is a lot going on in the world of Indian crafts.  Crafts are considered to be part of the heritage of India, but they are generally being replaced with mass-market goods, often from China.  Sometimes Chinese mass-market goods are even made to look like Indian crafts!  There are special stores, including government stores, who sell Indian crafts, and the growing middle class in India, who want quality products, is a new market for the crafts, as are craft collectors overseas.  Some Indian crafts are of exceptional quality, as are the blockprints in this link.  Notice how many steps are involved in creating the beadspread.  However, some Indian crafts are not of such high quality, and the presenter didn't believe that people should buy the products just because they were handmade.  He wanted to work with artisans and his design students to develop better products that would appeal to a larger audience, especially those who want something high-quality and don't care if it's handmade or not.  There have been many problems with the artisan community in India.  Most live below the poverty line, and people sometimes steal their ideas.  The concept of intellectual property rights often a new idea to these people.  There have been a number of suicides as people have watched their livelihoods become unviable.  Often the artisans are women, who face additional social, economic, and political hurdles.  However, artisanship is the second-largest employer in India (the first being agriculture) so it is essential to the economic development of the country.  The speaker wanted to help the artisans use crafts to lift themselves out of their poverty and experience dignity.

I continued to work on my yarn-ball drawing.  It is coming along, albeit slowly.  I'm still not very happy with it.  Unfortunately, it is the ball of yarn I've been weaving with, and I've run out of yarn on my shuttle, so I can't continue to weave until I've finished the drawing.  I don't want any more scenes changing on me before I've finished them!
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That weird grey thing is a kneaded eraser.
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The subject.
For surface design, I tried two new techniques: Elmer's school glue resist with watered-down textile paint, and pole-wrap immersion dyeing.  I have washed both out now and will post photos when they are dry and ironed.

Today, I started out with business study.  I have now estimated all of my start-up costs and most of my monthly costs.  The start-up costs are reassuring: I probably won't need a bank loan.  However, my monthly costs are scaring me.  I have no idea how many transactions to expect in a given day, and there are only two days of sales, and my products will be priced pretty high so I don't know if I'll be selling lots of them.  I certainly hope I do!  But there's no guarantee.  But I suppose I will really only have to make about $200 a day to make those costs, which is one or two sales.  If I could make two sales a day at that silly Catholic Church craft fair I attended last year, I could probably make more than that at the Portland Saturday Market!

Design.  Oh, design.  I wish this book had assignments because I am sucky at coming up with them on my own.  Today's chapter was about shape.  Shapes can imitate natural forms or they can be imaginary and abstract.  There are geometric shapes, which we are all familiar with from elementary school, as well as biomorphic shapes, which suggest natural forms or forces (you could have a shape like a human body, or what you thought the wind looked like).  Shapes do not have to have distinct boundaries: they can be suggested through closure, or implied shape.  There is also amorphous shape, which is a blurry image which suggests a shape.  Shapes can either be two- or three-dimensional, whether in sculpture or a 2-D picture plane.  Mass refers to shapes on the picture plane and volume is the empty spaces.  Shapes can appear 3-D while on a 2-D surface (plastic).  This can be achieved by tilting the shapes in space, foershortening them, overlapping them, or grading the color, value, or texture.  This is especially important when representing shapes like spheres or ovoids that do not have any flat surfaces.  Use of perspective is one way of making shapes appear 3-D.  A weird and cool effect can be created when the perspective lines tilt toward the viewer: it looks like you are looking through the shape.  Some artists use 3-D effects without using perspective: medieval artists did not know about perspective, and more modern artists sometimes find it too constricting. Shapes can be used for the same compositional aspects that we previously studied: harmony and variety, either in the shape itself (a repeating motif) or the lines or interior shapes of the image; dominance, or making one shape more dominant than the rest of the image; movement, or the interior lines of viewing the shapes within the image; balance, in which we consider the visual weight of the shape, the negative area around it, the placement, size, and emphasis of the shape.  I will continue with the shape composition in my next study.

I hope to continue to work on my stepmom's scarf today as part of my personal projects.  I also might go over and review things in my design book to see how well they are actually sticking.  The point of all this is to improve my design, after all.
 
I have a new resolution: I will not try to do everything every day.

I could do it fine for the first few days, but I was getting increasingly tired and less motivated.  Also, I didn't have enough time to work on site development, networking, and all that kind of thing.  So I am going to give myself shorter studying days with more time for non-studying projects.  I also resolve not to be working nine or ten hour days.  To some people, it might not seem like a lot, but with my disability, it really is too much.

Yesterday, however, I did do a full day.  I didn't intend to, it just kind of happened.

I started out with my podcast.  I had some errands to do and listened while I did them.  The presentation was by a very distinguished professor in India who talked about how craft has been essential to the Indian identity.  He said that in the various Indian languages, the word for "craft" also means "art", "architecture", and various other similar things.  This is an idea I can get behind!  I am very interested in blurring the lines between art and craft, as I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy, and in some cases it offends my feminist leanings (often, things that men have traditionally done are considered art, and things that women have traditionally done are considered craft.  It's not a hard and fast rule, but it is a trend.)  He talked about craft from the earliest known times of settlement of the Indus Valley region--of course, evidence of craft is one of the first evidences of civilization.  He also discussed how the Mughal Empire brought Islamic-style art to India, as evidenced in the Taj Mahal.   Most interesting to me was the association of craft with independence from the British.  Early on in British rule, the British cut off the thumbs of weavers so that they would not be able to weave, and Indians would thus have to purchase British cloth.  When Gandhi began to envision a free India, he wanted to make sure that British oppression would not be replaced by Indian oppression.  He believed that increased self-sufficiency was the answer to that.  In order to achieve that increased self-sufficiency, Indians needed to re-learn to produce their own crafts.  Gandhi focused on spinning, and taught spinning to his disciples at his ashram and even to Jawaharlal Nehru.  He designed his own portable spinning wheel that he could take with him on his travels and even to jail, where he spent a fair amount of time.  This is why there is a spinning wheel on the Indian flag today.  The flag also has to be spun with the same kind of hand-spun Indian cloth that Gandhi made, as I have just learned from Wikipedia.

Next I decided to experiment with doing an Elmer's school glue resist on cloth.  I applied the resist (and used half the bottle, so good thing it's cheap!) and had to wait for it to dry.  I also prepared several small pieces of cloth for continued experimentation. But that was all.

I continued drawing my ball of yarn.  It continued to drive me crazy.  When I look at it with fresh eyes, it's not so bad, but when I work on it for a while, I am acutely aware of how far my drawing has to go.  My biggest problems are that I am not very good at estimating negative space, so things always end up in the wrong spot and I don't realize it until I try to fill in the detail, which doesn't match up; and that I don't have a good grasp of shading and value.  I do shading, but it never quite looks right.  I don't yet have the tools to identify what it is that I am doing wrong.

In design, I finished the chapter on line.  Line also possesses character, that is, what type of line is made with the medium at hand, and how it is applied.  It could be blurry or sharp, thick or fine, dotted or smudged, etc.  There are other elements having to do with line as well.  Line and shape involved contours, the outermost limits of a figure, and cross-contour, like what you see on a contoured map.  Line and value has to do with types of shading that can be achieved with line.  You can do this by controlling how close together the lines are, or by varying the thicknesses of the lines.  Putting parallel lines together to create different values is called hatching, and you can achieve darker values by making those lines perpendicular, called cross-hatching.  There is also line and texture, which is how the line appears on the surface.  This is created by the different media that can be used.  Additionally, there is line and color.  The color used will change the impact of the line.  There are spacial characteristics of line: thick lines appear to be closer and thinner lines seem to be further away. Lines can modulate from thick to thin and have an impact.  Line can also represent emotions or states.  Gestural drawings are based on an artist's initial impression of something and tend to have loose, flowing lines.  There are also calligraphic lines, or lines that imitate calligraphy (but can be used in any typer of art).  Additionally, there is implied line, or lines that are suggested by the lines and shapes around them (remember closure?)  Finally, there are three-dimensional applications of line: we tend to see lines where there are edges in three-dimensional work.  Sometimes lines are incised in clay to bring a certain image out.

Finally, I worked on my business study.  My husband and I discussed getting my online shop back up.  One of the problems with my shop is that I have horrible pictures, so I re-took pictures of my products.  I'm not sure they're any better, however.  Master photographer I am not.

Today I endeavor to do half of what I did yesterday.  So shorter blog posts, hopefully.

Also, my camera situation has been resolved, and the camera is charged.  At the moment, I am loading those photos onto my computer and it is taking a long time, so I will have some new photos later today or tomorrow.
 
Yesterday was Labour Day, so I did roughly half a day of schooling.  I would have done a full day but I wanted to spend some time with my husband, who doesn't get a lot of days off.  So there was some decidedly not-working going on.

I started with the warm-up, as usual.  It didn't go anywhere, which is becoming more frequent.  The assignment was to get some sort of a box and put my "collection" in there, as a field journal.  The problem was that I a) didn't have the type of box mentioned and b) that I don't have a collection.  So that was that.

Next, I listened to my podcast as I wove.  On the weaving front, my project is nearly finished!  It will probably be a very short scarf as I don't think I factored in loom waste when I did my calculations.  I may have mentioned that calculations are not my strong point.  Anyway, the podcast was a continuation of the previous two day's podcasts, talking about Indian fabrics (mostly cotton) and their impact around the world).  Eventually chintz got passe, because everyone had it, so no person of fashion would wear it.  The next big thing in Indian cotton was Bengali muslin.  At the time, Europeans could not make muslin, because they couldn't replicate the very finely spun thread used in muslin.  It was apparently very difficult to weave because the thread was so fine.  Muslin appeared in dresses with high waists (now known as Empire waists), because it looked like the clothes that ancient Grecian women wore in the art from that period.  Since muslin is very fine, critics said that women were trying to replicate Grecian undress.  Also fashionable at that time were cashmere shawls, with very beautiful patterns.  In the beginning they tended to have a large plain field in the center and a decorated edge.  Over time, the decoration came to take up most of the shawl.  These could be draped around the shoulders in such a way that complemented the folds in the muslin dresses.  These shawls were very expensive and it took a long time for them to go out of fashion.  They were still fashionable in the Victorian period, where they became very long to coordinate with the silhouette of the day.

For my drawing assignment, I decided to draw a ball of fine yarn.  Holy cow.  When I try to draw stuff like this, it reminds me how far my drawing actually has to go.  It was very frustrating and so far, looks nothing like a ball of yarn.  It didn't help that I was looking at art magazines over the weekend with photorealistic drawings in them.  I have to keep in mind that drawing isn't my ultimate medium and photorealism isn't my means of expression.  That being said, I don't want to be an artist that can't draw so that's why I choose challenging projects like this.  My last project was too easy and I finished it in 15 minutes.  I suppose I could have made it more detailed, but I think I actually hit my limit of what I can currently do with my drawing.  Drawing will be my next major subject after design, I think.

After that, I did surface design.  Well, "did" is a relative term.  I spent a lot of my time looking at the projects of the past few days trying to figure out what's next.  I still haven't figured it out.  Maybe they are finished.  They are currently hanging in my dining room, where I can look at them and try to decide things.  I also spent a fair amount of time flipping through my book, reading about different techniques that I might try.  I decided to avoid discharges for the time being because you need a respirator, and I just don't feel like doing art that requires a respirator right now!  I decided to do a resist with Elmer's school glue on some new pieces of cloth.  However, when I got out my Elmer's glue, I saw that it was not school glue, and that it in fact would not work as a resist because it wouldn't wash out of the fabric.  So I'll keep my eyes peeled for some cheap school glue when I go out today.

I skipped business study, although my husband and I discussed how I might do some more internet sales, and that I should think about what I want to sell online.  I have a few items in my Etsy shop (none of them currently listed) and I think I will try to sell those again, but they need better photos and it's not the kind of stuff I want to spend the rest of my life making.  I might start a new shop in conjunction with my current one.  But first I have to find my camera parts!

My design study was a bit all over the place.  I started by finishing the previous chapter on form.  I actually didn't have much left in that chapter, so now I think it's odd that I stopped what I did.  I read about form in three dimensional design, much of which is the same as two-dimensional design.  Balance is a little different because things have to look balanced from all different directions.  Asymmetrical balance is most common.  The scale of 3-D work is important-- it could be a tiny thing that could be held in the palm of the hand, or it could be large enough to be walked on, or so incredibly huge it can be seen from far away.  Movement can be quite different because kinetic sculpture is possible.  The next section that I started on (but didn't get very far in) was about line.  I am quite excited about this chapter, as I am really interested in how line can be used in surface design.  The characteristics of line are measure (the length and width of the line), type (straight, curved, or angular), direction (which way the line moves on the surface; for example, you could have a zig-zag line that curved over the surface of the work), and location (where on the surface the line is, and how that affects our perception of space, perspective, and so on.)  That's as far as I have gotten.

In my personal projects, I have started to knit a scarf for a birthday present for my stepmom.  I had a pattern, tried it, scrunched it up and threw it away, and made my own pattern.  It's my first lace pattern, and I am pretty impressed with myself considering that I have only made 1 1/2 lace projects before.  I can't post the photos yet because my stepmom might be reading this, but after she receives it I will post them.
 
Today might have been one of those days that people would point to as an example of why unCollege doesn't work.  Which is silly, because I remember quite a bit more noodling around from my traditional college days.  It would take three hours to write a paragraph for a paper because I was screwing around on Facebook and Youtube most of the time.  So I was actually quite a bit more productive today than I would have been back in my undergrad days, even though I was feeling really lazy and didn't accomplish much compared to the other days.

Today's warm-up was a complete bust, as the assignment was to go through your best friend's stash.  This would not be possible for me today, and even if it was I would feel pretty uncomfortable about it.  I don't like it when people go through my things, so why would it be okay for me to do it to someone else?  So I knitted instead.  Being super-unproductive, I knitted about 4 rows before I quit.

I worked on my weaving while I listened to today's podcast.  It was a continuation of yesterday's and talked about the rage for chintz (in the traditional sense of painted cotton) in Europe.  It was crazy-popular in England, although it was relatively inexpensive so people who were trying to show off how rich they were would wear silk underneath.  It was also very popular in Holland.  It didn't make much of a splash in Italy or France.  In England, rich women would give chintz clothes to their servants, so people complained that they couldn't tell what class people were by looking at them (the horror!).  It started out being popular for bedspreads and that sort of thing, but then made its way to fashion, which led some to gripe about people wearing their bedsheets.  Because it was so popular and relatively inexpensive, local cloth manufacturers were having a difficult time.  Most cloth manufacturers in England were producing wool and linen cloth, which are much more difficult to clean than cotton.  So the importation of chintz was outlawed.  People were very creative in finding ways around the laws so chintz continued to be worn.  Eventually European importers began to request certain themes or motifs on their chintz, which the Indian manufacturers would carry out.  For example, trees were very popular in Holland.

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My weaving, which is not chintz.
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Note the herringbone pattern. I should also mention that I actually taught myself how to read a weaving pattern today. Mostly.
Next I worked on drawing.  This was one of the assignments where I felt I was the laziest.  I set up a very simple still life.  Very simple.  I think it took me 20 minutes to draw it.  My last drawing took about five hours.
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I promise I will take better photos one day. I want to scan this, but the scanner isn't talking to my computer. This should be indicative of my general technology-savviness.
I studied my design book after that.  This unit was about other principles in 2-D design (harmony being the one that I looked at yesterday).  I looked at variety, the counterpart to harmony.  This could involve contrast, meaning opposition or dissimilarity.  Contrast could be in color, value, or placement.  Elaboration of an area that lacked visual interest is another way of achieving variety.  Finally, one must take into account the dualism of harmony and variety.  You could, for example, achieve harmony by repeating shapes, and variety by making those shapes different colors.  Another principle is balance, which is what we perceive should happen with the objects in the work.  For example, a picture of a ball at the top of a painting gives a sense of tension, as we expect the ball to fall down.  Additionally, the way we perceive things, it doesn't look right when the mat around the painting is equal on all sides.  Usually the bottom part will be a bit larger, which makes things seem more balanced.  There are different kinds of balance: symmetrical balance, in which the two halves of the work mirror each other; approximate symmetrical balance, where equal visual weights are on both halves of the work, even though those halves aren't identical; and radial balance, where the visuals radiate out from a certain point on the work; asymmetrical balance, in which colors, shapes, lines, and negative area balance each other out (this I know when I see but don't know how to reproduce it myself).  Next I looked at proportion, which is the relationship in placement in a work.  The golden mean is a part of that, although I must admit that I don't really understand the golden mean and how it works.  I understand that there is some sort of ratio that the shapes have to each other, but that's the extent of what I understand.  Proportion could also mean the proportion of the work itself to the surrounding areas, or how much room the subject(s) of the painting take up within the picture frame.  In ancient art, the most important figure would be the largest, with other figures smaller.  Dominance is another principle.  Dominance occurs when a figure or shape dominates the surrounding space, whether through size, color, value, or something else.  Movement is the direction of the viewers eyes to different parts of the work.  Artists can manipulate what order the viewer looks at the image in by placing points of interest in different places on the work.  Economy is another principle of design, where the artist seeks to eliminate that which is unnecessary or confusing.  Finally, there is the problem of space: what sort of visual plane the artist wants to appear on the work.  A 2-D work with a flat plane is referred to as decorative and one with a deep plane is called three-dimensional or plastic.

Next, I worked on the dreaded task of removing the dye from my sample cloths.  Some of the overdyes ended up being quite interesting.
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Tie-dye without stones
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Tie-dye with stones
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Scrunching
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Pleated
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Folded. I like that this one kind of looks like ikat.
Finally, I worked on my business study.  I am still trying to come up with numbers for my start-up costs.  It is hard to get some straight answers about how much something will cost me.  I'm also trying to figure out if I need a business license.  I apparently don't need to be a citizen to sell at the Saturday market, but if I make over $15,000 a year I need a business license, and I don't know the legalities of that.  I guess it's a good thing that I have to figure all that stuff out before I can get started and cost myself a pile of money or accidently break rules.  But I've decided to figure out start-up and ongoing costs before I move to the next thing in the book.  Otherwise I will get too confused.  I really hate trying to figure money out but I also hate working for other people so I guess I'd better get over that!

I have filled in an application to volunteer at the Museum of Contemporary Craft.  I will most likely be handling transactions or directing customers, but it will give me the chance to see how a gallery works.  Besides, it's my favorite gallery in town.  So I will keep you posted on my progress.

Yesterday, I forgot to mention that I got my very own unCollege student ID card!  My wonderful friend Melanie Wallace, who has a laminator, made it for me.  Thanks Mel!
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Yesterday I only worked a little bit on my education.  I was having guest over so I had to prepare for most of the day (I was cooking a bit of a complicated dinner).  So I only worked on Design and Surface Design.

In my design book I read about attitudes that people have when viewing art.  Some art is difficult to understand, particularly if it is in a new form.  Sometimes the public reacts negatively to a work of art, which occasionally means that the art has to be removed and even sometimes destroyed.  I learned about how to develop ideas as an artist: looking for stimulating ideas in your travels, observe how people relate to each other, study nature, doodle, or look at existing artwork, for example.  I learned about critiquing and analysis: examine the subject, form and content and see how each of those measures up.  I learned about basic concepts in two-dimensional art, such as having a flat plane or three-dimensional effect, and how the picture frame can be in any shape you want, not just rectangular canvas.  I learned that negative areas are just as important as positive areas.  In three-dimensional art, the shape, mass, and volume have to be taken into account.  Sculpting includes several methods for creating: subtraction, or taking away material; manipulation, or modeling; addition, or adding materials onto the item; and substitution, or casting.  Finally, the chapter discussed some three-dimensional art forms that use these methods: sculpture, architecture, metalwork, glass design, ceramics, fibers (yay!), and product design.

 I also worked on washing out the dye from my low-water immersion dyeing experiments.  Washing out dye is my least favorite task in surface design.  I think it took me about an hour to get it all out.  Here are the results:
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This is tie-dye.
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This one was pleated. I made the pleats into different sizes.
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This one was scrunched into the toe of old pantyhose.
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This one was tie-dyed using little pebbles. The circles are smaller, rounder, and more regular than the plain tie-dyeing.
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This one was folded into squares.
It was an interesting experiment.  My favorite were the tie-dyes and the scrunching.

Today I had a full day.  I started with the warm-up that I missed last time, making a little altered-art card.  I took a map and found Spokane, where my husband did his undergrad.  I gave it as a gift to him.
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This is a horrible photo, for which I apologize. It's also backward. I regularly lose the battery charger for my camera, so I take a lot of bad photos.
Next, I listened to a podcast.  It was a lecture by a woman who was an expert in Indian cotton.  It was quite a fascinating lecture.  India has been producing cotton cloth for tens of thousands of years!  More recently, in the middle ages, there has been a lively trade with Indian cotton in Arabia, and Persia.  They started to trade with Europe when the Portuguese came in the fifteenth century, and have traded with both the Dutch and British East India companies.  They have also traded with Indonesia, Thailand, and China, where Indian cotton was very highly prized and worn in the royal court.  India has a rich tradition of textile arts involving cotton: the block printing of Gujarat, embroidery, ikat, and other decorative weaving.  It is difficult studying the history of textiles because textiles tend to deteriorate after a hundred years or so.  In India, these cloths have been used until they were dead, and so most information about Indian textiles comes from the places they've traded with.

I finished my drawing in the park today.  I drew as many leaves as I was willing to draw.  I wanted to draw the gravel but there was no way I was going to draw each and every pebble.  Also, somewhat annoyingly, some of the details that were on the ground before, such as pinecones, were blown away by leafblower before I could get started.  Who leafblows a path?
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Again, sorry for the terrible photographs.
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Next I worked on design.  The chapter I am on now is about form.  Basically, I looked at the principle of harmony that can exist in a work.  This can be achieved through repetition, rhythm (a concept I am still trying to get my head around and don't understand well enough to describe yet), pattern, closure (when your brain supplies missing information), visual linking in which two items touch each other, linking through extensions (in which there are items in the visual that form shapes by themselves, such as a triangle around three heads) and the problem of excessive use of harmony, which creates monotony.

For surface design I am overdying my just-dyed cloths using the same methods I used previously.  I used the same low-water immersion dying that I did last time, but with blue dye this time.

In business, I started studying finances.  I am having quite a bit of trouble with this part.  I am not very good at crunching numbers and complex formulas really confuse me.  I will probably have to have someone help me out with this part.  I have to estimate start-up and ongoing costs, which is going to take a fair bit of research and can't really be done in one day.  I have to figure out my own wage, which has me quite surprised because the authors insist that I must pay myself well.  That would mean making more money than I have ever made before--a lot more.  Like double of my previous best.  I am still kind of shocked that it may be possible for me to be middle-class with my business.  Can that really happen with art?  The authors seem to think so.  So this amazing wage that I am paying myself is to be calculated into the price of the items I am making.  Of course I still need to figure out my material costs, because I honestly have no idea what I spend on materials.

Now, I'm going to play around with my website a bit to see if I can't spiff it up!
 
Today was my second day of my un-BFA.  I got started a bit early because I was excited and knew that I had a trip to the library, which would take up some time.

My warm-up was non-existent:  I thought I didn't have the materials necessary, but I found them this afternoon.  I forget what all I have.  My husband, Jason, gives me odd random things that he thinks I can do something with.  Usually, I can.  So I might work on that activity tonight while dinner is cooking or something.  It looks like one that will work for me.  It's about taking a little piece of formica sample and using that with paper ephemera, stamps, and odd bits and making a keychain out of it.  I don't have the keychain components but I can make the little thing anyway.

I listened to the next podcast on my list while I wove.  It was a short one, which was the question and answer period to the previous podcast I had listened to, about the fiber artist from Nigeria.  Most of the questions were about the subjects in his work and how long he dyed his fabrics for (the ones with resist, he had to dye quickly in order to keep the resist from falling off.)  So I didn't learn much that I didn't learn from the previous podcast, but I still think it was worthwhile.


I had to pick up my design book from the library, which took a chunk of time as I had to walk.  I am using Fundamentals: Theory and Practice, 11th ed. by Ocvirk et al.  It's a textbook, so I didn't make a lot of headway with it.  I went through about 20 pages before I had information saturation.  This included a glossary and an introduction to the concept of art and how it evolves over time.  It also introduced the three components of art: subject (what the work is about), form (which includes line, texture, color, shape, and value), and content (the message).  When these three things are in some kind of balance, they form organic unity, or a work that has a sense of completeness.  There was also a section on abstraction and the different levels of abstraction: Naturalism, or the completely representational; Realism, which is representational but is more about an emotional state; Semi-Abstraction, which is partly representational but may be simplified or rearranged; Objective Abstraction, which is based on a physical object but has been so abstracted that it is no longer recognizable; and Nonobjective Abstraction, which is not based on any physical object.

After that I went to the park to continue to work on my drawing.  I continued on the same scene as before.  I worked on another bush, which was equally crazy-making as I was attempting to draw at least most of the leaves as I actually saw them.  The leaves were drooping more yesterday than they were today, so my bushes look more different than they are supposed to.  I also worked on some of the trees behind the bushes, but not any leaves.  I got to use my blending stump for the first time.  I love my blending stump!  In high school art class, I was taught never to erase (I don't know what that was about) and to blend with my hand.  You can imagine my delight when I recently discovered kneaded erasers and blending stumps.   The erasers can be shaped to fit inside tiny spaces, and the blending stump is much more precise than my hand.  Also, it's nice not to have my hand and everything I touch covered with graphite.  I didn't finish the drawing yet, as I still have leaves, gravel, and mulch to work on.  This might take me another couple of days.  I drew for about an hour, which is a long time for me to sit down.  My husband has suggested an easel, which I am keen to work on but not so keen to carry or purchase.

For my surface design "class", I worked on immersion dyeing with various resisting methods.  I did tie-dye (which doesn't have to look like a hippie did it), tie-dye with pebbles, scrunching, pleating, and folding.  I used a small amount of dye in plastic bags and they are batching right now.  I am not sure how they will turn out, as I don't know if I added enough dye.  I like to err on the side of not enough, because I hate throwing unused dye down the sink (it's kind of a nasty chemical) and because you can always overdye.  I will wash them out tomorrow and see what the effects are.  I will add pictures of the effects.

For my business "class", I worked on a simple business plan.  This included defining what I was selling (not just the product but the idea behind it.  It made me realize that I need to be more focused in my products.  "Fiber arts" is too broad of a category for a one-woman operation.  I have narrowed it down to surface design items that can be used everyday, but I haven't decided if that will mean home decor items or something like scarves.  I had to define my business's personality (otherwise known as branding, which is not a term I particularly like).  I decided that my business will be laid-back, sensual, artistic, beautiful, cutting edge, and a dreamer.  It will have the ability to connect with others' sense of beauty, and exude independence, woman spirit, pride, and simplicity without plainness. Next I had to define my customers.  I have decided to target mostly women, as the preservation of traditional women's art is important to me and a part of my brand.  They will be more affluent than myself (at least until I'm making money!) but not filthy rich.  They will share a love of art and beauty.  There are many more items but I won't list them all or we'll be here all day.  The most fun exercise was inventing two of my own customers, with their jobs, likes and dislikes, hobbies, dress style, favorite films, etc.

I did not work on my personal projects yet, at least not so far.  Yesterday I knitted up a storm while watching TV.  I finished the sleeve I was working on, and am ready to start the other sleeve.  If this project works out, it will be my first wearable-in-public sleeved sweater!
 
Today, August 29th, was the day that class was supposed to start at my art school. (I assume that it has started even without me there!)  So today was the first day of my un-BFA.  My husband printed out an acceptance letter, some posters, and some stationary for me.  My friend Melanie is making me my own student ID, which was mentioned on the unCollege Facebook page.  

My warm-up today didn't go that well, as these things sometimes do.  It was for an art-journal house.  I think if this was the only project I was working on today, it would have worked, but I didn't have several hours to spend constructing that thing.  I am still a little iffy on what an art journal actually entails.  I am not sure how it is different from a sketchbook, and if it is like a "writing" journal, how to put my thoughts into a quick-ish composition.  Usually if I need to express myself visually, it turns into a major project.

I listened to a podcast from Maiwa Podcasts today.  Maiwa is a fiber arts institution in Vancouver, Canada, where I am from.  They have a import retail store, a supply store, and a yearly symposium.  The podcasts are from lectures from their symposiums.  The one I listened to today was a lecture from a fiber artist from Nigeria who now lives in Santa Fe.  He is unusual in his culture because usually women are fiber artists.  He has always been visual.  He uses traditional fermented indigo to dye, and uses tie-dye techniques, as well as batik. He uses a type of sago paste for resists.  His work is usually depictions from his life.  While I listened, I wove a twill pattern on my four-shaft table loom.  The repetitive nature of the weaving helped me pay attention to the lecture.

I went out to the park to do some drawing.  I sketched out a little scene with some rhododendron bushes and some trees.  I worked on the detail for a few of the bushes, but one bush in particular was especially crazy-making so I will go back to it tomorrow and continue to work on the scene.  I will post a photo of it when it is finished.

For my surface design assignment, I finished up a table runner for Melanie Wallace.  I can't reveal too much about that yet, because she hasn't seen it!  I can't wait to show it to her.

For my business study, I read and completed the exercises from the first chapter of The Boss of You.  I identified my business goals, defined my personal measure of success (which is not to become a Fortune 500 company), and identified my strengths and weaknesses.  So far, I love this book.  It's perfect for people like me, who just want a happy little business with a sustainable wage.  I'm super-pleased with it.

I did not work on design because I haven't got the book from the library yet.  I also didn't work on my personal project today, because I didn't have time and i did get the chance to work on Melanie's project and my weaving.  I might do a bit on knitting after dinner though.

I am working on my website right now (obvi) and hope to improve it more over the next few days.  It's still looking a little ghetto but at least it has content now.

I am very happy with my first day.  It's ended up being a nine-hour day, which is remarkable for me.  I have a disability and usually have to work part time, but I have so much energy right now.  I haven't had a full day's work in a long, long time.  I am not sure how long it will be once I have my warm up, design, and personal projects elements tied in.  It might end up being quite a bit longer.  I will have to see if I need to adjust the schedule, or if I will just work longer.

Happy first day of unCollege for me!