No art this week. I haven’t even looked at my studio except to do the occasional product sample or project for The Monthly Muse in a while. I’m hoping that the spirit moves me to get going on the projects for my next classes soon.
Meanwhile, here’s a photo of the sunchokes I’m starting on my dining room window sill, in the ultimate act of recycling: two Earth Balance containers, filled with potting soil, dropped into a large clear spinach box. Sealed closed, those cello boxes make excellent little window sill greenhouses.
I’ve never grown sunchokes before, but they sound like fun. I don’t have a place built for them in the garden yet, but I do know where I’m going to build the new bed. I started these little tubers from pieces of organic sunchokes I bought at Whole Foods, knowing full well that it meant I’d have to build new beds, and haul dirt, and generally get on with expanding the vegetable garden, which I failed to do this past year. My mission: be healthy enough, and strong enough to just do it.
This is probably my last post of the year here, since 2012 is winding down to its final days. Once again, I hope to find something creative to post about every week in 2013. I went back and counted my 2012 posts, and this is number 54, which means I met my goal, more or less, of making things and writing about them every week.
I think I achieved some of my hardest business goals this year. I migrated my products into a real shopping cart system, and rebuilt the whole web site, which got me off the cobbled-together pieces and parts I’d been using for so long. This week, I signed up with a real email service, to get me off the Yahoo Group I’ve been using to send messages since 2004, because I want to send real, pretty emails, and have a way to manage who gets what messages from me. This weekend, I’ll produce the final issue of The Monthly Muse, and close that chapter of my business life. And the biggest achievement: I’m still in business, which I think is more of a statement bout how little I need to bring in to stay afloat than it is about how well my business is doing in this economy. Thank goodness I know how to live on a little…
I probably have the same goals for next year I always have: make more time for personal art, and spend less time sitting on my butt, thinking about making things.
Goodbye, 2012!