gnawing and gnashing
ok well. my idle period is ending and it's going to be back and forth to the farm for the forseeable. so I'm trying to wrap my shit up.
My main project is that my sister wanted new tablecloths for the farmer's market booth, and in the absence of JoAnn's, I was somewhat at a loss for somewhere to cheaply find cute quilting cotton in the right width in a print anyone actually liked. And, like a wacko, I decided the only solution was to buy preshrunk cotton sheeting from Dharma trading and tie-dye it. So I just finished the rather elaborate process of dyeing-- actually, I used a drip-dye kind of technique, on an old garment rack, over the laundry sink in my basement, with dye in squirt bottles and some just in a bowl I dumped strategically-- three 135-inch lengths of 65" wide cotton sheeting that I'd already soaked in soda ash, and then I let them cure in a black garbage bag in the sun for a day, and then I rinsed them with a great deal of difficulty (the red orange yellow half in one half of my laundry sink, the green blue purple half in the other half of the laundry sink) and then post-washed and then did a color fixative soak on them, and today I ironed them and I have to now remember how I made the last round into three-sided flat-topped tablecloths, and they need ties at the corners.
So that's been a lot. I've also done some sewing in the last two weeks, which, I hadn't sewn anything all winter so it was notable that I managed. I made a dress from a pattern I was testing out (modded pockets heavily, did the rest as written), modded a blouse pattern to rotate some of the enormous bust dart (I have fucking huge boobs so every darted pattern is slightly awkward in that the entire fucking side seam is one ginormous dart) up to the neckline to hopefully solve two problems (the huuuge bust dart not so huge, the neckline perhaps less prone to gaping yes i already did a gaping neckline adjustment), then drafted another pattern I haven't yet cut out where I rotated the huge bust dart to instead be under-bust gathers, and made it into an empire-line kinda shift dress kinda dealie with also heavily modded pockets. we'll see how that goes. haven't cut it out yet.
also sewed a new to me blouse pattern with princess seams, but i havent' finished it because i realized i hate the collar but haven't adjusted the pattern at all, and i'm out of motivation. i'll get back to it though.
the other thing is this huge story. i have like. i let myself get crazy and wrote several huge chunks of unconnected fic for heated rivalry, sort of, but it's not really.... that simple.... and i have enough to just post a bunch but i really am haunted by the thought that if i only i thought this structure through a little better, i could make this be really interesting. it's almost interesting. it's not quite.
i was so spoiled in the witcher fandom, and in my defense, i knew it, i got into it impulsively and stayed there on purpose way past when i'd otherwise have peeled off, because i had it so good. i had several readers who really read my stuff and who had ideas of like, structure and concepts and whatever, and. it took a while and i could trust them to know what to do, i could bounce ideas off them and get real feedback and really make stuff that actually expressed things and it was so satisfying. but none of them really followed me into this fandom, and nobody's got time, nobody can give me anything in-depth or collaborative. i've only had one person reading some stuff and they mostly were only there to nitpick numbers and occasional facts for me, which is necessary and important but. i don't have anyone i can ask about structure. I need plot-heavy help. I need help with themes and throughlines and should I do this linear-timeliney or should I try flashbacks or something pretentious, whose POV, what am I not seeing here, I know these scenes go together and I know where to go from here but not how fast. so I'm just gnawing on this big conceptual work that's really made up of a bunch of little things, and all I've got is a brute-force timeline, and I don't know what else to do with it.
i keep trying to find people in this fandom who want to do more in-depth stuff but i don't know where to look, really, don't know how to have those conversations. maybe i'm too disorganized anyway. someone helpfully linked me to this cool site where you can make like crazy person red string boards virtually, but i... don't understand it. (Look at this! Online collaborative whiteboards! i... where is the tutorial. i figured out how to make a post-it note but not how to write on it. i can write notes elsewhere though. mmm i do not think this way, i don't think.)
yes i'd love to go back to my other works, i haven't abandoned them, i still believe in them etc., but i am so determined to bang this behemoth of a whatever it is into something i can publish. and i could just-- put it up in chunks and let people decide if it means anything. that might be what i have to wind up doing. but i keep finding more throughlines in it, and if i keep pounding on that long enough, maybe it will mean something. so. that's what i'm doing. i think it means something. i dont know what it means yet though.
honestly i'd've started posting it already but i can't think of a title. because i don't totally understand what it's about. so. you see my difficulty. (It isn't that it's not about anything! It's about a ton of little things that I'm pretty sure are all thematically linked, but I keep finding more of them, and I know what they have in common but I don't know how to express what they have in common in words. I know it, I know how to communicate it, I don't know what the fuck to call it.)
anyway. time to do more sewing. i'm more aware currently of how load-bearing the sewing is, in service of making my brain move. when i'm not also thinking through sewing problems, big chunks of my brain are just quiet and dormant and maybe chewing on themselves. so. i need enrichment, in the form of halfassed textile arts. so i'm doing that.
and writing notes on a piece of paper, which i then lose, that's my other primary form of activity. at least i'm writing the notes again, i went through a solid eight to twelve months where i couldn't make myself write the lists. so. i'm. it's progress, though i can't say whether forward or backward.
