Musings – Page 48 – Wool Stone & Prairie

Felted Tasks

Artwork / December 9, 2018 December 9, 2018 / By admin

I’m dropping in with an update on artwork. It’s been a fruitful week with an art show featuring a collection of artists in the local gallery and time spent visiting with artists as a result. I sat down to the computer this evening with the intention to write about it because it was a special experience but words won’t come. I’m pretty sure writing in my paper journal will do the trick but for now, and for the sake of touching base and keeping up, switching gears it is.

On the ranch the routine is aptly routine. The sheep are grazing so our chores are light, consisting of feeding guardian dogs, checking on the flock twice a day and occasionally rolling out old hay for bedding. There is casual work/training with a couple stock dogs and the ever, ongoing work with the new house which Allen mostly takes care of at this point.

In the studio it feels more like computer time than creative time as I work through a long list of computer related tasks in trying to align online spaces necessary for sharing art and photos, all the while wondering where in the world am I going with this? Some days I’m not sure which way to turn. When that feeling surfaces I slip into making the art – because I’ve grown comfortable with that aspect whereas the promotion of it is still so awkward.

Beginning of needle felting onto plain white wool canvas made of Clun Forest wool from this flock. Second canvas in the background is made from Border Leicester wool.

My mom asked if I would make a Christmas decoration, not having done so before and not having a clear idea of what style of decoration to aim for, I made a few. This was welcome, *freeing*, creative time.

A pair of wool liners I made for inside my boots. I’ve been wearing these for a couple weeks now and oh they are toasty warm.

You can see by the creative outlets that I’ve been jumping around a bit, a sign of the unsettled feeling growth has brought.

Regular posts of artwork can be viewed on the Wool, Stone & Prairie Facebook page and Instagram Feed.

Where The Sheep Settle

Musing / December 1, 2018 December 1, 2018 / By admin

I wish I could plunk you down where the sheep settle every night, to feel the protection of the spot they chose, to wander in the deep and wide hollow there, to connect with the way the hill at their back shapes a partial cocoon. To see the trees that both roof them and ring them, offering shelter from each direction when needed. To walk their foot trails passing and investigating into the abandoned buildings, to watch how the girls settle loosely on the fringe when weather is favourable but tuck deeper into the core when the weather shifts toward ugly. To be in their space and feel the wisdom of their choice, and connect with the natural spirit that that wisdom stems from. I wish I could plunk you down where the sheep settle.

Just about every winter I write about the wise choice these ewes make at picking a bedding ground. And every year it feels increasingly important to see and recognize these traits, in livestock in particular because I worry the majority of livestock raised in North America are losing or have lost these innate, natural traits. That our animals are being steered away from their natural by an increasingly un-natural species.

I feel that people in agriculture are growing further entrenched in the idea that we, the human, know what is best, not Mother Nature. We tell ourselves that our choice to raise the maximum amount of fast food, and the plethora of interventions necessary to do so, is the only choice there is because otherwise we just can’t make it work. Are we no wiser and more brave than this?

As fast-food agriculture strives ever and ever more to fix production flaws nature never had to begin with, so to do we strip away the natural from the animal and from the land, and by proxy, from ourselves. As the divide between us and nature grows so to does our dissatisfaction with life. Until here we sit, a first world nation of over drugged, generally unhappy, distrustful people. Are we no wiser and more brave than this?

I’m not suggesting we return all livestock animals to the wild and let it be, but I am suggesting that we’ve gone way past the balance point on this one, and no one seems to be noticing the disconnect. I don’t know if I am making right choices for going forward in the agriculture industry, very possibly not, but I do know taking away the natural these sheep have is certainly going backwards toward a place I don’t wish to go. I want to be wiser and more brave than this.

One Piece Three Versions

Artwork / November 26, 2018 November 26, 2018 / By admin

Sometimes a piece of artwork is held off because I won’t decide whether to draw it or felt it. Sometimes ranch jobs are stalled that way as well. A weird way of procrastinating and one I’m well practiced at.

For a little while now I have felt this repeated nudge that said to do both a drawing and a felting of the same piece and I repeatedly told it: that’s nuts, I hardly have time to do one and drawings take so long.

Then one morning, after needle felting on the piece shared in the last post, I found myself digging into my color pencil sets. I pulled out the rough drawing of the Sarplaninac dog I was felting and transferred it to black paper and began to draw. I didn’t stay at it for very long before slipping back to the felting but I had started, the nudge was awakened. A few minutes at a time, stretched over the course of several days it morphed onto the page.

When it was done I was so utterly satisfied, and for the first time in a long while, it had nothing to do about the result. The result didn’t matter, the accomplishment of a process did. The heeding of the nudge did.

Oddly enough, when I’m in the pickle of deciding whether to felt or to draw a particular piece, it is all still one idea. In my mind the felting or drawing is the same piece, the same dog in this case, and even somehow the same outcome. So it’s striking how different the three versions are.