Why blog?

I haven't blogged for over a week now.  I have been in a bit of a creative slump, in terms of doing my textiles and in terms of blogging.
It is not as if I haven't had inspiration, in the last two weeks I have been to the Bendigo Wool Show, the Craft and Quilt Fair and the Monet exhibition at the NGV.  All interesting and inspiring, in different ways.
Here are some pictures of one of the challenges at the Quilt show, it was based on a plate.  There were many lovely and interesting ones.  These are just two I took photos of.  The first one reminds me of crockery my mother had and I felt a twinge of quilting interest reviving.

Judith Williams

The second one is quite humorous while commenting on the pest that rabbits are in Australia. 

Anne Sushames

I have been dilly dallying about getting the final part of my current assignment done - it is supposed to be a machine embroidery 3D object with some hand embroidery included. I had been working away very happily on experimenting with the samples required, including hand embroidery.  That latter requirement slowed me down but I have got it almost done.

But making a 3D object has been preying on my mind - with no good ideas developing.  I have finally decided to just do something and hope I can make it into a 3D object.  More on that later, when I eventually get it made (I hope!).

After I decided on an idea, based on something I had done in the past, I was very pleased to be able to find images and ideas about it quite easily - because I had blogged about it!!  I have lots of visual diaries on the shelf but I had no idea where some of my images and articles are.  It was daunting to think of going through them all, looking for particular ideas I know I played around with.  But the blog is searchable - what a bonus.

I have often thought of my blog as a visual diary and now it has proven to be very good in that respect.  I read another blog where the person was wondering why she keeps a blog and I was beginning to wonder if I should keep going. Now I am feeling inspired to continue.  Finally being back experimenting and creating is good too, I feel more likely to post. Blogging makes me look at things around me slightly differently - so I hope the inspiration continues to revive.

Exhibitioned Out!

I had not planned to go to many more exhibitions but I did set of for the Museum of Modern Art today. I wanted to see the Tim Burton exhibition. I got there relatively early and it was already reasonably crowded but I was able to see all the works quite well. There were a couple of school groups, both primary and secondary as well the usual run of tourists and locals. I had thought it was a bit crowded but overheard one guard telling another that it had been a reasonably quiet day! Glad I didn't go on one of the busy days.
The Tim Burton work was great. A lot of it was examples of him playing around with ideas and was not the finished work. It was good to see storyboards for movies, his early work with writing his own picture book, poems, etc.
I had not realised how many films he had worked on - I have seen a few of them but had forgotten that he was so involved with them (I am not much of a movie person).
This exhibition reminded me of the Pixar one I saw a few years ago, I suppose it was the connection with movies, the storyboards and the short videos that you could see.

After I had spend quite a bit of time at the exhibition, I decided to leave and keep to my resolution to only see one lot of work at a time.
But
I was walking past the Monet Waterlilies room and couldn't just keep going. They were magnificent.