Welcome to The Jetlag Zone
Hey gang,
Sorry it’s been a bit quiet here! I’ve been doing Important Family Stuff on the opposite side of the world for the past few weeks. I’d hoped to ship a video or two before I left, but the trickster small gods of the workshop had other ideas, from broken machine parts to shipping delays, and alas: none of those projects ended up fully baked in time. I promise that stuff is cooking, though, and I thought I’d offer a little preview of what’s on the menu:
- The much-requested cone winder project. This one has been in progress since at least November of last year and has suffered so many setbacks that I was starting to think it might be irredeemably cursed, but I’m like 95% confident(???) that I have most of the raw material I need to carry on editing the video, and if all goes according to plan, this will be my next Thing to hit your screens and printers. (Now that I’ve said that, go ahead and place your bets on which catastrophe will delay this one next: corrupted hard drive? Foreign army invades Canada?1 I finally catch COVID?)
- Speaking of COVID, I started writing some reflections on the experience of making art throughout and about the pandemic (so far). There are several pieces I worked on over the past five years that I’ve been wanting to share in more detail, but I’ve struggled to put them in context: unlike the knitting machines or the teleprompter2, these works don’t really lend themselves to a tutorial or project diary-style video. I’m interested in sharing some of the technical details but I’m not exactly inviting the audience to follow along and make their own copy. Then, with the recent wave of pandemic anniversaries, I realized that these individual projects might, together, be part of a bigger story I want to explore, so I’m experimenting with a different structure. It’s still in the scripting stage, I’m honestly pretty ambivalent about whether it's headed in the right direction, it might never make it off the page.
- A bit of meditative, quiet shoemaking. I recently had a crack at designing my own bespoke 3D-printed lasts, and although I'm not quite ready to share the lastmaking details until I've streamlined a few techniques and road-tested the results, I did aim a camera at my worktable while I prepared (what I hope will be) a wearable pair of shoes to test the fit. This still unfinished project was a weird eleventh-hour compulsion right before leaving home and I still don't know if either the shoes or the footage will be usable, but I was craving something... peaceful. And maybe you are, too.
In the longer term, there will be continued updates on knitting machine development, and I’ve also got a stack of ideas that are still more in the research and development or outlining phases; like the in-progress pieces I mentioned above, it’s a slightly oddball mix of some hands-on projects and some more essay-style, concept-heavy stuff.
I had started writing a bunch of additional thoughts about trying to reconcile, or at least balance, that mix: two wolves, Terrifying Ordeal of Being Perceived versus the Audacity to Create, etc.. But I couldn't seem to end the thing; I just kept shuffling the paragraphs around and rewriting sections without ever reaching a point. In the crisp light of Monday morning, I can see that I probably just needed to journal. Some thoughts are Inside Thoughts and some updates are just... updates.
Until next time,
xoxo Sparks