Slumpity slump slump

I have been in a slump for a while. Looks like since about September! I hadn't felt like doing anything in the studio. I even contemplated selling off most all my fabric and extra machines and not have a studio at all.
I read an interesting article today that spoke to me. I suffer from "I am not good enough-itis. Because my projects are not good enough, why keep trying to make things? The article spoke of creating things just for the sake of creating. I need to keep that in mind more.
So I did get into the studio and put eyes and whiskers on the October block:

I also cut out the pieces for the last block and am starting to sew them down:

I have a new sewing partner too:

Please let me introduce you to Dexter! He is a lab and terrier cross. He was gotten from one of the local pounds and is about four months old now. I am smitten with him. He is so smart and so stinkin' cute!

He must be a good influence on me because I also finished block number seven in the other quilt I am working on.

Thanksgiving was wonderful as all my kids were here. Christmas was quiet but nice enough. New Years is on the horizon. See you all next year! Till then, sew-on!

PS: If you want to read the posting that gives me hope for going back to my arts and crafts, I have copied and pasted it here:

Prepare thyselves: I'm feeling a little art rant coming on.

It seems like every "trend" that comes along ends up being kind of fun and cool at the beginning, largely because of the freedom that comes from exploring something new. Then, when a certain critical mass starts liking whatever it is, the Type A Personalities come out of the woodwork, first to create a whole bunch of rules they can stress over, and then to enforce those self-created rules as if they've always existed. Once enough people buy into the arbitrarily created "rules", then all the companies spring out of the woodwork to monetize whatever it is, so that the average Joe can follow the rules. And that's sad, folks.

Example: altered books in the early 'oughts. Buy an old book from a garage sale, do something to it, and have a whole heapload of fun while you're at it. Then there were the rules: must be a certain kind of book, must be a certain kind of acceptable pages, must be must be must be. And we end with companies actually selling $15 "alterable books", which, of course, were just BOOKS. Regular old *books*. (But they were a certain size and binding and acid-free and and and.... Not the point. They were books, like the ones you could get for $.25 at a garage sale.)

We won't even get into the clusterbomb that Zentangle's become. Or what happened when the Artist Trading Card nazis came out to play (and the corporate overlords selling literally a half a sheet of paper in a pack, cut to size, for as much as a whole pad of decent paper). When the guys in NYC started trading them at meetups, I doubt anyone ever looked at another artist and said, and I quote the organizer of a trade that devastated a friend of mine, "sorry, this looks like you didn't even try. It's not good enough to trade."

(I still growl about that one. That particular person never made another thing, last I heard.)

Tonight, I saw someone talking about how *stressful* coloring pages are. And how she makes photocopies of them so she doesn't mess up the book.

It's a coloring book, not a medieval-monk-lettered hand-bound copy of the Bible, folks. You will not die if you make the dots on a butterfly's wings in non-matching colors. And you're missing the whole point -- which is to lose yourself in *practice*, which *calms* your mind, not stresses you out. (Also, the money-grubbers are on that whole trend already. Look up how many skanky internet marketers are hopping on the bandwagon and talking about how you, too, can create books with no or low content and make your first bazillion dollars by using public domain art YAY! ::headdesk::)

So here's my actual point, six rambling paragraphs later: If your art is stressing you out, and that very piece of art is not going to be responsible for your children starving to death and you losing two toes to frostbite in your non-heated apartment that you're about to be evicted from if you don't NAIL THIS PIECE OMG....? Then it's about expression and process, not about being perfect. Don't feed into the haters who want to make themselves feel better by pointing out how much more sucky your work is than theirs, or the rules lawyers who want everyone to create in the exact same process that they do, in order to feel like the universe is a safe place for them. And sure as hell don't listen to any opinion where the person giving that opinion is making money from your insecurity or desire to do things right. That person/company has goals that have nothing to do with the truth, only about a sales goal toward which they'd like you to contribute.

Just make stuff, people. Make it with whatever you want, on whatever paper you want, whenever you want, HOWever you want. Stop stressing. Learn things whenever you can, but don't let comparison make you a target for the rules-ers and sellers.

Be you. Make your stuff, your way.