Website!

I have a website! Well, I have unofficially had a website for a while that my husband was building from scratch, which meant that not only did I have to find the time to make decisions, prepare photos, write text, but he had to find the time to manipulate them into the site. Consequently, the website had been under construction for years. A couple of weeks ago a great salesman from my website hosting company called and successfully sold me their website building services. For reasons too complicated to list, I ended up with a deadline of ten days to get a reasonable version of my website up and running. Deadlines can undercut the enjoyment of lots of other things in your life but they also mean that you get something accomplished--especially if it's something you do not find particularly fun.

Choosing how I use my time has been a constant effort for me. Since Tom and I both no longer have a work schedule determined by a larger entity, each week must be given some attention. Sometimes I just tumble through, which can be a wild success, or more often, becomes a succession of scheduling repairmen, spending too much time on Facebook/email, making shopping trips--ending in a depressing feeling that I am dribbling away my life.

To market or to create--that seems to be an easy question to answer. When I finally sit down to try to come up with some appearance of control over this finite quantity of time allotted me, uninterrupted time in my studio is way up on the list and sitting at a computer creating a website is way down near the bottom, almost as far down as cleaning closets. But yet a website, like a clean closet, has a certain usefulness, particularly when I enter a show that expects all its artists to have websites or when someone expresses an interest in buying one of my pieces but lives too far to visit in person. And, like a blog, a website provides an opportunity to reflect on work I have done and perhaps even may inspire a new path to take.

And so I now have an official website--madquilts.com. The name comes from the nickname my mother bestowed on me that seemed to fit with the crazy nature of some of my experimentations and the nature of the muse that orchestrates this passion of mine. Already it needs to be updated since several newer pieces are not on the site yet, but that will happen another day. No closets have been cleaned but I did manage enough time in the studio to finish another piece. More on that soon. And I even got a picture of (and identified--one of my priorities this summer)  an eastern pondhawk dragonfly--an eight-winged one!

And if you are still reading, thanks for the company!