Although we still have a foot of snow in our yard and my husband is busy in the saphouse boiling sap into maple syrup (usually sap season is all over by this time), there are a few signs and smells of spring in the air here in northern New Hampshire. And my creative juices are starting to flow, right along with the maple tree sap.
I can work very well, right up to December 24th, but after that I enter a fallow period and am ready for a break. January finds me picking up, sorting out, re-organizing, not only the studio, but the whole house. Then my desire to play with fiber kicks in, knitting, spinning, weaving. And of course snowshoeing once January’s frigid grip is over.
February is the time that I should be creating pieces for the many different auctions I donate to—NH Public Television, Tin Mountain Conservation Center, Gibson Senior Center, and others. But I am just not inspired yet. And so I do my taxes, which I don’t want to do either.
March finds me going to the studio and at least cutting out parts for pieces and doing simple tasks. Even if I come up with a new design, I find it difficult to judge its merit. Is it appealing, so-so, or awful? Well, I’ll think about it later.
But now it is April. I look at my stone collection and start to get ideas. I finish bits and pieces that have been started and set aside. And I want to spend more time in the studio. Yesterday I came up with a new earring design and made a prototype. It needs some modification, but there are possibilities there. I hope that by the end of the month it will be ready to add to the website photos. And so the maple sap and my creative juices have begun to flow again.