A Year of Anniversaries

 

Voie de Vie anniversary original art, (c) 2021. 
Mixed media with digital elements.

It is, amazingly, a new year - 2021!!!! While I usually take the first few weeks off at the beginning of the year to recharge and renew, the beginning of this year has been slightly different. While I have had an only limited presence on social media, it has been a far cry from restful. 

Nevertheless, I am so excited to finally fill everyone in on this most momentous of years - 2021 marks ten years I've been creating! I am absolutely blown away by this, truth be told. 

While there will be much more to write about in connection with the anniversary, I must mention the blog - I've been writing consistently on it for the last decade. That is unbelievable. Fittingly, this 1/1/2011 post fairly sums things up - a painting, a book, and a shawl. While I may have fallen for cowls over shawls, more writing and less reading, and hand-painting/dyeing yarn to painting on canvas (although I still do that!), there has been a clear theme over the last 10 years - creativity and making. It's something I cherish and never take for granted.

This year also marks a different anniversary for me - it's also the fifth season I will be curating/coordinating a summer Progress, Hope, & Happiness collection, complete with, as always, a making event. 

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I still cannot believe how far I have traveled along this creative path - from my first designs in the 2011 VKLlive/Los Angeles fashion show, to starting my own line of hand-dyed yarns, with just shy of 150 designs and over 560 blog posts in between, it's been quite a ride. The handknit and crochet business has changed dramatically over the last decade (and so much over the last 2+ years as to be almost unrecognizable), and through it all I have weathered every twist and turn. I have learned a lot about the people in this industry and, equally, a lot about myself in the process. I am so proud of my ability to still be standing, with my own voice still firmly in tact, in this my 10th creative year. There is no doubt that there are more popular designers out there - but popularity for its own sake has never been my aim. To paraphrase Thoreau - we only hit what we aim for; in my case, that aim has been a small, authentically-me business of which I can be proud. 

I will have much more to write about and announce during this very special anniversary year, so I hope you will join me in this 12-month celebration. My maternal grandmere, a New England textile worker, is definitely smiling down on me with that smug I-told-you-so smile. Ok, meme, you had me pegged all along. 

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