Moving a Little Faster

I've been thinking a lot about this blog and our website lately.  Obviously I haven't gotten any further than thinking - my last post was almost six months ago.  I've been considering what to do with them.  What do I have to share?  What might you be interested in seeing?  I hope if you have suggestions, you'll share them in a comment or an email.  I am definitely interested in your ideas.

Now that I have been working on bigger projects and am not doing art fairs any more, it's not very often that I have something I feel an urgent need to share.  Today is an exception.  I'll get to that in a minute.  First, here are a couple of ideas I've been considering about reorganizing/redoing the website and blog:

• Add more pictures of projects in progress. 
  • Should it be just a page in the Galleries tab?  Assuming I am working on a big quilt, I would add pictures of each section as I complete the piecing and then the embroidery/quilting?  You'd gradually see what the finished piece would look like, because each of the sections would be on the same page.
    
  • Should I do a short blog post as I complete a section instead?  You wouldn't see the gradual build up of the final quilt, but I could comment a little more about what I learned as I went.  What decisions did I have to make?  What problems came up?  How am I feeling about the project at that point?
    
• Add a history section in the gallery.  We've been at this for a long time.  Should I try to dig back to see if I could do some type of retrospective of our work?
  • Should it focus on chronology or evolution over time?  More of a history, if you will.
  • Would a focus on media and techniques be more useful?  Examples piecing versus types of surface design versus uses of materials such as skeleton leaves or silk cocoons.

Those are some possibilities.  Your input might get me past the thinking stage to the actual doing... I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

In the meanwhile, here's what I have been working on.

I've gotten faster.  This one took 6 months, not 9.  I got a little less carried away with the embroidery.  Plus I had lots of time to work on it when I was supervising Tyler's school.  (Thankfully he's been able to go back to school.  It makes me so happy to see how he's blossomed now that he's around other children his age.)

The quilt is an archive in itself.  Sonja created all the center square fabrics as she tried out and demonstrated various fabric dyeing and painting techniques.  The rest of the fabrics are mostly ones we've collected at various shows we've been to over the years.  I hope that as she looks at it each day she'll have fond memories of the time we've spent together making art.
Next it's my son's turn.  I've gotten a start.  I'll make that the focus of the "In Progress" blog or web page once I decide what to do (and get photographs of the pieces already finished).

Cheers.
Ann