Welcome to the A to Z Challenge! I’m getting started a little later than I intended, as I’m writing this on the 2nd of April, but I figure, leap, and the net will appear.

This image is from a series that I did a while back as an inspiration deck. I used the seven chakra colors plus brown. It was a fun project to think about, to come up with images that represented the color to me if not the chakra itself.

This month, for the A to Z Challenge, I will walk through my studio as I see it, not necessarily as I would show it to a visitor. I’m naturally a right-brained thinker, but since I have to live and work in the left-dominated neurotypical world I’ve learned to adapt. This month, I decided to try something different, and just post what I felt called to post for myself.

This blog, if you haven’t visited before, came about because I realized that I seem to have a learning difference in translating things from 2D to 3D. I’m hyperverbal (and thus a novelist), but I wasn’t always that way. I’ve always been a storyteller, but being raised in an abusive household I learned to hide my natural mode and survive as a left-brained thinker. I got very good at it, to the point that I now make a living in an analytical field and have an MBA in Finance.

In 2016, with the American election and the kickoff of what we now know is a strong Christofascist movement in our country, I started to feel seriously overwhelmed by everything. I didn’t realize at the time what was happening. The writing was the first to go, then the knitting, design work, and eventually, my weaving. I have done a few pieces here and there but nothing approaching my previous “normal.”

It’s been a journey but I’m finding myself closer to my “old me” than I’ve been in a long while, and I decided to take the opportunity of the A to Z challenge to challenge myself – to write, to show up at the keyboard daily, and to think about things that make me passionate.

And today, that’s craft: Knoontime Knitting: One Writer’s Journey Into 3-D. We changed it when we did a blog redesign, to “Where We Let the Squirrels Play,” and that fits too. Ultimately, it’s a philosophical discussion about craft as practice and a showcase, for myself if no one else, of what I did really do. A witnessing of my own process; midwifing my own creativity.

I hope you’ll join me, and that herein you will find some small inspiration for your own art, whatever that is.

Welcome.

Here are the rest of the images from the series:

Orange

Yellow

Green

Blue

Indigo

Violet

Brown