I haven’t vanished, I’ve just been asleep! Origin was enjoyable, stressful, exciting and boring at various points and extraordinarily tiring. I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep all week, with limited success. I had a great time, some fantastic feedback, sales and contacts. I was really lucky to be on an aisle with great people, so it was a lot of fun much of the time.

This is my little fabric-filled boudoir. It may, in retrospect, be a little too full, but hey, it was cosy.

After all the stress and excitment and exhaustion of the last few weeks, it’s been a bit flat being at home and trying to take it easy. I’m planning a couple of holidays soon, so I can’t take much time off this week, but I’ve not been firing on all cylinders either. Sort of mooching around not getting much work done, but not really relaxing either, and doing a lot of reflecting about the show. A friend really cheered me up when she sent me this quote from the Crafts Council website about the show:

Wow. That feels good. I might have to stick that over my desk.

But back to real life – I’m not doing anything very visual at the moment, so there isn’t a lot to show. I’m working on various freelance education projects over the next few months, along with a lot of book-writing, so it’s going to be a tip-tapping on the computer kind of winter. I’m quite enjoying that prospect at the moment. I’ve got a few days of teaching here and there, a holiday next month and several different things about to start so it all feels quite a change to the last 6 months of sewing. I’m sure there will be a good amount of sewing too though, what with book samples and projects (fun!). It’s the start of the academic year, and it feels like the start of a new work year for me. The last one has been amazing, since last year’s debut at Origin, and I can see just how far I have come since then, so I’m looking forward to the next year enormously.