This is a painting I made mid-late-2020, my own representation of the Fool of the Major Arcana in tarot. Whether or not you like the tarot or have some misconceptions about demon portals (it’s just a harmless deck of cards), I’ll explain a bit what it means, and why I feel it’s relevant to this post. Fun fact: although the tarot has been around in one form or another since the middle ages, the first 22 cards (aka the Major Arcana) correlate with Carl Jung’s archetypes, making it really fun for exploring the human condition. Another fun fact: the Minor Arcana (the remaining 56 cards) were the predecessor to the playing cards pretty much everyone has played with at one point or another. Playing cards nowadays have 52 cards because they took out the Page, but the remaining Knight, Queen and King remain. Otherwise, you have Ace through 10 plus court cards, and hearts are cups, spades are swords, clubs are wands, and diamonds are coins/pentacles. If they truly opened demon portals, Las Vegas would be… oh wait, I guess it is called “sin city” isn’t it? Just kidding - nobody’s done any harm playing gin rummy or go fish. Anyway, moving on…

The Fool (as do the other cards of tarot) have taken on a multitude of meanings ever since tarot started to rise in popularity since the 60’s & 70’s. It used to just mean literally what it sounds like - someone inexperienced, uneducated, lacking common sense, immature, etc. The earliest depictions of this character (which date as far back as the middle ages) show exactly that - some young fella, usually his pants torn up, being attacked by what I suppose is a dog (hard to tell with some of those drawings), headed off on a journey. The redrawn Fool of the Rider-Waite has a bit more innocence to it, where the dog is now a companion rather than attacker. Some people stick just to the original keyword for interpretation, meaning someone who doesn’t make wise decisions (in an attempt to avoid ableist language here). I suppose you could say that the character in my painting isn’t making a wise decision - diving head-first off a cliff into an ocean. We can only guess the thought process before they jumped. They may have been acting on impulse.

Other meanings of the Fool tend to be more positive (with keywords such as creative, spontaneous, carefree). The Fool is numbered zero and often placed at the very beginning of the deck, yet as a “rulebreaker” it can technically fall into place anywhere along one’s journey - after all, we all have “fool” moments throughout our lives. As such, it’s also seen as a card that depicts someone starting off on a new journey - there are no judgments whatsoever as to the level of intelligence of the character. Even in the earliest depictions he’s not going empty-handed - he has prepared for his journey (even if he’s travelling light). Someone who is a fool wouldn’t have prepared, right? Yet, no matter how well we prepare, it is impossible to foresee everything. There’s always something we could potentially miss, something forgotten, some oversight. A new journey is exciting and scary at the same time.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

Content warning: mental health

As some of you may have noticed, I’d taken a fairly long (in the sense of content-creators) break from posting much of anything. I’ve still been here checking in, replying to comments and emails, sharing the occasional thing on social media, and hanging out in some of the fiber groups, but the ability to create new content let alone sharing that content with the world had been put on a temporary hold.

A large part of it has to do with the fact that my ADHD symptoms had become unmanageable in 2020. Yes, the pandemic and lockdown situation had a lot to do with that, but more in the sense that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Some discombobulation was to be expected, but because my personal situation was one in which I didn’t have any working systems in place, I was unable to bounce back from it without a lot of help.

Since my ADHD was untreated and unmanaged for so long, my ability to function was like a cracked dam ready to burst, and all I’d done is patch up the worst of the leaks here and there while keeping my fingers crossed and distracting everyone else with a “nothing to see here! It’s been handled! Everything is fine!” As we know from the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, it’s only a matter of time. It would have happened eventually, with or without a pandemic. In fact, it’s thanks to the timing that I was able to step back and start the long process of rebuilding. My husband’s been working from home, allowing me to lean on him for support in ways that would’ve been more difficult had he still been at the office (he works really long hours).

My situation wasn’t so severe that I couldn’t get myself out of bed, nor was there any suicidal ideation or self-harm involved. Luckily in my case, my general mood wasn’t affected (not that I’m aware of, maybe more irritable but not depressed). However, I felt mentally paralyzed, and the worst symptoms one might have with ADHD became amplified.

I’m not going to go on about the details of it, but things did get to the point I needed to stop living in denial, seek help, and pull the plug on everything that wasn’t necessary - which included not trying to force myself to create content and post to social media. I am still working on pulling myself out of it, but I’m feeling okay enough to start focusing on creative work again (including at some point picking up the projects that were put on hold the moment everything crashed), even though part of me is dipping my toes in the water here. Am I ready to say “I’m back?” I’m going to be gentle with myself as to how - and how frequently - I am going to be posting, which brings me to the next point.

Newish Beginnings

This break (or wintering to use the quote’s metaphor) has allowed me some valuable time to re-evaluate what it is that I want to focus on. That’s something that’s difficult to do when you’re constantly in the middle of trying to figure out what to post next. It’s hard to just switch directions like that.

This video (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s TED talk on “How Craving Attention Makes You Less Creative”) helped me a lot with this evaluation process, and I highly recommend watching it.

For a while I’d been focused on providing instruction and tutorials as well as selling limited supplies - mostly kits. At this time, I’m placing a moratorium on selling supplies. There are several reasons for this, the main one being logistics. My supply of needles has dwindled to the point that I’d need to resupply my stock (which I buy in bulk, which means a large cost up front). The supplier I used to buy my wool from ages ago when I first started my kits increased their minimum order to $500 worth of wool (previously there was no minimum) to purchase in bulk. This was some time ago, and I was okay with switching over to my own dyed wool - however, processing wool start to finish (which is what makes supplying more cost effective) takes a lot of time, especially since I don’t run a mill. I have a small set-up here, a bit larger than most who dye for personal use, but not large enough to run a supply production. I still had quite a bit from before the pandemic, but that supply has dwindled as well thanks to orders over the past year. Since my husband set up his office in my “studio” while he’s been working from home (it’ll be one year in March that he’s been home with us), I would need to relocate my dye set-up to do more, as I can’t be in there working while he’s working. There are also the issues of storage space. Mainly though, I currently don’t have the time and mental stamina to devote to all the things I’d would’ve liked to, and the time involved in creating kits takes away from time I need to prioritize in other ways right now.

The second (and probably more important for me right now) reason is personal direction: creating for the purpose of selling kits and supplies is very different from pushing my personal artistic boundaries/skills. Creating kits is a time-involved and challenging process - I have to approach it as a beginner who has never needle felted before, simplify my process, document it in a way that anyone could follow, and come up with ideas that would be appealing to a wide variety of individuals. That’s why you see so many tutorials and kits that involve making animals, because they’ve been proven to be popular. The market (though now quickly becoming oversaturated) is a given. Coming up with something completely different is more challenging. I say more important because if I really needed to, I could make the first one work somehow, but because it became more of a challenge, it forced me to evaluate if this is really where I want to go with this right now.

I’ve decided that at this time, I don’t want to go in the direction of a supply shop. Looking back, things like the Green Man, the jellyfish, the coral reef - things that challenge me to push my boundaries - have been the most rewarding for me. I love sharing that process with you, the concept creation, the work-in-progress, and the completion. Those types of pieces also seemed to be more inspiring overall than the simple kits I made for the shop based on public reaction, and I can see how some people might feel a little let down in some ways. They desire to make something like my better work, but I’m teaching basics. Granted, all you really need to know are the basics. Seriously. It’s like building a more complicated lego kit - if you know how to snap two bricks together, you can do the simple ones or those 3000-piece sets.

So my new approach to making tutorials will involve both pushing my boundaries and teaching you the relevant information of how I put it together, but I will do it in a way that allows you to create your own art. Techniques, not projects. If I do offer any supplies for that, it’ll be to sell certain things you can’t get in any other felting shop.

All that being said, this is not going to just be another artist portfolio.

What’s the plan going forward?

Primarily, I am excited to focus on my art again. I want to make more things like the Green Man, or my ocean pieces, and I already have ideas for the next big project. You may or may not notice a thematic shift in my work. When I started this site several years ago, I really enjoyed creating whimsical pieces, but stylistically my work was still all over the place. I really want to work on refining my style, and/or making more pieces that fit a theme or series, rather than the randomness of a high school art portfolio.

I am still leaving the digital download tutorials up - which already include supply lists. I do plan to make more tutorials, but instead of being simplified, they’ll be smaller versions of the bigger projects I make. Who am I to tell you that it’s too advanced? Take a stab at it, and if you still need to practice some to make it look the way you want it to look, there are no time limits. One of the best lessons I learned last year while spending some time doing other people’s tutorials is that I absolutely hated getting sucked in with a really cool project that was literally in the tutorial preview only to find out that the class I took was a simplified version that only taught a small subset of skills that were needed to make the one I wanted to make. That cool project was literally the reason I got the tutorial. I can totally understand that the course wouldn’t have time to do the entire big project (for which a design was provided) - but at least some explanation of what techniques were used to do the rest of it would have been useful. I’m not going to do that to you. It felt a bit bait-and-switch.

I am open to working on collaborations. I actually am working on one right now that I cannot share the details of yet, at least until they start advertising, but it’ll be an ongoing thing (in which I am providing exclusive custom tutorials specific for that… thing). If someone reading this happens to run a needle felting supply shop and would love to set up a collaborative agreement with me, reach out to me. The people who get my tutorials are going to need to get their supplies from somewhere. Otherwise I’m simply going to list a number of shops in the tutorial which would have everything they need to make the thing. Since digital tutorials aren’t limited to region, I can set up a shop list of supply shops in various countries where you can purchase wool. I still do not recommend amazon or big-box stores. Some of y’all in those needle felting groups are buying from them and complaining. I warned you. Is it that hard to support small business? Buy American! (or whatever country you live in) Support us little guys. It’s really for your benefit - the small shops dedicated to selling wool supplies know and sell the good stuff, and that includes needles. You wouldn’t be breaking so many of them if you got the good quality ones. With that, I am also open to commissions (which I also have one I’m working on right now).

I plan to primarily focus on my blogs (more on that in a second), with social media being secondary. This has nothing to do with the recent “freedom of speech” stuff people have been going on about - I frankly couldn’t care less what social media platforms decide to do with their sites. I have a background in marketing, and anyone with any understanding of how that stuff works knows that you do not put all your eggs into other people’s baskets. This is why I hope “influencers” have plans B-Z figured out, especially if they’re depending on those platforms for income. This is why I stepped away from Etsy. Social media platforms are not the government, and they do not have to host anyone’s speech they don’t want to. The first amendment protects people from being censored by the government - it does not apply to private platforms. Anyway, there are a lot of reasons you don’t want to depend entirely on a social media platform, regardless of whether or not you plan to violate their terms of service - mainly because your reach (and resulting income) are at the whims of an algorithm over which you have no control - an algorithm which can be affected by so little as inconsistent uploads. This is why many creators panic when a platform makes any significant changes to their algorithm - because it always ends up screwing something up for someone. Anyway, limiting my use of social media is more for my own mental health, i.e. struggling to focus on things I both want and need to be doing instead, and not because of any personal or political beliefs. I enjoy social media - maybe a bit too much at times.

I will be reorganizing my site. Since there are a lot of steps to this, I’ve broken it down by bullet points below (in no particular order).

• Setting up separate blogs for topics that differ significantly. Yes, blogs, as in more than one. The beauty of this site is I can have multiple blogs on one site (if you’re struggling to understand the difference, think of a blog as a notebook, and the website as a shelf). Until now, I just used the one, which is where I posted all my fiber art stuff and split it up by categories. Last month, I set up a blog for my daughter to post her stories publicly, but kept separate from my posts. This particular post is on a new blog called “Mental Orts.” The first blog was “Thoughts and Musings,” and I’m not sure if I can cleanly rename that to something that makes more sense without messing up all the links - I need to look into that. I will also create a separate blog for homeschool posts and move the posts I’ve made to that. The purpose of setting up separate blogs is that each has its own RSS feed - that way, anyone who is interested in one or the other can choose to subscribe to whichever one interests them if they use an RSS reader. It also just helps to keep things better organized.

• Revisiting/revising old posts. As I set up the various blogs, I’ll be able to move certain posts. This may break some links, though I’m not sure how many people permalink my stuff. At most, it would affect any links I have within my posts to other posts if that one happens to be moved (also any time I linked to them in my social media posts, which I don’t think anyone scrolls that far back in time). While revisiting my old posts, I can any necessary edits and/or take down any that are no longer relevant and don’t make sense to keep.

• Checking to see for things I missed. Thanks to my poor organizational skills, sometimes I will write that I am going to follow something up with a post, and totally forget to do that. This time, when I’m revisiting and revising old posts, I’ll be making notes of anything I need to add.

• Revisit other site designs to see if there are any layouts that might work better than the current one. The last time I did this, none of the other layouts did what I needed (which a heavily blog-based site with a shop - usually designs focus largely on one or the other). Who knows, maybe they added other designs since then. This is usually a fairly seamless switcheroo - I can toy around with one layout in the background while the current one is still functional. If I do switch it over, you’ll hear about it.

• Convert certain blog posts to static pages. Some of the stuff I wrote as blog posts really should be static pages that don’t get lost in the feed (the post about supporting BIPOC in fiber arts for one). When I write blog posts, old posts move into the archive. Unless someone knows to search for them, or I have them organized in a way that’s easily located (the felting guides for example), they can get lost. I had to set things up this way back when I first started this site, because I was limited to having 10 pages. Using a blog format (where a single blog counted as one page, but not the posts within it) allowed me to pack in far more information on my site while bypassing this odd rule. At some point I guess they got rid of this rule, which means that I can now create more static pages - ones that would be permanently linked - so the information never gets lost among the posts. In the cases I do convert some posts to static, there will be some redundancy, as some of those posts are linked-to quite a bit from outside sites, and have many comments. They won’t be deleted - instead there will be a link on those posts which I make into static posts to help redirect people to the new, revised information. There will also likely be some new pages for information I have yet to post.

Over time, I plan to add more things to the shop. That’s always been a goal of mine to do. I did recently reorganize the categories to make more sense. I’m still not a huge fan of the shop layout, hence why I want to take another look at other designs which will allow me to make the shop make more sense.

I hope to finally get this email business figured out. I know a lot of people have asked if I send emails or have a mailing list. I was sending them out for a short while when I was trying out the mail service through Squarespace, until my trial ran out. I did set up mailchimp, but at the time was getting really frustrated with trying to get it to simply update everyone when a new blog post was up. It’s still on my to-do list.

what are mental orts?

Last thing I wanted to add was to explain this particular blog. Ort, or orts, is an archaic term meaning scraps - originally table scraps. Nowadays it’s common in the embroidery community for the little leftover snips of thread. Some people toss them, others collect them in something called an ort jar, which is what I do. Some think ort is an acronym meaning “old ratty threads” or something like that, but it’s an actual word, similar to cabbage/carbage (not the veggie, but fabric scraps). I’d initially planned on writing a post explaining how my mind is like a messy pile of orts in desperate need of containment, but I ended up confusing myself in the process. Still, I liked the reference and thought it was the perfect name for a blog that is just that.

The mental orts blog will be about my literal mental orts. I want to utilize it in the way I had utilized social media in the past (or like livejournal - anyone remember that or am I aging myself here? oh wow they’re still around) - posting updates in here more regularly. Obviously those posts would need to be far shorter than this one, and I’m not sure if I could ever get to daily posting, but some blogs that follow a similar idea to what I have in mind would be ones like Austin Kleon or Spiritcloth. Who knows, maybe I could work up to that. PS. Side note, I really loved livejournal, which was the perfect cross between a blog and social media and predated social media by probably a decade? It was definitely the precursor to social media. It allowed people to write blog posts such as this one about whatever is going on in their life, and others would be able to find blogs related to their interests and interact with each other. It’s probably less popular because it still seems to focus on that which social media tried to sell to the public - only to become this platform of using its users as the product and sell their attention to advertisers. Anyway, I already have a blog here, but I may go check it out and see what changes they made.