Today on the Quiltart list a member, Kathy,  asked those of us who blog various questions like why blog, why did you start, what do you get out of it, whether it’s a painful chore or something enjoyable, whether it has helped any of us sell quilts, and stuff like that.   Some of the answers in my reply would be a bit different  if I were more focused on marketing! but, really, most of its value to me has been as a visual diary.  Writing about photos I’ve taken, samples or techniques I try out, writing about landscapes, cultural experiences, history, architecture, films or books that capture my attention I hope gives my collectors and fans more insight into why I do what I do.  But more than that, writing about them helps ideas crystallise in my mind as well as provide a record, and so blogging regularly is probably the closest I’ll ever come to journalling.  Some artists put almost as much time into journalling as they do into their art and living itself.

My regular readers know I sometimes have nothing much to say, and therefore don’t, and also that I don’t apologise for the occasional lapse in posting – because I know you don’t want to hear me whine silly excuses.  But, over the 7+ years I have been blogging, I have certainly enjoyed the process of writing and posting  for people to read about my life and about how some of it translates to inspiration for my creative works in fabric – quilts and mixed media works.  As part of my response to Kathy, I looked back at some of my earlier posts including the first – and really, dipping into the several I re-read down the years, I think I am posting the same mix of things now that I did then.  At the time I began, I’d found myself living in a foreign country ‘for a while’ – where indeed I an still living temporarily – and I was mindful that not many people know Uruguay very well, so that things I found interesting and different would probably seem so to my readers, too.    This is still one of the themes of my posts, but I have developed more focus on several things that particularly interest me in terms of  inspration and thought behind my textile work.  These have assumed more importance than they had at the time my blog began in its first form, in Blogger, as ‘Greetings From Montevideo’ – the subject line I still often use writing to friends and family from here.

And as you might have noticed, at times it gives me a free forum to rant or vent if I wish – my readers are free to follow along, comment,  or simply press the close button. . . so far I have only once got into such a tiresome silly comment exchange with one reader that for a while  I had to turn on the ‘moderate comments before publication’ button.  She got sick of that really quickly and went away.  It hasn’t happened since and was ages ago – so perhaps this means I have been too bland and non-controversial? Or perhaps I’m just sleeping better or reading better books.

Oh and for the record – this  recent photo of me is in front of Ebb & Flow 15,   2009,  2.25m x 1.25m.  Since it was taken a few weeks ago, my hair streak is now a purply brown – perhaps my hairdresser picked up the wrong colour or forgot, didn’t have her glasses on in the prep room – whatever.    Could be something else next time, anyway ;-p  spring is on the way here.