is this a test?

(Off-topic and too personal but it's my blog so there)

I wrote this in an email to a friend today:

"And being on the edge of a breakdown of some flavour or another doesn't help in that respect, either. Fortunately I've yet to flush my underpants, something a friend of a friend did at a late stage of her PhD; she realised her mistake just as the panties disappeared from view. But it can't be far off for me, either. Once recently I put the coffee grounds in the cup rather than the coffee maker, and stared at it all for nearly a minute knowing something was wrong but couldn't work out what. "

Maybe it's selfish, but when at the final stages of a PhD, one does not expect to have to deal with a friend's near-fatal accident and recovery that will take months, possibly years (but that she will recover is a small, happy miracle that we didn't dare dream of just over a week ago), and then, the death yesterday of another friend from advanced, inoperable, terminal cancer that even she didn't know she had less than three weeks ago, when I saw her on the day of the opening (and was too busy to talk to as she came early to say she couldn't make the opening as she was not feeling well). The exhibition comes down on Friday and I can't wait, simply because I associate most of its duration with so much sadness it's almost suffocating. The past fortnight has felt like some cruel endurance test thrown at my friends and me by the universe.

Pat: love'n'quacks - I miss you so much already and so do the ducks of this world. Thank you for letting me into yours.

(It seems banal to even mention it now but in reference to an earlier goal, I shaved off nine minutes from my time last year in City2Surf. I didn't quite meet my fund-raising goal but $900+ is still pretty damn good, don't you think? Thank you, everyone!)

survivor

So, I've survived my first ever exhibition. I will post some photos within the next week or two, and am happy to report that the response was quite positive on the night. More importantly, having made the garments, I've got an entirely new sense of this kind of making. It's empowering: I now know I can design everything from now on like this.

A number of people (including many women) on the night asked as to whether I'd be selling the work. I will, I think, produce on a made-to-order and -measure basis, but not until the thesis is out of the way. Being a winter collection, I think February would be an appropriate time to begin taking orders. Some further thinking and planning is required in this respect but if you are interested, shoot me an email. As for getting into wholesale, I'm not interested, at least not for now. Been there, done that, got burned, etc. And I think made-to-order discourages impulse buying, something we are all sometimes prone to. Having to fork out cash for something you won't see for some weeks hopefully makes you think about whether you actually need it a bit more. I only want to make and sell something if the wearer absolutely loves it, and will keep loving and wearing it for a considerable period of time.

Now for the five kilos I lost in two weeks...