Sunday morning

I wake up, though I could have wished for more sleep, I have coffee and then sink into listening to the self-hypnosis recordings I have downloaded from the magical internet.

Rejuvenated,  I open my curtains to this, with a wonderfully cool breeze and birdsong. Life is harsh and unrelenting, but oh! - it is also wondrous and beautiful.

I have homework to be done, but I have neglected my blog, too, so let me update.

I finished the beading on 'Deeper and deeper 2'. I wrote a far-too-long hypnotic script and calculated I'd need to write 3 letters per cm, to fit it all into the 334cm I have. I took many deep breaths, picked up and put down the pen about 4 times, gathered all my courage and began to write. Why all this stress? Because ALL the beading was done, and I could not make a single mistake with the paint on the fabric. Very tensely, I wrote the whole outer ring.The irony of being so tense while writing about relaxation, did not escape me!

Then looked at it and it was ALL wrong. I had to cramp the letters so close together to fit in all the text, that it gave the feel of words-running-into-each-other-spokenfast-and-pressured - ANYTHING but the relaxed feeling it needed to have! Then came that familiar, stomach-dropping feeling of "I put all this work in and now it's ruined"... Bundled the stupid thing up and stuck it on a shelf for a few days!

Now what? The text couldn't be erased. Or so, I thought! I discovered that I could paint over it in black - you can faintly see it was there, but that will be disguised when the new text comes on. Saved! O, happy day.

Then, I cut the text in half. There were 2 parts to it anyway, so that was ok, and it gave me some space to flesh out the first part. Then followed some maths - first simple and then complex, with the aid of my daughter, because my brain is putty.

I wonder if anyone who looks at it, will appreciate the amount of calculating involved, counting words, letters, punctuation, spaces and cms available! As in: 334cm in which to write, 610 characters, 109 words, 119 spaces... AND I wanted the spaces to be bigger than the letters. My daughter created a clever spreadsheet with variables, so I can do this calculation easier next time. For this time, I have 0.5cm per letter/punctuation mark and 0.7cm per inter-word space. This provides a guideline, which I can then adjust while I am writing.

All the calculation is necessary, not only to fit the text into the spiral so that it fills all the way to the middle, not over or under. It's also to know how to space the words out, so that when you read it, it reads with the meter of the person saying the words. This means greater spaces between some words, taking a little longer for your eye to run across, to create the pauses you would otherwise hear. To translate the feeling of the auditory into the visual. This is why the previous, squashed text totally failed.

Last night I finished blacking out the text I had written. Hopefully I'll get time today, to begin writing the new text on.

You can't see the blacked-out text at the bottom, can you? No. Say no! 😁