I’m putting the final touches on workshop kits and workshop prep for a one-day class to be taught on Saturday. Today and tomorrow are more or less straight organisation, although I do have to make one additional class sample to bring along. The workshop is my basic Landscape Design workshop, but the folks for whom I’m putting it off have added the minor curve-ball of making it an Attic Windows workshop as well. To that end, I’m adding an instruction leaflet for the Attic Window block and am hoping to have finished a few samples that show the versatility of the block when used for framing landscape views. My only real concern is time; I have the landscape design workshop spaced for six hours. Adding another element may cause more rushing than is suitable. We’ll see how it goes.

This flipping back and forth between organising and creating is one that has always been tricky for me. I can do both, with great ease, but I find that organising blocks me from working intuitively. Knowing this about myself, I try to get paperwork, kit-making, planning and the like over with in blocks of time and I segregate creativity from them. I suspect the Clean Studio Syndrome or White Canvas Block are related to this impediment. While studio tidying is a necessity and most canvases start out as white, it is often the juxtaposition of the unusual that results in creative euphoria. I have had more “eureka!” moments from seeing fabrics haphazardly piled on the table in random-but-perfect order than I have from staring at the cleaned-off table and neatly ordered materials.

But the workshop prep will not take long and the sample to be done requires more perfunctory necessity than creative genius. Off I go….