In my room

It's where I do almost everything - in my room. My mom looks in sadly and says, "I wish you had some better place to work." But over the years I've made my room the most comfortable nest and like a gawky bird, I fly out now and again to get food or supplies to bring back to my room where I prefer to be.
Often, when I'm home alone, I bring a tray up with my dinner to eat in front of the TV. Food is limited to things that don't need to be cut with a knife - that's a little hard, really I pretty much go the fingers-as-tools route when at all possible.
My room is where I read - I have the balance of pillows down to a science. The big down pillow at my left to balance the arm with the book leaving the right hand free to turn pages. Head propped up by one pillow set horizontally behind one set on its end to keep my head and neck from hanging in painful positions.
My room is where I talk on the phone and write letters and cards, where I go through cookbooks and design menus and make shopping lists and where I try to finish my Sudoku puzzles, one each night.
My room is also where I do pretty much 100% of my crafting. That's why my mom shakes her head when she finds me chin-deep in yarn and bits of wool, working on my crowns or Christmas presents, glue tottering from my work board and glitter and needles, pins and markers always close to becoming a disaster on the comforter on my bed. It conjures up an image right out of a Dr. Seuss story.

My room is, also, where I sleep and my bed has been made plush with feather pillows and feather pads and wooly blankets. Most nights I nod off reading or watching TV in velvet comfort. Some nights, though, as most of you experience, sleep doesn't happen for all the thoughts swirling and eddying behind my eyelids. Last night was like that - I had a kaleidoscope of ideas and concerns and "to do's" and "what if's" clicking around. I don't think I relaxed and fell asleep until after 2:00 a.m. Not good when the alarm goes off at 5:30.

I needed solid ideas and I had too many bits and bobs of ideas, that was the reason I couldn't get to sleep. I have three swaps I am preparing for. I like to be ahead of time when it comes to getting the goodies ready for these swaps, so although many of the deadlines are far ahead on the calender, I hate to be doing things at the last minute scrambling at the end. Last night I was rolling over ideas for apron swaps, ornament swaps and Christmas card swaps in my brain for hours and actually, I didn't come up with much in the way of solutions though I kept running pieces of ideas through the machine
This morning while taking a shower, hot water washing away the sleep in my eyes, I remembered so many of the art classes in college and how we had to come up with new ideas and projects on a weekly basis and how in hell did I manage that? And I remembered "Zenning" my work, that's the term we came up with. We'd "Zen" a project by letting the parameters of it sit in our minds, snippets of ideas percolating , not dwelling on it until one day, seemingly without effort, the vision of what you were to produce came fully formed into your mind's eye. We would let loose of the urgency of getting the project done and just store the thoughts away to form themselves into a whole concept and every time, every single time we were ready to make the project come to life, the idea for it was there in our heads. It always worked. SO that will be my plan. No more sleepless nights trying to come up with ideas for Christmas ornaments and Christmas cards. The ideas will come if I open my mind up for them. They'll come just in time, I'm sure. Ohmmmmmmmmm