Moving during a pandemic has been intensely weird. I realized the other day that I don’t know what the majority of my coworkers look like because I haven’t seen them without their masks. I have also been working primarily from home so if you required me to line up all of my de-masked coworkers and tell you what their names are, I would probably fail.
As I write this, my county in Oregon has been moved back into an extreme risk category for Covid. Two steps forward, one step back, or is it three steps back? Due to the job that I do in my “real” life, I have been fully vaccinated for a few months now but that just means I have been in a weird limbo with every other fully vaccinated person.
But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been dreaming of what life might look like when things begin to open up. My whale is complete and I am just waiting to gather up some money to have it framed. I have also begun to lean into the idea of coordinating a fiber art coral reef.
If there is one thing I excel at, it is coordinating a large project. I LOVE to come up with ideas and then work my butt off to bring them to fruition. I haven’t done it for many years and when I think about rallying PNW fiber artists around creating coral pieces for a community coral reef, I get VERY excited. Can you imagine, as the world begins to open up, traveling up and down Washington, Oregon and maybe Northern California or Southern BC to yarn stores and talking about freeform and hyperbolic crochet and knitting and getting people interested in creating pieces for donation? It would be CRAZY! And who knows, as we are all proficient Zoomers, it would be relatively easy to reach out to anyone anywhere.
This morning, as I was driving along the Oregon Coast, I thought of creating a ghost net installation with knitted or crocheted nets and felted weights or buoys. If you combine it with pieces of healthy corals, bleached corals, and perhaps some corals made of recovered “trash”, it could be both educational and artistic.
All that to say, wear your mask, get vaccinated if you can and keep holding on. Tomorrow is coming!