this awesome, beautiful, fabulous life

i submitted my dataspejlet work to trapholt electronically today, so now, i only have to drop it off. i still need to write a post about how i got my hands on a kit, but i'll do that next. 

they have a form to fill out where you can write a 1000 character description of your work. that's a crazy small amount for all the thought and hours that went into it. here's what mine said:

i loathe facebook, but have been there for many years, so it made sense to use it for my dataspejl. interestingly, the data did rather accurately reveal what's important to me - husband (yes, i call him that, like it's his name) and daughter, their circles overlapping, very fittingly. the next circles, all very close in size represent other things i love - like cats and ships and LEGO. my #2 circle featured words like "time" and "reality," which surely come from reading and posting about Murakami books. i chose to do one circle in white, as the frequent word there is one i'd like to forget - trump. it's also an outlier on my grid - away from the others, which seems right. but to end on a happy note, the circle where i used all three colors in a crazy quilt sort of pattern was full of words like "story," "fabulous," "beautiful," "sunshine," "awesome" and again, "reality," - leading me to my title and to the realization that yes, my colorful, loud, messy life is rather fabulous.

submitted this process photo - as i thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the sunshine in the garden, stitching away last weekend.

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you also had to fill out which words you chose to work with and mine were:

husband, sabin (which i submitted as daughter, for the sake of anonymity), cats, ships, LEGO, time, reality, story, fabulous, beautiful, sunshine, awesome and yes, trump. 

so weird to boil my life down to 8 circles and a dozen or so words. it seems so paltry and yet still, it did capture something. i tried stitching outside the circles a bit, to indicate that my life is much more than just those 8 confined and sometimes overlapping circles, but took it away again, because it felt like it didn't capture it. instead, i chose to go with the snapshot those 8 circles offer and keep for myself the messy chaos of the rest of this awesome, beautiful, fabulous life.