Guide to Use

Years ago in college I wanted to become a librarian. When I actually got to Library Science school I found the librarian trade to not be as exciting as I had hoped it would be. Perhaps because it was a glimpse of our current computerized future, perhaps because the work itself left little room for creativity, perhaps because my marriage was disintegrating at the time and eventually I would need to flee back home to California to start over. But the urge to list, catalog, explain, illustrate remains strong. If early humans were either hunters or gatherers maybe I was the one who stayed back and tended the first human garden with flowers and herbs rather than the vegetables we would have needed to survive, and in my spare time I would have attempted to list and illustrate all of the methods that the rest of the folk used to hunt and gather. My records would have been kept on cave walls. And, there you go, we have art!  Except for those cave wall artists can easily paint a horse that looks like poetry in motion and I can't. :-)

So, instead of drawing poetic horses, I spend or waste my time cataloging other peoples' art forms, and it's a rather pleasant occupation.

My goal is to create a starting place for searches on information on a variety of arts and crafts. The starting place is the Pinterest boards that I have been creating, but once I have all of the links in place for those, I want to include links for both general information searches and image searches, especially using other languages when possible, as some of the best images are not to be found on English language websites but rather in the language of the region where the craft is traditionally done.  I want to also add information about museum exhibits, the websites of experts on the craft (especially blogs that allow you to watch the process of decision making and completion), maybe eventually supplies. For now, here are level one links to general topics, which lead to the level two blog entries on each topic that are in progress now, which will eventually then lead to level 3 "pages" that will have the details.  I once tried this on a stand-alone website, from scratch, but it required too much technological fiddling and, once separated from my login information and my specific software, I was unable to work on. On Blogger I will be able to add information from any computer.

Some of the categories are much more subdivided than others. This is mostly because there is much that I do not currently know about types of ceramics, woodworking techniques, etc. As I learn more, I will probably subdivide more, though eventually I will be rubbing up against my limit of 500 Pinterest boards. Maybe they will expand the limits by then, or maybe I will pull non-craft categories off of one Pinterest collection and move them onto another.

This all probably doesn't interest anyone but me, but whatever, the internet makes a useful place for me to collect my personal thoughts and organize my learning activities. Hopefully a few random people will also end up making use of it.