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My Singer finally laid down and died this morning. Just made a sound I never heard it make before and then nothing. That machine has been with me since 1986, my husband at the time saved up layaway money for six months to get it for me for Christmas. I've sewed every one of my quilts on that thing, wedding quilts and baby quilts and funeral quilts, I hemmed my daughter's prom dress on it and my son's little league pants year after year. I went to the store today feeling like I was cheating on an old friend. New machine is fine, it's got all these computerized buttons and it threads itself and I'm sure I'll get used to it. But I sat down to sew just now and my hands didn't know what to do. The rhythm is all off. I guess that's how it goes. You spend decades learning a thing and the tool becomes part of you, and then one day you have to start over with a stranger. I know it's just a machine. But I had to stop and cry a little before I could even plug this one in. If you've been through this with a tool you loved, I'd be grateful to hear you got past it.

That old Singer from the 50s, my grandmother's machine, it's still right there in the corner of my studio. She bought it secondhand when I was a little girl and it's sewn every quilt I ever made, every dress for every child, every hem I ever turned. It's got a sound to it, a kind of whir and thump that's as steady as a heartbeat. The light flickers sometimes and I have to jiggle the cord just so. My granddaughter keeps telling me to get a new one, a modern one that does all the fancy stitches and whatnot. And I tried one, a couple years back, borrowed a neighbor's. Made a whole afternoon of it. And I couldn't stand it. Too quiet. Too smooth. Felt like the machine wasn't talking back to me. I know people say tools are just tools. But I don't know. That old Singer knows my hands. It's got my grandmother's prayers still in the metal somewhere. Anybody else got a tool they just can't swap out?

Y'all, I finally broke down and let my granddaughter talk me into getting a brand new machine. The old Singer I been sewing on since I don't know when, it still works, but the tension's been fighting me something fierce for about two years now and I been cussing at it quiet so the Lord don't hear me too clear. New one came in the mail yesterday. Shiny. Got all these stitches I don't know what to do with. And you know what I did? Sat and looked at it for twenty minutes before I touched it. It felt wrong somehow, like I was cheating on a old friend. My grandmother's machine was treadle. Foot-powered. I ever tell y'all that? I learned on that thing, how fast you go is how fast your foot wants to pump. This new one don't even need me to guide the fabric straight, it's got a little arm that does it for you. I told my granddaughter that ain't sewing, that's supervising. But I used it this morning. Made a little test block, just scraps, nothing special. And I got to admit it sews real pretty. Real even. I still don't trust it though. Might keep the old Singer right there next to it for a while, just so it knows I ain't forgot where I come from.

Middle of a hot afternoon, helmet up, grinding down a seam on a steel piece I'd been fitting for two days. Guy walks into the shop, no knock, just wanders in from the alley. Stands there watching. I figure he's lost or curious, whatever. I keep working. Ten minutes. He watches me run a bead, watches me chip slag, watches me check the fit. Then he says "you know they have machines that do that now. Robots. Could just program it." I said "yeah, and you could just keep walking." He stood there another minute like he expected more of an answer. Then he left. I don't know what gets into people. They see someone doing something with their hands and the first impulse is to tell you why you don't have to. As if the point was efficiency. As if I'm trying to save labor. I'm not trying to save labor. I'm trying to make the thing.

Now listen, I am not a fussy woman, but this old Singer of mine, bless her heart, decided today was the day to throw a fit. The thread keeps snapping, the stitches are all loopy on the back, and I swear I heard it sigh. I've tried cleaning it, re-threading it, even giving it a gentle talking-to. Nothing. It's like it woke up on the wrong side of the basket. I've got a memory quilt for my grandbaby that needs finishing, and this machine is just sitting there, stubborn as a mule.

There's something about dismantling things other people threw away. The motor was seized, the screws were stripped, I had to drill out three of them. By the end my hands were cut up and there was grease in my hair and I realised I hadn't thought about a single thing except getting that rotor free. I'm not even sure yet what I'll do with it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it just sits on the shelf for six months. But that hour of pure mechanical problem-solving with no audience, no jury, no curator waiting for a statement, that's the part they don't put in the grant applications. Makes me wonder how many of us are secretly just hobbyists with good framing.

I had a newsletter for almost two years. Every two weeks, a studio note, what I was printing, the tide tables that week, a dried piece of seaweed I pressed between pages. Nothing pushy. Just the work. I stopped six months ago. Not because of open rates or unsubscribes. Because I realised I was writing for an audience I couldn't feel. The emails went out and something went into a void and maybe someone read them somewhere and maybe they didn't. I had no way to tell. I know the advice. Build your list. Own your platform. But I think there's something honest about admitting that not every kind of reach is worth having. The newsletter worked better on paper than it ever did in my gut. I've been quieter online since then. Posting less. Selling more through the people who find me through word of mouth and the local shop that carries my prints. It's slower. It also doesn't feel like I'm feeding something that never looks back. Anyone else stopped doing something that was supposed to be essential and found it didn't matter?

Young guy at the open studio last weekend. Watched me work a piece of limestone for maybe thirty seconds. Then he tells me he could program a CNC router to cut the same shape in twenty minutes and walk away while it ran. I asked him when was the last time he chipped a tooth on a tool grit he didn't see. When he had to look at a piece of stone for three hours before he knew what was in it. When he ruined a week of work because he hit a fissure nobody could see. He said he didn't need to do any of that because the machine did it for him. I'm not against the machines. I've used them for roughing out when it makes sense. But the way he said it, like the whole point was to not be there. Like the work was an inconvenience between him and having something to sell. Twenty minutes. I wanted to hand him the chisel and a block of granite and see how that twenty minutes felt on hour three.

Three weeks without the press. Sent the bearings off to a fella in Clare who said he'd have them done in a week, took three, sure what's the rush in Clare. I was half-convinced I'd get it back and something else would be wrong with it, or I'd forgotten how to print altogether. Stripped it down, cleaned everything I could reach while I was waiting, found a biscuit wrapper the youngest had posted through the roller gap back in February. Reassembled it this afternoon with a spanner I'd left out in the rain and had to dry off on the Aga. Pulled the first proof an hour ago. An old block, a hare I've carved so many times I could do it in my sleep. And it just... worked. Clean. Even pressure. The ink laid down like it was glad to be there. I stood there staring at it for longer than I'd admit. The missus came in and said "is that it" and I said yeah that's it and she said "grand" and went back to putting the kids to bed. Which is exactly the right amount of fuss. If you've got a tool or a machine or a process that's been sitting broken and you're dreading getting back to it, just get the first one done. The second one's easy after that.

Kid couldn't have been older than twenty. Points at a piece I'm loading out, thirty pound chunk of basalt I spent three weeks on. Asks if I found it like that. I said no, I carved it. He says yeah but did you make the rock or did you find the rock. I told him I found the rock. Four hundred million years old, I didn't make it. But I sure as hell made what's inside it. He nodded like I was humoring him and walked off. Not his fault. Nobody teaches looking anymore. They think if it didn't come out of a machine it must have washed up on a beach fully formed.

Picking out a block of limestone this morning. Twenty years I've been buying from the same yard. Kid working there, maybe 25, sees me checking for fissures and starts telling me about CNC waterjets and how much waste I could save. I told him I don't want to save waste. I want the stone to tell me where to cut. He looked at me like I was speaking Latin. Not mad about the tech. It's fine for some things. But I'm not trying to produce units. I'm trying to find what's already in there. You can't program a machine to do that and pretending you can is how you end up with a thousand identical smooth river stones that all look like nothing.

There's a cafe two streets from my apartment, been there forty years, looks like nobody touched the decor since 1992. I go there sometimes when I need to get out of the studio but don't want to go far. Last month I noticed the corner of a rug was lifting near the counter, and underneath there's clearly a mosaic floor. Not a good one, late Byzantine, provincial work, big tesserae, crude faces, but unmistakable. I asked the owner. She said "yeah, we put the rug over it because customers said it was ugly." I'm not making this up. A thousand-year-old floor and people found it offensive to their frappes. I told her what it was and she shrugged. Said I could lift the rug if I wanted, she doesn't care. So now I go once a week and uncover a bit more, drink my coffee, stare at this thing that's survived empires and earthquakes and is now being protected from criticism by a machine-woven rug from IKEA. Anyway. If anyone needs me I'll be on my knees with a soft brush and a very patient waiter.🙂

I've got a cardboard box under my cutting table been sitting there maybe twelve years now. Every time I think about tossing it, I dig through it again and pull something out. Little triangles from my grandbaby's Easter dress from 2011. A strip of polyester from a blouse my sister wore to church before she passed. Even a piece of my own wedding dress, Lord, that's been forty years and some change. My grandmother called it "saving for the hard times", not money, but cloth. Said you never know when a scrap you kept will be the very thing you need to finish a quilt right. I thought she was just being old and sentimental. But here I am, same habit, same box. Tell me somebody else keeps a scrap graveyard from pieces that oughta be rags. Or am I just a hoarder with a sewing machine? 😂🙏

Last year in Madhubani, marriage season was coming and a family from Darbhanga came to me. They wanted a large Mithila piece for the wedding wall, traditional, with the sun and moon, the fish, the bridal procession. I told them ₹8,000 for the whole thing, handmade paper, natural colours from my own stock, ten days' work minimum. They said they would think about it. Next week I heard they went to a younger fellow in the next lane. He does the work too, learned from his aunt, but he charges ₹4,000. He uses poster colour, not geru and rice paste. And the paper is machine-made. But it is half my price, so they went to him. I am not angry at the boy. He is feeding his family. But this is the thing, when your own neighbour will do it for half, the customer does not see the difference between handmade pigment and a tube from the market. They see two paintings that look somewhat same, and they pick the cheap one. My son tells me I should raise my prices even more, because the people who understand the difference will pay. But the people who understand the difference are fewer every year. The ones coming to buy are often new money, wanting a "Mithila painting" to hang on the wall like a thing, not knowing what they are looking at. So I am stuck. ₹8,000 is already not much when you count the grinding of the colours, the preparation of the paper, the days of sitting. But I cannot compete with ₹4,000 and poster colour. And I don't want to compete that way either. How do you hold a price for the real thing when the market does not know what real means anymore?

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.

Third time this week my Riso has eaten a master and crumpled it into a little accordion. I know it's probably the paper moisture or the master tension or whatever, but I've cleaned the drum twice, adjusted the feed, and it still decides to destroy every tenth print like it's personal. The worst part is the sound. That high-pitched mechanical scream when it jams. My studio mate in the next room doesn't even ask anymore, she just hears the noise and goes "again?" through the wall. I know this machine is supposed to be this beautiful imperfect tool and the flaws are part of the charm. I don't want charm. I want fifty zines by Friday and this thing is testing my commitment to the multiple as a concept.

I spent this morning walking around a space I was offered for a show in April. Big clean white box. Good light. Totally dead to me. Couldn't feel a thing. I need a room that already smells like something. Dust, damp, machine oil, old wood, whatever. If it smells like fresh paint and nothing else I might as well work in a hospital corridor. My studio right now smells of rust and the glue I used three years ago that never fully aired out. That's what gets me going. I turned the white box down. Found an old engine hall instead. Smells like grease and 1987. I can work there.

There's something deeply satisfying about the Riso's mechanical pulse. It's a steady drone that pulls me into the work. Today I'm running a new test run for that series on urban decay – just two colors, a deep cyan and a kind of muted ochre. I love how the layering creates these unexpected muddy greens. It feels like finding something in the dirt. Sometimes I think the machine has more agency than I do in the final image.

just spent three hours down a rabbit hole figuring out why one specific reel absolutely tanked after three days of killer engagement. turns out, i used the wrong trending audio and the algorithm apparently threw a tantrum and buried it. lol. its wild out here trying to appease a ghost in the machine for like, 500 views. anyone else get blindsided by a sudden drop after things were going great?

There's a Miller Syncrowave 250 at the shared shop I work out of some days. Been there twenty years. Last month the high-frequency start started sputtering. Now it's catching about half the time. Rest of the time the arc wanders and you get this weird snake-track bead. I keep asking the guy who runs the place to call a service tech. He says he'll get to it. Meanwhile three of us are just working around it, wasting gas and tungsten, telling ourselves it's fine. It's not fine. A machine that old, you respect it or you replace it. You don't let it limp along getting worse. Anyone else dealing with equipment that needs real maintenance and nobody's stepping up? Or is it just my shop that runs on deferred repair.