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My granddaughter sent me a link this morning to a little design blog that ran a picture of my Red Hollow quilt. Now I don't mind a picture being taken, that's fine, but whoever wrote it said the color arrangement was "unexpected and deliberately off-balance, a bold subversion of traditional form." Honey. I was working around a hole. That's the whole story. The blue corduroy came out of my uncle's work shirt and there wasn't enough of it, so the strip runs wide on one end and narrow on the other. Nothing bold about it. I needed to cover a gap and I did. Spent about an hour this morning wanting to be mad, then went out back and looked at the quilt through the window where it's hanging on the line, and I couldn't even stay mad, because it does look good. It always did. Just not for the reason they said. I do wonder how many of the old quilts in those books got wrote up by somebody who never once sat at a frame with a woman who was just trying to make her cloth stretch.

Drove out to the scrapyard outside Kladno this morning, not looking for anything in particular. Came back with a cast-iron gate from a Cheb textile factory, stamped 1964. Somebody's entire institution of work, forty years of women standing at looms, reduced to scrap weight. The gate is beautiful in the way things built to last are beautiful before they get repurposed. I use these pieces in the big room installations and people always ask me what they mean. They don't mean anything. They meant something to the people who made them, and that's gone now. I'm just the guy who gives the bones a second life, like a taxidermist for a dead economy. It's leaning against the studio wall now and I keep looking at it. I'll weld it into something by spring or I'll sell it to a restaurant owner who wants "industrial charm" and I'll swallow the shame either way.

A decorator from Atlanta came through here a few months back, bought a big improvisational piece I'd done, maybe 72 by 90, all in these warm ochres and deep blues, took me the better part of a month on and off between everything else. I charged her $1,200. Felt fair at the time. She didn't haggle, wrote the check, had me ship it. My granddaughter showed me the decorator's website last week. That same quilt's listed at $7,200 in a client's home. "Custom artisan textile" or some such. Now I'm not mad about the free market, I understand how that world works. But I look at what I charged her and I think about my grandmother who would've gotten maybe fifty dollars for a quilt she put her whole self into, if anybody bought it at all. And I think about how I'm still pricing myself like I'm selling at the church bazaar. Somebody out there thinks this work is worth seven thousand dollars. Maybe I ought to start believing them.

I don't know when I stopped noticing the floor under my work table. But today I had to crawl under there for a hinge I dropped and I realised I've been standing on about four years of accumulated debris. Wood shavings, bent nails, wire offcuts, some screws that probably went with something I finished two years ago, a dried-up tube of something I don't even remember buying. I swept it all out. Took about twenty minutes. The linoleum underneath is the original stuff from when this building was a textile factory. Grey with little black speckles. I'd forgotten it was even grey. Now the whole room feels wrong. Too clean. I'll fix that by Friday.

There is a cup on the corner of the workbench, blue enamel, chipped at the rim, and inside it is a brown ring that has been building up since some time in February. I drink from it every day. At this point the ring is part of the flavor. I am not proud of this. I am also not going to wash it. My studio is in Holešovice, third floor, the kind of building where the radiator knocks twice an hour like it wants to be let in. Half the room is salvage stacked by material, not by project, which means I spend twenty minutes every morning looking for one specific hinge I know I have. The other half is the current build, a room I am reconstructing from a demolished textile factory out in Liberec. Forty-one meters of conveyor belt, three doors, and a mountain of wooden bobbins that I am starting to suspect I bought from a man who sold me the same bobbins in 2009 under a different story. Possibly they are good bobbins. At least now they are my bobbins twice. The cup is the only thing in here that has not been catalogued, sorted, labeled, or argued about. Everything else gets moved, borrowed, documented, insured, rejected. The cup just sits there getting worse. I think that is why I keep it. I do not know what I would do if someone washed it. Probably nothing dramatic. Probably I would just start again.