The world is a Hot Mess – just watch any news broadcast – and sometimes our personal lives are a Hot Mess, too. How do you deal with difficult situations? I cope by making art and trying to find the beauty in any situation. "Hot Mess, #2" was inspired by my daughter’s recurrent, severe headaches. It is my vision of what the MRI brain scan of a person having a really smashing headache would look like, if MRI’s recorded sensations. Motifs include fragments of my signature (my handwriting is a nightmare, too). "Hot Mess, #2" was hand-woven of cotton and metallic yarns on a computer-aided Jacquard loom. Colors are embedded into the very structure of the weave, and the sheen of the yarns catch and reflect light in a magical way. I start my design process by making mixed media drawings that I scan into my computer. I manipulate these drawings in Photoshop and develop a file that will be read by the loom. A computer tells the loom which threads to lift for each throw of the shuttle.