>A funny thing happened this evening when I went to write my last post. I FOUND the two missing posts. How weird is that? It seems I have two blog accounts, and the errant posts are in this mysterious “other” account. Hmmm….my ignorance on things techie knows no bounds!
….and one other thing. I’m smitten by the Knitting Daily blog. If you don’t know about Major Laura (an avid knitter serving in Iraq) you must take a look.
>Stash….I’ve read a lot of things about stash over the 30 years I’ve been collecting mine, and a few people have given me stash advice in person. I was out walking one day this week when stash advice began to replay in my head. I want to record some of those ideas before they go underground again for another decade or so!
Pat Slaven recently wrote a very poignant essay about stash, inspired by the death of two good friends. She was somewhat involved in dealing with the stashes left behind by both these women. In one case she was invited to view the friend’s quilting stash in order to pick some fabrics to make a quilt for the 6 year old son of the deceased woman. Are you getting misty yet? She tried not to influence the young boy, but she did hope that he would choose fabrics that would still speak to him as he grew and matured into a young man, and beyond, as this quilt would hopefully stay with him for many years. Pat was relieved that he did choose fabrics that were not specifically for very young boys. The poignant part of this story is that Pat discovered that her friend never seemed to have used any of these fabrics. There were no quilted projects in progress, no finished projects anywhere in the house, and no one remembers ever seeing her sew. There was only her stash. Her friends and family can only speculate what this stash meant to her. Was she going to learn to sew? Was she just interested in collecting interesting fabrics? Who knows, but her stash remained hidden in various closets in the house, complete with sales receipts.
Many years ago, in a weaving class with Daryl Lancaster, she admonished all of us to enjoy our shopping experiences. She said, “Shop to shop, buy what appeals to you! Then weave from your stash!” This has been my motto for many years, ever since I first heard Daryl say it! I shop with such abandon! I buy things that call out to me, and boy do things sing to me. The problem now is that I have opportunities to buy (and do buy) at a faster rate than I can weave. I now have some serious space considerations, and no hope of catching up if I continue to have SEX (Stash Enhancement eXperiences) at this rate! My studio looks like a warehouse, and it’s often difficult to access my looms, much less my stash. I do weave from my stash, but the effort it takes to get things out and examine my stash is often competely overwhelming. Sometimes I have to take a month’s break before I can face going back into my studio to put some of that stash away. It’s too hard. There’s too much of it, it doesn’t fit neatly on my shelves (in plastic bins, and in anything else that will contain it) anymore. Trying to find things has become a herculean endeavor, and I am not strong enough for the task! I now have my spinning stash in one bedroom, my knitting stash in another, and all of my weaving stash overfilling my basement studio.
This leads me to a bit of advice I heard recently on a podcast I enjoy: “Cast On” by Brenda Dayne. As part of her New Year’s ritual each year she goes through her stash and reorganizes it. She had some fantastic ideas, especially for anyone whose stash is still moderately sized. She calls her yearly process the “Airing of the Stash.” She gets it all out for viewing. Yarns that will make complete projects she bags together, and when she has several complete projects bagged she places them all together in large vacuum bags and proceeds to vacuum them into a small concise size, which can be stored and easily viewed. You go, Brenda!
It gets even more interesting after this. With the rest of her stash, which consists of small batches of yarns that appealed to her when she bought them, she begins grouping them into possible projects. She looks at color and texture and decides what yarns look good together. These also get vacuum bagged together, after being collected into various possible project groups. What a feat of decision making and courage! She makes it sound like this possibly takes place during ONE day, maybe a couple of days. I may remember this wrong, but I’ve pictured this more random stash spread out on a bed! I’m thinking of my random stash taking up every horizontal surface in every room in my house, and me playing a horrific memory game (oh, where is that lovely aubergine mohair that would go so well with this celery green alpaca? Did I see it in the dining room or the basement?) Ha! After 30 years, I think my stash has become a behemoth, a monster, a nightmare.
But, to get back on track with Brenda Dayne’s idea: Here’s one awesome benefit of doing this. At least once a year you see your stash. It rekindles the ideas you had when you bought each thing, which perhaps will get you started on a new project, and/or motivate you to finish current projects in order to start something new. And better yet, now that you’ve seen your stash, when you are out shopping and some wonderful little tidbit leaps out at you, you can make an intelligent decision on whether you really need it or not! How great is that? I might be panting over some incredible blend of color and luxury fiber, but perhaps I won’t buy it knowing that I have something equally wonderful waiting for my attention at home.
This idea of “viewing your stash” at least once a year is a terrific idea. I just can’t figure out how to do it! I’m not sure I can share photos of my own personal stash here, for two reasons. The first and biggest reason is that it won’t all fit in one picture, or even two. It might fit in a photo album! The second reason is that I’m a bit shy about this. It would be like showing the dark side of my addiction. It’s not pretty!
Well, okay, here’s one picture (what’s a blog entry without a picture?). I think this is about 1/4 of my linen stash for weaving, with some other stuff in the background. I swear not all of my stash is this messy….really!
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This is a little out of order, going back to the lunar eclipse that happened on Saturday, March 3. Losing those two posts interfered with my writing about the eclipse, but now I’ve made peace with the disappearance of those two entries I can get back on track.
My friend Elisa called me about 7.30, and told me to go outside to see the eclipse. I grabbed my cell phone (so I could call my two sons and my husband since everyone was out of town that evening) and went out on the front porch. This porch is the best feature of my whole house. It sits quite far back from the road, so our front porch is a private place, and since it faces East, there have been many wonderful evenings to watch the moon rise. The moon was still rising Saturday night when I went out on the porch to see the eclipse. The eclipse was more than half way done already, but it was still a wonderful sight. I watched until the end, which must have been about half an hour.
A couple of years ago I read that native American women thought moonlight was very good for female well being. Women should sleep with the light of a full moon falling directly on their faces. Well, even though glass cuts out the real rays of moonlight, I’ve felt very connected knowing that on those somewhat rare occasions when a full moon is rising late enough in the evening for me to be in bed, that light is falling on me as it comes straight through one of my windows! So I thought of all that real moonlight falling on me as I watched the eclipse. I hope I gained something good from it!
No weaving to speak of yet this week, but I have returned to my younger son’s handspun, handknit sweater. I’ve started the sleeves! He’ll be home tomorrow evening for a week (spring break). With a lot of luck I hope to finish both sleeves and get the sweater assembled for him to take back to school with him. School is in Rochester, NY, so he could still get some wear out of a winter sweater there before real spring weather arrives.
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What’s it like in other parts of the country right now? Here it is just ridiculously cold. We’ve got brilliant sunshine that is so deceptive to the frigid conditions. The snow is so hard you can walk right on top of it and not sink in. It’s 14F degrees this morning, but the wind chill makes it feel like 5. We’ve had temperatures like this for a week now! We’ve had so much wind for so long, I think it’s been more than a year with unusually high winds. Are the windy places of the world even windier, or did we get some of their wind so that they are now milder? I’d love to know that.
My Korean art teacher believes that wind is caused by anger. Initially that may sound absurd, but high and low pressures have to originate somehow. I know I show my ignorance of science here, and I shouldn’t go down paths where I have no knowledge. Anger causing wind is just such a powerful image. There is certainly no shortage of anger anywhere.
When we get to the last few really hot weeks of summer we call those days the “dog days.” We need a name for these last few weeks of interminable winter. I don’t think we can use the word “days” since winter is more about “nights.” Someone please think of something! “The teetering on the edge of death nights of winter,” “the way beyond the pale nights of winter,” “the nights when hell just might freeze over,” “the Boreal nights of winter”…etc.
So here’s a picture of my garden, a deceptively peacful winter scene. It’s hard to tell that the wind is blowing at least 25 mph and the temperature is only 14F!
I’m heading down to my studio to weave and hopefully not hear the wind howling.
>15 Feb. 2007
The wild weather of this strange winter, and the fact that I have entered my sixth decade, conspire to make me examine my choices lately. I have been a hand knitter for over 40 years and a handweaver for over 30 years. In 2001, I began some experiments with tapestry. After adding spinning and tentatively trying some dyeing over 10 years ago now, I wonder where I am going with these fiber technniques. At this point I know that I cannot be a master in all these avenues, but I have no idea which direction to take. The wild winds that have blown throughout this winter, and my own internal storms have me rooted to a single spot, cautious about moving in any direction. So, instead of finishing a number of projects that are blowing about in the storm, I’ve decided to start a blog. What am I thinking??
Some weavers on the Yahoo list “Tapestry 2005” have been sharing their blogs, with the result that I now give in to the urge to join them!
