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Where did the holiday go?

November 29, 2009 in Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

I had good inten­tions for this five-day week­end, I truly did. Like so many of my good inten­tions, they didn’t get com­pletely ful­filled. I was going to:

  • catch up on the mas­sive grad­ing back­log. Well, I at least sorted out the papers and graded a lit­tle bit. A very lit­tle bit.
  • get a bunch of items listed at Art­Fire and 1000 Mar­kets for hol­i­day shop­ping. I did get some pho­tos taken and cropped/resized, so I can at least get some bracelets up this week, I hope.
  • do some more cold-connected jew­elry pieces. Nada. I did do another chain­maille bracelet, but that’s it.
  • try out the Pris­ma­color pencils-on-copper tech­nique. Nope, though I did at least get a bot­tle of gray gesso & some Kry­lon spray Sat­ur­day, plus found a cou­ple of sheets of phos­phor bronze mixed in among the cop­per at Dick Blick.
  • tidy up my stu­dio. Let’s not even go there.
  • catch up on some read­ing. I barely man­aged to read the news­pa­per a cou­ple of those days.
  • Sleep. Now, that’s the one true suc­cess this week­end. Most nights I did get plenty of sleep, which I badly needed.

On the plus side, I did a good deed by fill­ing in for the Thurs­day evening meds per­son at Good Mews (and get­ting thor­oughly carved up by Sil­ver and Mickel in the process). I spent time with my entire fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing day (get­ting rather over­whelmed in the process), and some time today with part of it when we went over to wish my mom a Happy Birthday.

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My studio is…

November 15, 2007 in Flaming Hot, Lampworking & Glass, Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

(This week’s Flam­ing Hot Blog It!)

…an appalling mess to look at, but in all that mess is a haven of cre­ativ­ity and seren­ity. It’s almost always that way, so it must work for me some­how.? I always have a small space for a stu­dio, and try to cram an insane amount of cre­ative para­pher­na­lia into it. That is bound to lead to clut­ter, but I do try to orga­nize it as much as I can.

In my starter mar­riage, I used the din­ing room as my stu­dio.? We removed the din­ing room table and I packed two floor looms, two book­cases, two floor-to-ceiling Skan­dia shelv­ing units filled with yarn and note­books, a desk made from two fil­ing cab­i­nets with a desk­top, a spin­ning wheel, a straight chair, and var­i­ous and sundry other mis­cel­lanea.? Basi­cally there was a nar­row path you could walk through to get from the kitchen door to the foyer (which had no door so I hung a cur­tain).? It was always a dis­as­ter but it was still my soli­tary, everyone-keep-out refuge and safe haven from the rest of my less-than-happy life.

Now I’m in the small­est bed­room of our condo, with about the same square footage.? The Skan­dia shelv­ing is still there, and even expanded, but now it con­tains book­bind­ing and col­lage mate­ri­als,? busi­ness sup­plies, and beads and jew­elry com­po­nents, along with note­books and still a wee amount of yarn.? The looms have been replaced by my lam­p­work­ing area, one table with my torch and one with my kiln and pri­mary glass stor­age.? Another small table tucks in a nook for the paper crafts. Now, though, I have a com­fort­able chair and read­ing lamp in one cor­ner so Mr. Frosty can keep me com­pany when he chooses.

At the moment my stu­dio is in worse shape than usual thanks to two spare oxy­gen con­cen­tra­tors and a map rack with glass tub­ing and other stuff sit­ting wher­ever there is space, since I haven’t found per­ma­nent homes for those three items yet.? Once I do (soon!)? I can do a lit­tle more tweak­ing and declut­ter­ing to get it to exactly the way it should be…the home of my cre­ative muse, my own play space.

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Putting the past into storage

November 9, 2007 in Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

In the past week we finally moved my two floor looms over to our stor­age unit up the street.? The big Schacht high-castle loom had been sit­ting in the liv­ing room backed up against DH’s piano ever since he moved in, com­pletely untouched.? That’s been nearly four years now.? The Baby Wolf has moved around a bit, but has been folded up in the cor­ner of my stu­dio ever since I con­verted it from weav­ing to lampworking.

In a way those looms were my san­ity for many years — weav­ing was my escape from heartache and depres­sion and just plain annoy­ance dur­ing my first mar­riage.? Yet that meant that once I left the mar­riage, weav­ing held such neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions that it became emo­tion­ally impos­si­ble for me to do.? And THAT, my friends, is what made me quit the pro­gram at Geor­gia State in the end.? I had gone in as a weaver, but I could not con­tinue as one.

We’ve done a lot of clear­ing out and toss­ing, declut­ter­ing and rear­rang­ing, in the time we’ve been together, but it has been very hard to let go of the looms even to this point. Weav­ing and tex­tiles meant a huge amount to me for quite a long time; in fact in some way they were my iden­tity for almost fif­teen years.? Even get­ting them out of the condo and into stor­age feels like I’m putting part of myself in stor­age.? But should that part of me be in stor­age, or is it actu­ally gone and I should just admit that?

Truth­fully, I am wish­ing there were some sim­ple way to get the looms per­ma­nently and com­pletely out of my life right now but still get some final value out of them.? I’ve made a half-hearted attempt to adver­tise the big loom before, but nothing’s come of it to date.? The Baby Wolf I’ve been reluc­tant to do even that, just in case I ever wanted to go back to weav­ing.? At this point, though, I finally just don’t see that hap­pen­ing.? If I ever give up lam­p­work­ing it will likely be because I phys­i­cally can’t do it any more, and at that point I prob­a­bly couldn’t weave any more either.

I guess I’ll try to adver­tise them once again, but more seri­ously this time.? If that doesn’t pan out, it will be time to con­tact Pam and see if the Folk School wants two more looms, and just take one hell of a tax deduc­tion next year.

No one said let­ting go of the past is easy.? Once you can do it, though, it does make you feel freer and lighter.? That’s a good feel­ing despite the nos­tal­gia for what is gone.

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The Great Studio Purge of 2006

December 31, 2006 in Arty Stuff by Julia | 1 comment

Between exams, the hol­i­days, and gen­eral malaise, it’s been over three weeks since I’ve been in the stu­dio to work. Add to that the gen­eral clut­ter and over­whelm­ing dis­or­der in the entire place, with the stu­dio one of the worst areas, some­thing had to be done. We started on Christ­mas Eve with some gen­eral clean­ing in the main areas of the house, spent some time work­ing on our bed­room, and at least tidied up the kitchen.

I thought I was ready to tackle the stu­dio on Thurs­day, but when I walked in I was so over­whelmed that I couldn’t cope. I walked out and crawled under the quilt on the sofa, with Dono­van purring on my lap, until DH got home. With about a half hour’s help from him, we cleared enough room to at least let me get a start. No, I have no “before” pic­ture — I don’t want any reminder of the start­ing point!
The process has not been with­out some seri­ous anx­i­ety and a small panic attack or two, because so much of my past is linked to my art, par­tic­u­larly the tex­tiles. I had to con­sciously under­stand some things before I could start a full-scale purge:

  1. Being owned by your “stuff,” rather than own­ing it, is a real drag on the psy­che AND on your creativity.
  2. I am never going to be a tapes­try weaver. Never. So the tapes­try loom, equip­ment, and tapes­try yarns can go to a new home.
  3. I don’t need a charka. I loathe spin­ning cot­ton, on any­thing (unless it’s blended at least half-and-half with silk). So the charka and cot­ton fiber can go to a new home as well.
  4. There’s no rea­son to keep not-handspun knit­ting yarn on hand if you are never, ever going to knit and if you can give it to a knit­ting friend in return for her knit­ting you some socks from your hand­spun. Socks are the only thing I’ve ever had any desire to knit, and I’m not inter­ested in going through the learn­ing curve to do so. So the knit­ting yarn can go to my geeky/crafty sister-in-spirit, who will use it.
  5. Jag­ger­spun Zephyr yarn IS worth keep­ing — highly fondleable wool/silk in lus­cious col­ors is the stuff I’m most likely to ever want to weave with again. Most of the rest of the weav­ing yarn is just tak­ing up real estate, suck­ing energy (or maybe radi­at­ing stored neg­a­tive energy still) and keep­ing me tied to my past…so it needs to go. IF I ever want to weave some­thing else again, I will just buy the yarn for that project — a small price to pay for let­ting go of a huge mental/emotional ball and chain.
  6. You can have too many drop spin­dles, so why keep the ones you don’t like and use?
  7. Ref­er­ence and swatch note­books can be stored up in the attic if you’re not ready to let them go. If you need one, go up in the attic and pull it out of the box.
  8. Clear floor space is a good thing.
  9. A good light makes all the dif­fer­ence in the world! We brought home a torchiere lamp last night and put it in there — oh, WOW!

So a bunch of stuff is out of the stu­dio ready to find a new home, and more is on the way out. I already have room for my new jew­elry mini-workbench, and I’m able to start con­sol­i­dat­ing some of the excess spillage-out from other areas of the house into its proper home.

There’s still a good ways to go, but I can once again stand to go into the stu­dio, and am pretty excited about get­ting to actu­ally use it pro­duc­tively and creatively!

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The Obligatory Fifth-Anniversary-of-9/11 Entry

September 11, 2006 in Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

writ­ten as a let­ter to myself on that day, from today, five years later.

Dear Julia,

Tonight you sit alone in Wood­stock, in stunned shock along with the rest of the world at the events of this morn­ing.  You remem­ber that the day started as an ordi­nary day; you got to GPC about 8:40 for your 2D Design class at 9 a.m.  You sat there with Heather and Bir­git, laugh­ing and chat­ting as you worked, until Inna Dereshin­sky came in late with the hor­ri­fy­ing news that a plane had hit the World Trade Cen­ter.  Cathryn Miles found a boom­box from some­where, and you three tried to keep work­ing while you lis­tened to the static-y broad­cast.  But by 10:30 you had all given up any pre­tense of work, and at 11 Cathryn took pity on you and dis­missed the class.  The TV room in the stu­dent cen­ter was jammed, but you found space on the floor and watched the news footage with Con­nie and Tina, see­ing again and again the plane hit the sec­ond tower and then the col­lapse, one after the other, of both tow­ers.  When you could stand no more, you left for your office, just before things turned ugly as Mus­lim and non-Muslim stu­dents got into an alter­ca­tion.  Dr. McCurdy rightly shut the cam­pus down and sent the stu­dents home, then the staff and fac­ulty, but you could only wait until you could leave.  As more and more news and reac­tion came over the Inter­net, you fret­ted and wor­ried more and more.  Randy was at Wood­ward — would he get home safely?  Nick was in Phoenix, due to come back the next day — what would hap­pen there?  So you sit there now, try­ing to make sense of the sense­less and failing.

As I write to you, it is five years to the day after that sem­i­nal event.  Although you didn’t lose any­one you knew in the attacks, Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 becomes the first day of a period that will com­pletely change the life you know now.  I won’t sugar-coat it.  The next two years will be hell, the worst two years of your life so far.  That well-known stress mea­sure­ment scale?  You’ll be com­pletely off the chart — divorce, ill­ness, death of a beloved fam­ily mem­ber, Randy leav­ing for col­lege, mov­ing not once but twice, and that’s just the really big stuff. Those two years will be cold, lonely, uncom­fort­able phys­i­cally and men­tally, and make you ques­tion every­thing you have ever known, believed, or dreamed. You will have to draw on all the strength you have devel­oped over the decades to sur­vive it.

But…

You will sur­vive, and in the end make the life you always wanted for your­self.  Don’t be sur­prised at the changes that occur in you.  Don’t be sur­prised at the unex­pected oppor­tu­ni­ties that show up, the unex­pected friends that you find.  In the end, you will be hap­pier than you have ever been before, and you will find the love that you’ve long yearned for.

And five years from now, you will sit at the com­puter in your own home, and write this let­ter, and you will know how for­tu­nate you are.  For you, the life you will have will be worth the hell you will go through.

But you will never for­get, and you will remem­ber those who died, and those whose lives were irrev­o­ca­bly changed by today.

Love,

The Julia of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2006

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