(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  The looms have been replaced by my lampworking area, one table with my torch and one with my kiln and primary glass storage.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.

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.

This week’s Flaming Hot Tips Tuesday asks how we come up with color combinations when working with glass. Sometimes I’ll have a color combination in mind based on something I’ve seen lately; sometimes I’ll just use colors that “feel” right for the current season. As an example, I’ve been doing a lot lately with autumn-type oranges, rusts, greens, and browns that I normally don’t do much with.

Sometimes, though, I’ll decide to make a boro cane or twisty by starting with a rod of clear, and then just grabbing whatever rod of color my hand happens to fall on (whether that rod is on my table or in my bucket) and smooshing a stripe of it onto the clear. When I do that, I don’t even think about what color I’m grabbing; I just grab and go. I did that a couple of weeks ago at Hot Time in the Mountains on Sunday morning when I was getting ready to pack up. I finally used that twisty a few days ago for some beads, and they are amazingly bright and vibrant, just because I grabbed colors that, if I had actually THOUGHT about it, I never would have put together.

Picture will follow shortly.

I must be on a roll. I got bored this afternoon after doing most of my web site updates for spring semester, so I started cleaning and purging in the office. I must have thrown out a hundred or so used floppy disks, gotten rid of a bunch of conference office supplies from the meetings of two and three years ago, and filled both my trash can and recycle bin. Now if I could just do something about these two old printers in here, that would be two corners that would be finally emptied out!

I have another day and a half here, with not that much actual work to do unless a huge horde of students comes by, so who knows what I will manage to do the rest of the week!

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!