Change…

It is a good thing really.

There is nothing about my life that isn’t in a complete upheaval, yet, it is all good.  All of it.  The most important change of all is to my living space.  I know I’ve been advised by about 3000 people not to make any changes the first year after a loss, but for me, this one is important.

I love my home.  I love what my husband and I built, the character of the space, the way it has changed and morphed to fit our needs over the 34 years we have lived here.  I know every wire, every outlet, every flaw, every feature.  I love that I can walk into town in 7 minutes, to restaurants, services, the biggest Shoprite with a cheese counter as wide as my house.  I love the gardens, the climate, the deadend street where I live, yet the close proximity to NYC and beyond.  But this house was so full of my husband’s spirit and the things that filled his life that I was slightly overwhelmed.  It was important to begin to rebuild my life and my space, to better suit my needs moving forward.

I follow many of you on facebook, weavers and fiber people from all over the world, many of whom I don’t even know.  I love when you post pictures of your work, pictures of your vacations to exotic places, and I love to follow when you move to a new space, especially when it involves moving a studio.  I have a studio, cramped, and cluttered, but just down the hall, and it has worked for me since 1982.  At the moment I have close to 100 looms, including inkle looms, frame looms, and the 15 Structo looms I have acquired for teaching beginning weaving.  All of that resides in parts of my house that preclude them from being anything other than storage for my overflow.

My bedroom was quite large for a bedroom.  It was built as an addition in 1989 over a two car garage.  It was more than enough space for my bedroom, too much in fact, so my husband and I divided it in half with a bunch of IKEA bookcases and he made half of it his office.  My husband saved everything, every paper, every document, every scrap of anything that defined his life.  He was a town official, he was a techie, and he had a lot of technology, right there in that little half bedroom office.  We uncovered seven monitors, we uncovered 25 years of town planning board documents, we uncovered 25 internal and external hard drives, the contents of which are still unknown.  I know I complained regularly about my husband’s stuff while he was alive, but really, if it had been me that had died, I shudder to think how my husband would have dealt with my 100 looms and walls of yarn and fabric.

Technology unlike fiber equipment is obsolete after about 6 months.  In fact my daughter, when moving my desk equipment commented on my archaic speakers and just popped over to Staples and for a cheap price, I got brand new state of the art blow you out of your chair USB speakers.  What fun!  I’m really a weaver at heart.  I still have my first loom from 1978  and it is still going strong and does the job.  All of my equipment still works, and works well.  It never occurs to me to upgrade anything, and in the world of tools, sometimes thay don’t make them like they use to. So I can gleefully fill the dumpster at the town recycling center designated for computer detritus knowing I’m not depriving any new weaver the chance to explore the world of fiber.

A huge thank you to my daughter who spent hours helping me sort through stuff I didn’t recognize nor know what to do with.  She brought in a techie friend to help, and let him carry out anything of interest to him.  A huge thank you to all of you who came over, shared a bottle of wine, and spent hours pouring through papers dating back to the 1980’s.  A huge thank you to the poor sanitation workers who have to pick up contractor bags full of trash every trash day, and to the recycle trucks that shake their heads whenever they pull up to my house.  We aren’t done yet.

I transformed my bedroom back to the space we had originally designed, moved the bed, and the wall units, replaced my husband’s computer and equipment with my own, and even had space for a loom, my spinning wheels, and a bobbin lace pillow.  The light is lovely, and the space clean and every book on the shelves has been looked at and touched and kept because they all bring me joy. (Yes, I’ve read that book.)  I’ve rearranged artwork, passed on things that needed to find somewhere else to live, and began to appreciate my house all over again.  I still have a few piles of files to sort through and store, but they are my files, and I have time.

So that left me with holes in my horrifically cluttered studio.  Another lovely friend came over Wednesday morning and we moved all the furnishings in the studio, cutting table, looms, storage units, around until the layout made sense.  And though it is still cluttered and jumbled with the debris of a creative life, there is now floor space, precious lovely floor space.  I can move around and get around equipment.  It will be a couple of years before I sort through all of the files and archives of my creative life, and try hard to downsize 100 looms.  But again, I have time.

What is important is the house can breathe, I can breathe, and I smile when I walk into the space instead of being completely overwhelmed.  There are many other areas of the house where I still can’t even…  like the gardens, the first hard frost can’t come soon enough…  but redefining my life and space can’t be done overnight.

Meanwhile, I’m heading off to Sievers in Wisconsin tomorrow morning, before dawn, where I will see old friends, enjoy fall on Washington Island, and teach two classes, one in inkle weaving and one in garment construction.  Sievers has a seven day option for the normally five day garment construction intensive, and most of the students are staying on for that extra couple of days.  I just have to finish packing, mostly everything remained untouched from the Harrisville trip a couple weeks ago.

I know a couple of you complained after my last post that subscriber notifications came out late or not at all.  Forgive me while I navigate the technology that my talented husband always took care of.  I don’t know if the notifications for this post will be more timely, I’ve tried to tweak a couple settings, but I can’t fix what I don’t know.  I am in the process of hiring a technology person, but he would be more hardware oriented, not software oriented.

Stay tuned…