Procrastination

So, in the interest of not doing anything product—I mean, in the interest of providing vital, useful information to you, I decided to take some photos of the sewing room/office.  My husband, who was sitting in the adjacent living room watching a rugby match, appeared to come to the conclusion that I finally lost what little was left of my sanity.  “You think people want to see that you cleaned up??”.  No, I don’t.  But pictures I did take.  Vastly interesting, right?  Exactly.

Of course, the real reason I didn’t do a picture when I posted about my miraculous day off, is that while this room most definitely is an improvement on it’s former state, it’s still what most normal people would call, well, “a teensy bit messy looking”.  Whatever.  You have to take what you can get in our house and this is what you can get.  The fact that four people (and I’m the most tidy of the bunch) use this office space for “work” (i.e. messing around with junk) makes it a bit overwhelming to keep more than nominally straightened.

And just to make you feel much much better about yourselves, here are pictures of my fabric habit—I mean, collection.  You can’t see all of it in the corner of the closet (it extends another “pile width” behind the wall), but I think you get the idea.  The other image is the Fabric Cube which you see covered in the right corner of the room.  I have 2.5 shelves open in that cube and a “pile slot” open in the closet shelves.

Even I can’t quite justify filling those up.  This is truly ridiculous.  I guess there’s nothing like the cold hard truth of photos to make you accept the grim reality.  And so on that note, I guess I’d better get back to my t-shirt drafting now that I have finally measured every conceivable part of my body.  Oh, the humanity.

EDIT: The reason we have this lovely dedicated space is that we force TLo and The Big One to share a bedroom at the back of the house.  Saying that, it’s the largest bedroom of the three we have and they have bunk beds, so it gives them a lot of space to play.  Which of course they almost never use, since that would require, you know, being in a different room than us.  Still, in order to facilitate the office/sewing area, my husband and I took the smallest bedroom (which isn’t unreasonably small, it’s not like a cell or anything) and agreed that I could have this space.  Well, of course by “agree” I mean that I said to him when we moved in “The girls have the big room, we have the small room, the front room is the office.”   To which he replied, “Uh.  Ok.”  And yes this house has great natural light in all but the back bedroom, because natural light is at the very top of my “must have” list in a house.  I’m pretty inflexible on that point.  Makes for a toasting hot house in the summer, though, and it wreaks havoc on the fabric if it sits out (hence the covered Fabric Cube).  There, you now know WAY more about someone else’s home than you ever wanted to.  I’m quite proud of you for reading all this.  You get a gold star!

I Am Spartacus.

 

Yesterday I was home on a day off from work.  Which was a miracle.  Actually, it wasn’t exactly.  I was supposed to work this Saturday and so my boss asked me to take a day off in the week in lieu.  (Which actually has worked out well for me, because the job for Saturday got cancelled so now I have that day off too.)    Still, I was free.  FREE!

My original plan to use up this unaccustomed time alone was to start drafting a t-shirt block from my newly acquired, de rigueur book "Design-it-yourself Clothes" by Cal Patch.  But when I got home from taking the kids to school (and getting a desperately needed haircut), I looked around at my sewing room and with heart-sinking realization decided that this space was totally and completely unusable in it's existing state of disaster-zone chic.

To be completely honest, I've been putting off rearranging and resorting in the whole sewing-related area for... well, let's just say "a while" and leave it at that.  The problem with this mess, besides making it difficult for my easily-diverted mind to work properly, is that the sewing room is visible from the living room, which is where we spend about 95% of our time.  Yuck.

So instead of sewing something for myself (yet again), I decided to Clean Up:  I picked up the tottering piles of miscellaneous fabric, the unfathomable stacks of altered patterns and pattern envelopes, the mountains of arbitrary pattern magazines and the herd-like mass of half-empty thread spools that careened around every available space.  I cleaned out and rearranged three separate closets to facilitate this Great Sewing Room Revolution.  I was unstoppable.  I moved shelves.  I refolded and reorganized fabric.  I destroyed whole families of dust bunnies.   It took six hours.

And you know what?  Not only do I have a crisp, clear, organized new space to work in, I now have a whole shelf of unused fabric space!  A WHOLE SHELF!

This means I get to buy fabric, right?  It’s like war booty.

Oh How I Hate, O-hi-o State.

I love Kent State, however.  And here is why: The Kent State University Museum.   It is the only reason I can see for wanting to visit, let alone live in, Ohio.  (Please send all hate mail regarding the blatant slander of the state of Ohio to: 1234 University of Michigan Drive, Ann Arbor MI 12345.  Go Blue!)

The Kent State Museum has an astonishing array of textiles and clothing.  A-ston-uh-shing.  There are many a book and CD collection dedicated to it (none of which I own).  They don't have a searchable image database (as far as I can tell), but they do put up some images of their exhibitions. They did a particularly thorough job with their recent "The Art of the Embroiderer" exhibit, which was on view for over a year.  I seriously considered going to Ohio for the sole purpose of seeing this exhibit in person.  Then I recovered my senses. 

I will warn you: the large number of online images could be due to the fact that this exhibit only just came down.  I’d get a gander while you can, because once their new exhibit goes up, these images may be gone.   And what images they are.  Here’s a tiny fraction of a sampling:

  

 

The website also has images from some of their other exhibits, both past and present.  For example, this lovely little series is a part of the "Mood Indigo" page.

 

And of course, any place that has the genius to create an exhibit by combining E.S. Curtis photographs and shoes is just about perfect in my book.

 

Oh yeah and the website also has a bunch of you know words and stuff and I suppose you could read all about these exhibits and their intentions and meanings and value to society and whatnot.  If you like that kind of thing.