collecting III: the fabric stash

probably my most extensive collection is of fabrics. it's gotten a bit better since i began to focus on organic cottons with bee charmer, but still, it's pretty crazy. i have repurposed the wooden boxes our weekly organic food delivery comes in and they make great storage. plus, they bring a new one every week, so i can keep adding to the stash and always have enough storage.

some months back, my mom expressed disbelief that i had all that fabric without knowing what i was going to make of it. but i don't need to have something in particular in mind. i choose colors and prints that i love, and feel a nearly giddy happiness just looking at it and knowing that whenever inspiration strikes, it's there, waiting for me.

at the moment, i'm totally enamored of the cloud9 fabrics that i made the dresses out of. and i'm working on that big cut out & keep quilt again. i wasn't happy with some of it, so i uncharacteristically spent a lot of time taking out some seams and rearranging a bit and now it's getting there.

being surrounded by beautiful fabric makes me happy. i can sense a nearly audible hum in the air...the hum of potential. and at times, i swear the fabrics whisper to me and tell me what i should make of them. so it would be crazy not to have plenty of their little voices at hand. right? right?  ok, i do realize this makes me sound like some kind of crazy lady, but still, the stash makes me happy. and it begins to be evident that happiness is what's at the heart of all of this collecting.

hypothetically speaking...

if your husband paid 11,000DKK (more than $2000) for a pile of wood that looked like this?

but also this (and included those big metal roof plate thingies - 9 of them)..

would you feel justified in adding to your fabric stash?

as you may have guessed, this actually happened to me.

things i've learned...

...while knitting:

~ knitting requires a project basket. it's not always easy to find the right project basket and you might have go to 4-5 different stores, including antique stores,  looking for one.

the perfect project basket (+ giant ball of finger knitting by sabin)

~ you cannot knit and read at the same time. at least not if you're me. note to self: acquire audio books.

~ it's a bit hard to keep all of the criminals straight if you're knitting while watching midsomer murders and seldom look up because of your need to concentrate on the knitting.

~ splitty yarn bites.

~ it does get easier the more you do.

~ changing colors is WAY easier than you think it will be.

~ one of the reasons my previous attempts at knitting failed was that i had no idea what i was making, now that i know what i'm making, it's much easier to keep going.

progress! and i've even changed colors.

...picking up my loom:

bits of loom

~ you shouldn't lose the phone number of the people you're buying the loom from, because they won't necessarily remember you when you show up at their door.

~ a disassembled loom is a rather overwhelming pile of sticks.

~ a pile of sticks can begin an adventure.

~ the windmill looks much better against a blue sky on a sunny day.

melby mølle

...from my child:

i am ever, eternally, in awe, of sabin's ability to jump fully into every moment. she never, ever waits or wants to wait for "the right time" to do things. if she wants to turn a cardboard box into an airplane/car for her bear, she just begins. she collects the things she needs as she goes along and as she thinks of them, but she jumps into the task from the very first moment. if she gets hungry along the way, she incorporates picnic supplies (cucumber, blueberries, tomatoes, a thermos), stowing them in the "trunk" of the car.

sabin's airplane/car - complete with a key and an ingenious seatbelt design

but she lets nothing stand in the way of imagination or of execution of the vision of the airplane/car that forms in her head - a boxed taped to the back to function as a trunk, yellow tape for the headlights, yarn and a matchbox as a seatbelt, a key of cardboard covered in black tape. i really wish i could be more like that. i get extremely held back in the "collecting the materials" stage of things and then it's sometimes very hard for me to begin the actual project.

the latest additions to the fabric stash

p.s. it's so cool that blogger has added captions to the photos. makes wordpress look even more like the internet explorer of the blogging world, and not just from a security standpoint, but from a lame, so yesterday kinda standpoint. go blogger!

poking about in my drawers (not THOSE drawers)

at blog camp, we talked quite a lot about the many drawers in this house. and to be honest, i'd never thought that much about it before. but with three different units that used to stand a little shop somewhere, we do have an awful lot of drawers around here.  the drawer unit above stands in the famed blue room and is in the worst shape. it needs a serious renovation. as you can see, two of the drawers aren't even in it. they're in husband's workshop, waiting to be fixed. but frankly the other drawers aren't that far behind. the knobs don't stay in and often, i have to get the drawer below open and reach up to open the one above. but it serves its purpose, which is the storage of mostly pretty paper.  the blog campers got to partake of the abundance, so they can vouch for how much is there (a totally obscene amount, i admit).

anyway, i promised marie-thérèse that i would give you a peek inside the drawers:

 1 drawer of pretty paper

 one drawer full of paint and painting supplies

 one drawer full of embellishments and alphabets

drawer #2 of pretty paper

 glue gun and various die cutting tools.

and a bar of soap i intend to felt at some point.

 drawer #3 of pretty paper

 oh look, more pretty paper.

what a surprise - pretty paper.

 and drawer #4 of pretty paper.

various miscellaneous goodies.
beeswax for encaustic work, old iPod boxes, etc.

there's also a year's worth of starbucks sleeves.

they would make a great little mini-book, you know.

one drawer is full of CDs (lounge and chill, of course).
and somehow i missed getting pix of the one w/gocco cards, zip-locs and tape.
mmm, tape.

and as for those blue fabric boxes in the drawer holes, one is full of gocco bulbs & screens and the other is sabin's stuff - pipe cleaners, felting supplies and perleplader (for those beads that you iron).

through the eyes of others

when you live in your own house and even in your own life, you stop noticing things and stop putting the pieces together, because you're so in the middle of it, you simply don't see it anymore. it's just how things are. you may see the bits and pieces around you, but you don't actually see the whole.

but then, people come to visit and because it's all new to them, they notice things. and they ask you, "hmm, do you have a thing about drawers?" and you realize there are really a lot of drawers in your house - 21 drawers in the kitchen, 38 in the blue room, 25 in the dining room. three old drawer units or købmandsdisk that once stood in some little country store somewhere. and so you begin to think about why it is you love drawers so much....possibly for their ability to keep things safely tucked away and out of sight. they may be a mess on the inside, but you can't see that from the outside.

and then you begin to think about what was in the drawers in the house where you grew up. the big buffet drawer with the beautiful, old, rather art-deco looking (in your memory at least) pistol  that your great uncle bought after his wife, your great aunt, was kidnapped and ransomed by bank robbers.  and you think of how you used to open the drawer and peek at it, but never dared to touch it. and the drawer full of cards on the china cupboard where you used to get decks of cards from for family games of "tell," which is really called "oh, hell," but your grandma didn't like the swearing. and you realize that drawers are both wonderful and mysterious in your mind.

eventually, you open up all of those drawers in the blue room and share your entire stash of pretty papers and embellishments and ribbons and buttons and stamps. and the energy that comes into the room from all of the creating that results from those beautiful materials being used is really quite overwhelming. but it's also extremely gratifying, to see everyone's head bent over their journals, clipping and gluing and opening up to something inside themselves that they maybe didn't even know they had.

and you think how fortunate you are to have met these people who wanted to come to visit you and spend one of their weekends with you, having this experience. and you shudder a little bit, thinking of the randomness of it, how many blogs are out there and how unlikely it was that they would find yours or you theirs and how so many little things had to fall into exactly the right place to make this thing that feels very big happen.

top and bottom photos are of elizabeth's beautiful soul food project. we got to see it in person, but you can read all about it at landanna.

rearranging in the blue room

blue card translation: "one has an opinion until one blogs a new one"

the pink one, i think everyone can read

green card translation: "'god is dead' - nietzche 'nietzsche has just been erased from facebook' - god"

as soon as i felt better yesterday, precisely 36 hours after beginning to feel sick, i went on a cleaning and tidying frenzy in my studio, aka "the blue room." blog camp approaches and it needed a good tidy. i changed out the things that were hanging on my inspiration wall and so now these postcards, which i picked up in a café not long ago are there. i thought they were all pretty clever. also changed out the MOO cards, putting up some different ones.

but the biggest project was sorting and folding my fabric stash and making some "shelves" for it out of the wooden crates that our weekly organic veg comes in. since we are, after all, making an effort to consume less this year, it seemed like it would be good to put those boxes to use. you can see them beneath the iPod HiFi. makes it MUCH easier to assess the color ranges when it's all visible like this.

i think you can actually learn quite a lot about your taste when you organize your fabric and see it all in one spot. i tend to like bright, fresh colors (lots of teals and greens, surprise, surprise) and rather scandinavian prints on white. and i've bought a lot of fabric in ikea.

and i finally hung up the little copper whirling dervishes i bought in istanbul last october. aren't they sweet? and they have a little evil eye bead to ward off any bad vibes that might try to get into the studio.

i'm working on my blog camp prezzies today in between getting some letters ready to go about my freelance writing business (yup, i'm available for writing assignments if you know anyone who has a need, especially someone who wants to tell stories about ships).

#1 in the 2010 year of creativity

a little viking ship stamp carved from an eraser.

i forgot how much fun it is to carve stamps!

#2 - cloth goody bags for blog camp 3.0
i won't spoil the surprise by telling what's going in them.

ok, i'd better get back to work. i'm not quite done out there. hope you're enjoying your thursday. the giant ball of fire (what's it called again? the word has fallen from use around here) actually put in an appearance in the sky today, so my spirits are lifted considerably.

picture inspired by spudballoo's far superior pylon picture.

these aren't really pylons so much as the light poles on the street in front of our house.
taken at 9:20 a.m. this morning. (thanks char, for asking whether it was sunrise or sunset.)

art journal fun or it's about time

last year, i took an art journaling course . i know some of my bloggy friends are taking the latest version of that course from the very creative rachel denbow. i'm not taking it this time around, but i checked out the flickr group and can see that the first assignment is about making summer resolutions. i went out to the studio to pack up my little box of craft stash and found myself suddenly inspired. so i made two quick pages on the subject of my summer resolutions.  here they are.

loving these details

even if do say so myself

it's days like this when i'm extremely grateful for my pack rat ways and my stash.

* * *

and now i'm off to oslo.

on stashing the stash and never actually using the stash

my scrap stash continues to grow and i still don't really use any of it, except to make the occasional card. why is that? what is it that drives me to buy pretty paper and embellishments like a woman possessed? and why don't i sit down and use it? some of it comes in kits i subscribe to, some from shopping online, others from visits to craft and scrap stores.

speaking of scrap stores, the one i know and like best, scrapshop.dk, in roskilde, is closing at the end of this month! so, yesterday, i went there and finally bought that QuicKutz squeeze in pink that i've had my eye on for a long time. i've managed to restrain from going back today. i also stocked up on bazzil basics paper, since i find myself using that as the base whenever i make cards. i also discovered another scrap store in høje taastrup--dream papers--but didn't get to properly explore, as the woman who owned it was on her way to a craft show in sweden and had everything packed up. i did score a couple of sassafrass lass robots papers and one of the sets of owl stamps, also from sassafrass lass. i'm still obsessed with owls. i discovered that shop through this fun blog, the first blog friend i've made who actually lives in the same country as me! :-) imagine that!

my dozens kit also came yesterday. it has some super fun little pink plastic alfas by heidi swapp. they may be what makes me scrap something. i got my label tulip kit this week as well and it has some inspiring bits in it--especially a prima adhesive black felt that looks like a city skyline. i love that so much i put it on the inspiration board beside my desk.

best of all, at the scrapshop, i finally scored one of those little 7 gypsies ATC carousels. there's something about the playing-card size of ATCs that makes it seem less overwhelming than a big 30x30 sheet, so perhaps i'll find my scrap groove doing a few of those. it's a bit silly NOT to scrap when i have so much beautiful stuff to use and because i have tons of great pictures and i really enjoy the pretty paper--wouldn't i enjoy it all even more if i actually used it and had it right in front of me on the little card carousel? one would think so.

i think part of the problem for me is that scrapping is so about squarey edges and perfection, even when people are "distressing" their paper edges or ripping them, they do it just so, all perfecty, perfect. i feel constricted by that. and although i have lots of words in me, i freeze before the scrap page. i might have the perfect photo, and tons of cool ribbons and buttons, but then i never really know what to write in my journal spots (and believe me, i have lots of those) or what to write with my cool thickers and other alphabets. am i the only one who feels this way? in love with the supplies, but paralyzed before them?

does anyone else have issues like this? do you also collect and collect art supplies and then finger them lovingly and look at them, but not really use them? how can we get started? maybe if we promised one another to make and share something, that would kickstart things? anybody up for that?

it's pretty much all about the stash

i've been reading stephanie pearl-mcphee's knitting books casts off and knitting rules and now i understand why i keep ordering the beautiful yarn from posh yarn. if i'm going to be a proper knitter, i have to have a stash. who cares if i can actually knit? that worries me very little, actually. what matters is that it's lovely and soft and it makes me feel good, just caressing it or even just walking past and seeing it there in the basket (tho' i will soon need a larger basket). additionally, it may eventually help to insulate the house and save on heating bills. so it's an environmentally sound thing to do. (do you hear that, husband?)

the stash concept may also explain the obsessive acquisition and stockpiling of scrapbooking supplies. i've carried the notion of establishing a stash over into that zone. i have managed NOT to photograph the pretty papers (because i think that frankly, we're all pretty tired of hearing about those). but the stamps and ribbons and little bits and bobs all look very pretty, don't they? and for some strange reason, having them and looking at them (even without really using them) makes me inexplicably happy.