Back to Reality

 

Oomph - it's been a while, friends! Last I saw you, I was in the throes of pattern releases and preparations for vending my first show, both of which had been eating my brain cells and all of my free time for the last three months. And after all of that hard work, a whole weekend vending at Knit Fit was the perfect way to finish it all off! Of course I forgot to bring my camera, but I managed to get a couple of dorky pictures with my booth setup and vendor badge.

I've waxed poetic about the wonderfulness of this show before, and this year was even more magical (if that's possible??) Although I've worked shows as an employee before, this was my first show as a vendor for indie.knits, and I felt so welcomed and supported by every person I met: the entire Knit Fit crew, the other vendors, the attendees. I had a great time chatting with tons of knitters, and the vendor selection was top-notch, and I learned so, so much from the whole experience. A big thank you to everyone who stopped by to say hello, and a monumental thank you to Sasa and the other behind-the-scenes folks who made this great event happen.

  

And because of course I did, I woke up the day after Knit Fit with a desperately ill rattie and a cold. Wah-wahhhhhh. After taking Mr. Pooper to the vet and getting him on a nebulizer treatment (he's doing much better!), I spent the rest of last week flopped on the couch, watching Jane the Virgin and attempting to send work emails in between Theraflu-induced naps. The second I started to recover, I started to tend to my sadly neglected house by doing boring adult things like dishes and vacuuming and taking out the trash. (Of course, it's not until you have at terrible cold, a dishwasher full of dirty spoons, and overflowing recycling bin full of soup cans that you realize how frequent and necessary such tasks truly are.)

After I finished all of that stuff, I turned my attention to the tub full of handwashing and the heaps of paper and knitting needles and clothes and half-finished projects all over my studio. Yikes! So yesterday I completely rearranged and cleaned my studio, which, unsurprisingly, made me feel loads better. The blocking queue is back up and running - including my finished Fireweed for the Fireweed With Me KAL! Yayyy! - and all the flat spaces are now ready for me to explode ideas and sketches and swatches all over them.

Because what are clean spaces for, except to facilitate creative clutter and coffee-drinking? Nothing, that's what.

Happy Wednesday, friends!

<3

Cory

Creating Space, Part 5: Paring Down

 

It's hit that season again: when the sun comes out and casts light on all the dark corners around your house you've been passing by, thoughtlessly, all winter. When you look at your overflowing closet and the little bits of yarn strewn about the house and the books stacked carelessly on the floor, and you think, dammit, I'm going to put this into order!

Two days of cleaning and sorting later, sitting on the floor of your living room at midnight surrounded by a flurry of bank records and receipts for rat antibiotics and doodles drawn on tiny scraps of paper, you start to think that maybe this won't be so simple after all.

You think of the box of ten-year-old cards and school papers in the attic. You think of the garage full of camping gear and electronics. Then you look around at the mess you're embroiled in, and you start to have a mini panic attack at the center of this little volcano of your own making, the detritus of your silly, irresponsible life strewn around you like confetti.

But you forge on, that night and the ones that follow. It's not a pretty kind of forging on, either: the corners of your house, newly lit and dusted, become piled with boxes of papers to shred, bags of old shoes to go to Goodwill. The pack rat in you has a near-constant temper tantrum as you discard books you'll never read, clothes that never fit right, gift yarn that doesn't suit your coloring. (You feed it donuts with sprinkles to make it shut up.)

And at the end of each day, the house still looks like crap - but there begins to emerge a pattern of order and brightness, too: small pockets of color and space, where your newly unencumbered belongings can stretch out their legs and breathe a little.

And each night, you think of that cheerful and almost infuriatingly useful book with less resentment and more gratitude, and you plan another trip to Half Price Books, and you let it be okay that it's not done yet.

Because the journey is part of the experience... or some shit like that.

Happy Wednesday, friends! (Guess what I'm doing tonight?)

<3

Cory

Creating Space, Parts I-4:

Part I: Minimalism, Stuff, and Reclaiming Space

Part 2: Studio!

Part 3: Bookshelves for the Aesthetically Needy

Part 4: A Bright Little Nook

Creating Space, Part 2: Studio!

  

Yesterday, Sparklepants and I had a massive cleaning party in our studio. Ever since Beetlegate, we've been slowly working our way towards having a functional space again, and I think we're finally there. Although I'm a naturally cluttered person, I need a certain level of organization when it comes to my workspace, and as we've rebuilt our studio, I've tried to be more intentional about having a space for everything so that it's easy to find and use - even if it's just in a drawer! Although I'll always have those cluttered corners, I'm hopeful that some of the functional changes we've made to the studio will make working up here relaxing and enjoyable.

The last few days in general have been super productive - I've taken care of some major errands this week, cleared out some unwanted items from my closet, and now have a clean studio to work in! It feels good to clean all the things.

Mr. Squishy thinks so too.

FO: Geodes

  

Socks!  Hooray!

These were done except for weaving in ends, bagged, and then frozen for months on end, so it was a relief to finally be able to sit down and finish them off for real.  The yarn is Socks That Rock Lightweight in the colorway G-Rocks, and it was the first Blue Moon Fiber Arts yarn I ever bought - I think I got it in summer of 2007!  It tried and failed to become Jaywalkers 3 or 4 times before I finally gave up and shoved it deep down in the stash, to be unearthed last summer when I needed some plain socks to knit because my brain was short-circuiting from wedding planning.  Not much to say about these puppies except that they're bright, and they're done!

One WIP down, 20-something to go...

Creating Space, Part I: Minimalism, Stuff, and Reclaiming Space

  

Slowly, we are rebuilding from the shitstorm that raged across our house late this October.  I've started reorganizing and putting things away, a little at a time, and the light at the end of the tunnel is starting to get brighter.  The pace has been agonizingly slow, but certain places in our closets, kitchen, and studio are starting to look normal again.  Pretty, even.

One of the side effects of Beetlegate2013 is that we have had to truly sort and prioritize all of our items.  It's been a gargantuan task, but it has also been strangely freeing.  (Skirt that's in good condition but doesn't fit my style anymore?  Receipt from yarn I bought at Sock Summit in 2011?  Pairs of jeans that are old, threadbare, and too big?  Donate, trash, or use as rat bedding.)  Suddenly, life has started feeling far too short to hold onto this crap, and the looming threat of carpet beetles has given me a pressing reason to let go of things that I've been on the fence about for a while.  It's made me a lot more motivated about becoming more organized and minimalist in my belongings.

At the same time, I have some complicated feelings on minimalism, many of which are expounded upon in more depth in Graham Hill's New York Times piece on minimalism, this elegantly outlined response by Charlie Lloyd, and this Slate article by Katy Waldman integrating the two.

In short, minimalism is very often the luxury of the well-off, and unsustainable for the average person.  Minimalism relies on the ability to purchase high-quality, more expensive items less often than their cheaper, more disposable counterparts, as well as the ability to replace an as-yet unneeded item only at the moment that it becomes needed again - all of which is just not feasible for a lot of people.  At the same time, there's something powerful and deeply aesthetically appealing about consuming and owning less.

This experience has given me even more food for thought on the subject.  I think the answer for me lies somewhere in between the two extremes, probably as it tends to with most people.  I will admit to my moments of wanting to throw it all away and start over; I know that I absolutely loved dressing from a capsule wardrobe of about 15 items when I lived in Japan; I also know that I have a deep love for and inspiration from yarn, clothing, and books.  Seemingly contradictory, these things are all an integral part of how I experience my belongings on a daily basis.  The challenge will be to reevaluate how much space I want things to occupy, and how to be okay with that.

Because after all, I really do love me some yarn.

WIP: Unfucking Our Apartment

  

There hasn't been much knitting around here as of late, and the main reason is the apartment.  Our old place was probably half again as big as the new apartment, so it's been challenging to fit all of our stuff into a much smaller space.  In some ways, it's fun, like a puzzle!  And in other ways, it's just epically frustrating.

Luckily, I recently stumbled upon a Tumblr called Unfuck Your Habitat, and it's sort of revolutionary.  I have definite perfectionist leanings, and I hadn't really ever thought of that as being a deterrent to cleaning.  But if the options are a) do it perfectly, or b) don't do it at all, that doesn't leave any room for little bits of progress.  This explains a lot about my cleaning habits - I go on big CLEAN ALL THE THINGS spurts every few weeks to a month, depending on how antsy I'm feeling.

So I've been trying to do cleaning in shorter increments with lots of breaks, and to appreciate the little things that do get done.  So even though the kitchen is a relative disaster, my coffee pot is sparkling clean - dude, apparently hot water and vinegar and a good scrubbing is magic.

One of my biggest priorities has been to have a nice living room, and I finally finished tackling the coffee table/couch area today.  I like that the little IKEA bookshelf has both Legos and yarn on it - it definitely reflects both Lumberjack's and my personalities!

There's still a long ways to go, but I'm trying to get a little done every day, and hopefully we'll actually be moved in and comfortable in the next month or so.  The day that happens can't come soon enough.

Studio Overhaul 2012

So one of the things I was most excited about when we moved into this apartment was the front room, which is a great size for a small studio.  I already knew that I wanted to get one of the Ikea square shelving units.  It's the perfect size and shape for yarn, and doubles as a bookshelf.  I had it all arranged a couple of months ago, but lately everything was starting to get out of control.  I was running out of room for my fashion school binders and the desk was covered in circular needles and DPNs from all the times I've rooted through my needle stash.  My laceweight stash was also starting to have a life of its own and spilled out of its cube whenever I was looking for anything.

This morning I got up, ate breakfast, and then organized the crap out of this room for the next five hours or so.  I would have a picture of the before, but it was so messy that it was embarrassing.  So what did I do?



- I consolidated all of my magazines and books on the lower shelves.  We don't have any pets right now, but I want to be prepared so if anyone ever brings theirs over that my yarn is out of gnawing range.  A dog would have to be pretty dedicated to rip up a magazine that's tightly packed in with the others.

- I organized all my magazines by date, made a cube for my fashion school binders and sewing books, made a cube for my fashion magazines, and put all of my sewing patterns in a little basket.

- I moved everything in baskets to the cubes that are difficult to reach.  Over the last few months, I've learned that it's much easier to grab an entire basket than to search for a single skein of anything from those cubes.

- I gave my lace stash an extra cube for wound skeins.

- I separated my sweaters' worth stash into three cubes: fingering/lace/sport, dk/worsted/aran/chunky, and wound skeins of all weights.

- I made one cube for yarn that I'm intending to use soon.

- I dusted.  Gross.



- I also took out a rocking chair that had been here and put my brand spankin' new skeinwinder/swift in its place.  It's so cute!

I still have to find somewhere to put all the paper patterns from school, which are currently perched on top of the shelving unit, but other than that I'm pretty happy with how much better it looks.  I also realized that the reason this room feels so absurdly dark is because one of the overhead bulbs is out.  I had to turn up my camera's ISO to 800 and down to a shutter speed of 1/20, and still had to do post-processing to get it light enough to see, which is a fancy way of saying it's reeeeally dark in there.  Also: time for a new camera, because this one is starting to have fits of dementia.

I'm hoping to get some blocking done tonight on my new clean floor.  I'm so excited!