STEP 7: Choice

August 17, 2019May 29, 2020 / janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

Making choices is exhausting. It is rewarding. It is power but also wearing. Like many things that matter, the creative process pays and pains.

Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me contains an essay about Virginia Woolf and uncertainty. The truth about wandering in the dark. In a journal entry of 1915 Woolf wrote: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” Certainty belongs to the past (and is not so very fixed there), but hope is what drives us toward the future. Solnit writes: “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”

My friend Madora Lawson is a creative person, as are many of my friends. Madora is my friend who made a career of her creativity as an interior designer. She emailed to tell me that a post where I revealed that I rarely used a pattern prompted her to knit without a pattern. See what she made!

She cannot even remember how she made that dragon’s legs.

It works like that sometimes. We create something, make a series of choices in color and stitch and a dragon has toes!

The toes up top are from an aging walking group who took a weekend and learned to knit slippers from Madora. Each person had plenty of colors to choose from, stitches to try, closures. Being clever takes energy and courage. The reward is something fun lovely grand and strange.

Painting walls builder’s beige or gray is easy. Following decorator’s advice, copying a style. Even when it works, looks appealing and safe. Where’s the fun in that?

Creativity demands the courage to make another choice. The bright textile on the wall, the yellow button on a turquoise strap, the zig-zag dorsal fin, the peculiar combination of orange and electric blue mohair. It’s coming.

Who knows where one choice might lead? Solnit joined anti-nuclear activists in the late 1980s. They “did not exactly shut down the Nevada Test Site, our most overt goal, but inspired the people of Kazakhstan to shut down the Soviet Test Site in 1990. Totally unforeseen, totally unforeseeable.” It might argue for a certain recklessness, a measure of faith in accident and free choice.

In the mean time, I finished the central panel of BlueToo.

Fifty-some batik fabrics, five hundred pieces, and going-on two thousand yards of thread. So far.

SHIFTING GEARS

June 8, 2019June 8, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

The ocean yesterday morning. We had several insane bursts of rain later on, as if someone was playing a firehose on the house. No exaggeration!

Last month I determined to complete several projects, mostly knitting. I knit a narrow scarf, a huge shawl, a cardigan sweater for my granddaughter, and a washcloth—that last from a horrible but gorgeous cotton linen blend. I would make another washcloth if the yarn were not so stiff and rough that it hurt my hands to knit with it.

There were small writing projects I worked on and larger ones I skirted. I have ideas for two quilts and a couple of warps. Plenty of work is waiting for me. But instead of any of these, I am planning another knitting project.

This little 4″ x 7″ swatch uses two yarns, a 2-ply Canadian merino in three colors and kid mohair/silk blends from Japan and Canada in two colors. There’s a sweater in this swatch—I just have to figure it out. In the mean time, I am writing out a pattern for my other granddaughter.

I knit a swatch and have been carrying it around for three days. Yesterday, in the coffee shop where I was meeting a friend to play Scrabble, and there was a woman knitting. I walked over and identified the yarn right down to the color: brand Malabrigo, yarn Rio, color Anniversario. Then I had to confess that no, I had not made my sweater.

That needs to change. Doesn’t it?

A PBS special about where we get our food claimed that human beings were nomadic for thousands of years until we began farming so we “didn’t have to move anymore.” The writer got that wrong. When we began farming, we could not move around anymore because we always had to be there to look after our crops. Farming did not allow us to remain in one place, it forced us to stop moving. There is evidence that this shift, rather than relieving us of a burdensome life of mobility, actually oppressed us, forcing our workdays to become longer, our labor more backbreaking. There is every possibility that this assumption that stability is preferable is mere bias. True, human beings developed architecture of stone once forced to remain in one spot, but we were already creating on a smaller scale.

Whether we traveled each day, or closed the door to a house every night, we created what scientists like to call artifacts. We call them garments, useful objects, pendants, and toys. We made art, we sang, and we told stories. These are human activities. Making stuff beautiful. This is what we do.

My older granddaughter told me the other day that she wanted purples and pinks, and here’s the start after combining and recombining many other colors. The mohair/silk blend will likely be burgundy, and that whisper-weight thread will tip these colors darker and redder. I still need to make a swatch. If I don’t like it. I reorder my colors until I get them right.

PARING DOWN and going out

September 26, 2018October 24, 2020 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

In our continuing effort to tidy the house, I am following an online series of articles on how to edit and tidy my home. Fifteen days of advice on how to eliminate clutter, and basically sort “stuff” into giveaway, toss, and keep-but-put-away.

The process began by suggesting that I have a “monster pile” someplace in my home. It was true. I had a pile that was a couple of feet high and three by six feet. By the time I’d cleared other areas of my house my monster had grown to four times that size. Even made tidy into straight lines and contained by boxes, it filled the center of my workspace. My online article told me to remove three items from the pile and find a place for them or scoot them out of the house. The next day it gave me a different area to tackle, but then reminded me to take three things out of the pile. That’s mostly how it’s been ever since.

A junk drawer is not necessary only in my kitchen, I was told, there should be one in each room. That made me laugh. I had already sorted out my sewing “junk drawer” but kept the little plastic bin of miscellaneous stuff that needed to be somewhere but did not belong in the baskets with thread, the drawer with scissors, or any other particular place. I have an orderly junk drawer in my kitchen and one in the bathroom vanity. The dressing table in my bedroom contains scarves and miscellaneous “junk” too. All this has been sorted recently, but each day I try to turn the home-tidying advice into practice.

Yesterday, I was told to edit my freezer, fridge, and pantry with specific attention to outdated items or foods I had tried but did not like. While I was upstairs reading these instructions on my computer, my husband was downstairs actually emptying one shelf at a time in—you guessed it—the freezer, fridge, and pantry. He sorted. That afternoon I went through his piles as a second reviewer. Trash, giveaway, and keep. He cleaned the shelves too. The resulting order went well beyond what had been suggested, and even though I didn’t do most of the work, I felt accomplished!

I have been advised to spend a limited time sorting one specific area each day. I did the entire linen closet. I was advised to remove three items from the “monster pile” and sometimes I eliminated an entire cardboard box from the room.

I spent some extra time with my monster pile after dinner, choosing not three items but a mini-pile or box to sort, several days in a row, while the television played something in English where I did not have to read subtitles. My monster is mostly gone, though it seems to be rebuilding.

However, the attic is completely empty. I still have space on my book shelves. (I ruthlessly sorted books again this summer, but there are still eleven bookcases upstairs and more than that downstairs.) We took a small painting to be framed in a wooden frame that came out of the attic. On Friday we hope to take a tiny print up to be placed in another frame from the attic. I gently oiled, sanded, and waxed the beautiful walnut veneer.

Over the past summer, I painted the entire upstairs, ceiling included.

There is still work to be done. Next summer we need to move all the furniture out of the living and dining rooms and varnish the floors. The kitchen, too. The entry and hall floors have a different finish on them and I plan to paint over it. I suspect I missed the weather window for floor paint, so that will likely wait till next year. I sorted through everything in the lower half of my grandmother’s secretary, but there is still the top half.

The Christmas ornaments are at home in a downstairs closet. I have completed most of my Christmas shopping. There is paper and tissue and green velvet ribbon waiting for me to wrap.

I have put a warp on my loom for a pair of scarves and begun knitting a third. These are straight forward, simple projects I can do without thinking much. But I also have less than five weeks to knit my granddaughter a sweater with a cat on it for her birthday.

My laptop is getting a little creaky, but I have been putting off buying a new one. This morning it abruptly turned itself off, screen went black. Later it was fine. Not a very good sign, though. My older son told me before I replaced my last one (after nine years) that laptops have a half-life of about 18 months. The one I am using now is going on six years and unlikely to last much longer, I fear. I want a lighter laptop. I enjoy the screen on my 15″ MacBookPro, but it weighs four and a half pounds. How about two pounds? I am thinking a tiny screen and two pounds, but I have a couple of bills to pay first. In the mean time, I am backing things up.

I made a ginger plumcake the day before yesterday, which we had for breakfast and then broccoli for lunch.

It is also Wednesday and I am sitting in the high school library for Open Library. Three sophomores were working on Chemistry lab write-ups, but they’ve left. Last week I helped a freshman with his Geometry. I’m not sure he finally had the correct answer to the last problem. He’d done it wrong the first time and I did my best to steer him in the right direction. Next week I am promised a few frantic juniors working on the infamous Reading for Writers. I would rather have customers than not.

I have committed to NaNoWriMo this year, and begun notes on an SF novel. That cat sweater has to be done. Maybe that is something I should start tomorrow?