On Inspiration, Perspiration, Consternation...& Storage

Home Depot 'Oops' paint mixes--one man's mismatch is my blue heaven...at a huge discount!  And the one on the left turned out to have been a complete stranger to the paint dot on its lid, but it's true color was a perfect uplift for my bathroom.

Timing can be a real biatch, or so the saying should go.  For 3/4 of the year I don't sleep much, feeling compelled to work at my craft through the cooler night hours.

 The other three or four months I pretty much sleep through.  The analogy in my head is a sponge.  During the summer months, I'm soaking it all up--all the sensory input that will rattle around, divide, separate & recombine like some cellular mutation into new designs, colors, laughs, all to be squeezed out into fresh new production the rest of the year.  

Fabric.com design board, one of my summer obsessions 

Summer is also project catch-up for all things peripheral to the world of wire bending.  This year's ambitious  list includes having the entire interior of the house painted (all creamy fresh white plus three WOW walls in varying shades of coastal blue), new ceiling fans & pendant lights installed (CHECK! All this is done), rehabbing & replanting the pineapple beds with the juvenile delinquents I've been rooting (ok, ignoring) beside the stone wall, sorting & culling the sedimentary layers of 'potential' in my studio, disassembling, cleaning, & either stowing or rehabbing & moving my loom (see post 'She's Come Undone ' for more on that), reconfiguring my studio to optimize workspace, natural light,

This window & view were wasted on the sofaloaf, but are perfect for the desk

& storage efficiency, yet again, and removing the blinds & replacing them with some new version of window treatments (for 15/17 windows...how crazy am I?).  

So bright without all those slats to block the view

To that end, I have 2 huge rolls of fabric & a third on the way (none of the swatches above, despite the wasted time spent obsessing over them).  

One is already cut into curtain panels for the living room & hall, though I may make Roman shades instead, making all that cutting & measuring a bit hasty.  An aside here about inspiration; fabric has always inspired me.  Sales on fabric inspire me to buy more upholstery fabric than I could use in a lifetime & hoard it in a closet.  

So that covers the inspiration/perspiration aspect, but not what I was thinking about.  The poorly timed inspiration was that I decided to order the PBS series 'Craft in America ' on DVD.  So I have been reveling in all these depictions of fine craftsmen & women, their back stories & their meltingly gorgeous work (sometimes literally--glass blowers), & despite the tools in my hand & the anvil I'm next to, I hear my loom, all in pieces & hollering at me like a left-behind child, all rowdy & raucous from its hiding place in the back of my closets.  It screams about what we're supposed to create, completely oblivious to the over $2k (after shipping is added) replacement parts estimate, the wonderful space created in my small house when I finally succumbed to logic & took the loom apart, to the new yarns that I'd have to purchase & have shipped here, to the sweatshop atmosphere created by weaving itchy fibers in tropical heat, & to the fundamental illogic of laboriously doing by hand that which the industrial revolution has rendered pointless..

I figure I'm about one more viewing of the 'Threads' episode away from biting the bullet & ordering the replacement parts.  

Next Summer's project:  building a weaving room addition to my house!  :)

Complicated pulley systems I'll have to recreate if I take the plunge & rehab the loom