Messy

 

As with many other tasks in my studio, cleaning up tends to be done in 'batches', not every single time I make a 'mess'.

So, today I am hoping to cut the current - and last in this series - of towels off the loom, get them cut apart and serged and into the washing machine/dryer.  

With all of that cutting/serging (160 towels) an accumulation of bits lives on the studio floor by the foot pedal for the serger.  Each warp produces a small amount of these 'bits'.  Not enough to bother me into dragging the vacuum cleaner out, so they get left where they fall until the series is done.

I know not everyone will have the tolerance for 'mess' that I do, and I don't expect everyone will let a mess like this go unchecked.  But I'm not supposed to vacuum in the first place (bad back) so I do it once in a while, frequently when I reach the end of a series as I hope to do today.

Yesterday I was reviewing one of my Zoom lectures, talking about efficiency, and how I have come to the conclusion that while I can make more money to buy more yarn, I cannot buy more time.  And so, instead of taking that 15 or 20 minutes each time I use the serger to clean up a few bits of yarn, I let them build up.  It doesn't take much longer to clean up a mess this big, and a smaller mess produced after one session of serging.

My studio (and house, to be honest) is littered with half done projects.  As a textile maker, I have dust buffalo, not bunnies.  And again, they tend to build up into a sizable herd before I deal with them.  I used to apologize to people coming to the house and now I mostly just don't invite people over.  I don't have to feel as though someone is judging me for my 'mess'.

When I was a kid, my mother would set up her sewing on the kitchen table, and then put it all away every night so that we could eat there.  Now that I'm an adult, my dining room table gets used for all manner of things, rarely to eat on.  Neither of us is much bothered by this.  

I used to make a point of inviting company for a meal as an effort to force myself to clean up, and it worked - when I was younger, healthier and cared about such things.  Now I 'clean' when I feel able to and just meet people outside of my home.  

All of this is to say - if you come to my house, I trust you are coming to see me, not how clean/tidy my house is.