Dust Settles

 

This is an old photo of part of my woven 'stash'.  Over the years, my various stashes have been moved around, shifted from place to place, while I tried to tetris more stuff into the same amount of real estate.

Earlier this month I participated in a guild sale so most of my tea towels got boxed up and moved to the venue, then moved back here when it was over.  But while that was happening we were *also* getting ready to leave for Olds and so those boxes continue to sit on the floor while I try to figure out what's next.  Goat trails are beginning to appear again...

Now that we are home from Olds, there are yet more bins/boxes filled with stuff that I need to deal with.  Do I keep?  Give away?  Trash?

While at Olds I gave a very large box of woven samples to my teaching assistant, who said she was delighted to have them.  I hope they are useful to her.  They are no longer useful to me and it was time to let them go.

I'm at the 2/3s mark of the current warp with the next 2/16 warp designed.  So another 7 or maybe 8 towels to weave and the current warp will be finished.  And then the last (for now) 2/16 warp will go into the loom.  That won't *quite* use up all of the 2/16 (and 16/2) yarn, but will will come very close, indeed.

But for someone who is 'retired' (for certain values of) I still have a shit tonne of inventory left.  I have taken to giving more of it away, primarily to my health care providers - because they are keeping me alive and able to weave.  They deserve something more...personal...from me.  I think.  

The guild has several more sales opportunities over the summer, then the big craft fair in the fall.  

And in the meanwhile, I keep churning out more tea towels.  Because it is a lot easier to get rid of finished textiles than bits and pieces of tubes.

While I'm working on 'finishing' the 2/16 cotton, I am beginning to examine the lesson plan for the recording in October.  I've emailed some questions to the team and expect to get some feedback soon.  In the meantime I keep thinking, slowly, in the back of my mind.  Not ready to pull those thoughts out into the light quite yet.

It was not an easy decision to make, to stop teaching the Olds program in Olds.  But my body was adamant that such long trips were no longer feasible.  For either of us.  We are both getting older (better than the alternative, amirite?) but still.  Lugging boxes around, carrying them up the stairs, shoving them into the back of the van, unloading at the other end, then reverse it all going home?  Time to stop.

But I'll tell you one thing for free - I am going to miss the personal interaction with people as they hit an ah-HA moment.  And that moment of discovery, of sudden knowledge, I will miss being a part of that.  Very much.  

The next best thing is to keep working with School of Sweet Georgia.  And so far they seem to want to do that, so...

This week is busy with appointments and meetings, but I'm letting the sectional beaming class content swirl around in the pot at the back of my mind, and I should be about ready to start pulling that one together by next week.  I figure one day of taping that if I plan it out efficiently (as in out of chronological order - have fun editor!) and perhaps two days for the lace weaves.  I need to really sit down and think through the content and how best to present that topic.  Again, there may be some out of order taping to challenge the editor.

In the meantime I still have my reluctant body to encourage to keep going.  I have made a commitment to SOS for two years.  After that?  I'll have to see how things are going.  By then I'll be nearly 75 and frankly, when I started weaving, I figured 75 would be the limit of my ability to do much of anything - weave, or teach.  So...time will tell...

This week is time to let the dust of the past few weeks activity settle and rest, then hopefully return to the planning, thinking, analyzing, thinking, writing, more thinking, in preparation for the Next Big Project.