Testing, testing . . .

This morning I will say goodbye to my little old cedar shed. Cleaning it up should have been my priority yesterday, but it was hard to get motivated for a task like that with my new studio just crying out to be put in order. I decided on a compromise. For every trip to the studio I took a side trip to the shed to carry something back to the house. Well, not for every trip to the studio, but enough to make a difference.

Getting the studio in order has gone past the quick and easy stage. I'm down to the vaguely labelled or just plain messy things from what has been my sewing room. I tried to do some sorting along the way, otherwise I'd just be transferring mess from one place to another. My quilting fabrics and silks are in reasonably good order, but there were various pieces of unidentified dress materials there too. I tried burn-testing them, with some success and some remaining uncertainty. Burn testing depends on recognising things like the type of flame, the resulting ash and the smell of the burnt fibre. My trouble is that after testing a couple of fabrics, everything just starts to smell the same. I need the nasal equivalent of a lemon sorbet to cleanse my palette between samples. Now it's time to focus on the final clean up for the little shed. The buyer should be here in an hour or so to pick it up. It will be interesting to see how the back garden looks with the extra space.