Workshop

I have shelves--a whole wall of shelves! It took most of the day, but that part of the job is done: Working in the Studio not only protected me from the occasional showers, but meant I had easy access for measuring and adjusting as I went along. The biggest challenge was the corner shelf. You can see it in the far right of the pic. I'm glad to see how accurate it looks from this perspective, since it cost me a fair bit of effort. The reality is less precise, but I won't care about that once I load it up with boxes and bits. That's today's task, but first there's some cleaning up to do.

My friend L is dropping in this afternoon with some jewellery that needs repairs and adjustments. I'll see whether I'm up to doing that in the studio or back on the kitchen table. And I need to buy a Christmas tree and some trimmings. That sounds like quite enough for one day.

Today's Materials

Today's going to be another hardware day. Here are my materials: I hope to transform these pine planks into some more shelving for the Studio. Then I can move some more boxes from what has been the sewing room. I've moved a lot of neatly labelled boxes in the past week. Now I'm getting to random piles of fabric and boxes with labels like, "to be sorted". Apparently that's as far as I got on my last tidying blitz. Oh well!

My parallel challenges are to make the living room livable and to leave some functional workspace somewhere so that I can be ready for Christmas. I must say it all feels a bit much at the moment. And it's raining, so I'm back to slippery clay between the house and the Studio. OK, maybe I'd better shift the sawbench and tools into the studio and let it be a woodwork room as well for the time being.

Deconstruction

I first heard the term, "frog stitch" in a beginner quilting class. It made me smile and still does. It's nice to have a light-hearted expression for what is often a frustrating task. This morning I started a big frogging job. It's a cardigan I knitted for a dear friend quite some years ago. In the sad tradition of inexperienced hand-knitters, I put hours of loving work into a garment that was never quite right. My friend persisted with it for years, attempting to wear it at least once each cold season, before setting it aside. This year we finally came to the conclusion that it just wasn't ever going to work. After some discussion, we decided to re-use the yarn. It's a lovely alpaca-wool blend. I'm not planning to have another go at the cardigan. My friend now lives in the north of the country, where I'm unable to check and adjust the fit of a garment and where heavy garments are rarely needed anyway. It's going to be part of a blanket. That way she'll get the fibre "hug" I intended for her.

We're coming into the warm season, even in Melbourne, but the forecast today is for a cool 20. Most of my fibre tools and supplies are in a state of transition as I get my studio set up. The cardigan was sitting in a post-pack near my armchair. It felt good to be able to tackle it this morning.
My memory of the knitting is sufficiently distant, that unravelling the stitches isn't bothering me any. I already have two balls of wool ready to skein up, wash and rewind. As for the Studio, I spent yesterday moving shelves from the spare bedroom. They were all mounted on the wall, so each one had to carefully removed, carried to it's new home and then reinstalled. I was surprised at how far I got, but things are still looking reasonably messy. Maybe that contributes to the satisfaction of this much lighter deconstruction task.

Watch this Space

This is the space above my washing machine and laundry tub:It didn't look like this a few hours ago. I had a set of shelves there, but they were fiddly little decorator shelves and weren't working for me. I've been meaning to get rid of them and install something more substantial, but it was one of those projects I kept putting off. This weekend I have a visitor--yeah I know I had a visitor last weekend too and I don't usually have so many visitors, but there you go. My visitor wanted a project to get stuck into and she's competent with power tools. I pointed to the shelves and a pile of timber and told her to go for her life. My only requests were that she keep herself and the rest of my house reasonably intact.

She had the old shelves cleared off and dismantled much faster than I'd expected. Now I can hear her in my shed with the power saw. I've got a good feeling I'm going to have new shelves by tea time. Meanwhile I'm getting on with my spinning. I have to resist the urge to keep checking on her--I'm not used to people working independently around my place. I reckon I could get used to it, though!