Letting Go

I am thinking about letting go of a lot of my raw materials. First on the mental list: felted sweaters as well as sweaters which I have not yet processed, plus lots of sweater pieces.


I'm doing this because I am feeling overwhelmed by too much stuff. I can't comfortably maneuver in my studio. There is no such thing as a good sized clear surface to work on, and, most importantly, I find it difficult to be creative when there are so many possibilities piled around. I work better when I have to make something from nothing.


So, I'm just going to start unloading until I feel like I'm back at the "right" amount of wool. All the wool I will list for sale will be from my own precious stash, gorgeous wool which I had planned to use for my own projects before I realized how overwhelmed I was becoming.


Sometime in the next day or so, I hope to start uploading listings to my wickedwaifFIBER shop on Etsy.  Maybe you will see something you like.



Contentment



"We need much less than we think we need."  - Maya Angelou
“That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”  - Khaled Hosseini
Some days I am so perfectly content, and others I would cry into a magical cup. 
  

Faces

Children in a Mexican Village

These beautiful faces are looking at you from a photo I made on a trip to Mexico in the mid 1970s.  The trip was a gift from my mother and aunt.  We traveled together, along with my cousin Chris, for six weeks.  Well, they traveled for six weeks.  I, on the other hand, changed my air ticket to return one week earlier than originally planned, because I just had to see my boyfriend! What an idiot I was.

If you think it isn't totally stupid to give up a week in Cancun (back when Cancun was unspoiled), let me tell you the rest of the story:  When I arrived at the boyfriend's door, souvenir gift in hand (a very nice leather belt), he was unwilling to invite me in because he was entertaining another female.

Do you still think I was not totally stupid? Then how about this: Before I left, in total embarrassment and humiliation, I gave him the gift. Ugh.

At least I had five fabulous weeks with my family, driving around Mexico, seeing many sights and getting some nice photos ... including one of a man who was running away from police and was shot, right before my eyes, on the cobblestone street.