Making it Easier – February

In late January I seriously considered buying a property a friend was selling. On a block a quarter the size of ours, with a three bedroom house on it but with room to build my dream studio and Paul’s dream garage, it would have made life easier… once the work required to fixed it up was done. But there was an issue with an easement. And the thought of all that work and moving house was deeply offputting. Still, it had got us thinking more about what we will want when we inevitably downsize.

Buying the more portable Jenome Juno will definitely make going to sewing days easier, though buying another sewing machine isn’t exactly downsizing.

We also gave away our organ bar.

I seem to have developed a mild intolerance to alcohol, and Paul isn’t interested in making cocktails, so we spent a couple of days redesigning the interior of the old TARDIS pantry. It has been a wine and whisky cabinet since we made the bar, and now it has a three tiered spirits and liqueurs shelf.

The organ bar will go to a friend who loves it, which I am glad of because I do still think it’s the most quirky, fun piece of furniture we’ve made. Apart from the TARDIS, of course.

Making it Easier – January

In my summary of craft for 2023 I noted that I seemed to get into a culling frame of mind after getting Covid, but when I think back, I reckon the urge was already simmering in the background. It started after Mum went into care, but not in a ‘you can’t take it when you go’ sort of way. Instead it was in reaction to seeing how bad Dad’s hoarding was getting. I know when he passes away I’m going to have a lot of stuff to get rid of, but I’ll want to keep some things too so I feel the need to ‘make room’ at home to make those decisions easier.

So I tried again to pass on the Passap, and this time was successful thanks to a very helpful person at the Machine Knitters Association. Honestly, I was almost as excited to find it a good home as I was when I bought it, ten years ago. Our ironing board now occupies the space. Not particularly exciting, but I am sewing more often now and it’s been set up in one room or another, always in the way, for most of the last few months. Now it has a permanent home, and that makes one small part of domestic life easier. It even led to Paul ironing the button bands of his shirts!

In non-crafty areas of the house… well, this is the tenth year we’ve been here and our usage of the house has changed quite a bit. When we first moved in we had big parties. Our friends had young kids, and people often stayed over. Now our friends are exhausted from wrangling teens and ageing parents simultaneously, and for the first time nobody stayed over on NYE. So in the days after, I culled a lot of things related to entertaining that are too much trouble, we don’t use now or we are just tired of.

More recently, we watched The Gentle Art of Death Cleaning on tv, then I read the book, which were fun and enlightening. The tv show takes the concept much further than the book, especially in regard to my new favourite term “reverse robbery”. Since I don’t have kids or nieces/nephews, if I die it’s going to fall to friends or even a stranger to sort out my possessions and I’d rather they didn’t have a huge mess to clean up. And since we do plan to downsize eventually, it’d be less of a shock if we don’t have to cut back our possessions all at once.

Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway.

I hesitated to add ‘January’ to this blog post title. It makes it feel like I’m setting myself a challenge to do at least one thing to make life easier each month, which actually makes life harder. My intention is just to remind myself of this year’s motto at the end of each month, and note any new ideas I’ve implemented.

Motto for 2024

For the last few years I’ve come up with a motto for the coming year. Last year it was “Make it Fun”. 2022’s was “Evolve and Simplify”. 2021’s was “Be Flexible”. It doesn’t look like I had one before that, though I reckon if I’d had one for 2020 it would have been “Try Out This Retirement Thing”.

Did I manage to live by my 2023 motto? Yes, but not in the way I’d intended. It was meant to be a way to motivate myself to tackle tasks I’d been putting off. Instead it became a survival strategy. A way to find calm. Mental health maintenance.

So what about 2024? What kind of motto might carry me through the next year?

Lately I’ve been considering what a healthy amount of time and space is for each of the aspects of my life. Art. Craft. Time with Dad. Time with friends. Gardening. Especially gardening.

Mum’s move into care and death, and our growing physical limitations over the last few years, have me wanting to downsize. We love our house and don’t want to move, so I’ve been simplifying the garden and making small changes to make cleaning the house easier. Whenever there’s a physically demanding task, I try to hire someone to do it, or buy a tool that can make it easier.

Our holidays were short and domestic and fuss-free. The weaving projects I did were less slow and complex. Painting on canvas sheets rather than stretched canvasses made framing simple and inexpensive. Going out with friends for lunch rather than having to cook a big dinner was less exhausting. More simplification of the garden this year made maintenance more manageable.

I really want to make sure I continue looking for an easy way to do something, so 2024’s motto is going to be “Find An Easier Way”.

WIP Wipeout

These dishcloths were on the loom for fourteen months. Fourteen.

And now they’re done.

They’re the last of the major WIPs I decided to finish a few months back. While not as old as the Pin Loom Blanket project, they had definitely fallen into a Black Hole of Mehness. They seemed like a good use of the supplemental warp beam – and they were – but I couldn’t help wondering why I was spending so many hours weaving and hemming an object that I can buy for around a dollar each and will toss in a year or so when they get too stained and threadbare.

Eventually I decided I wasn’t allowed to start any new weaving project until they were off the loom. I suspect my dive into air dry clay was partly a subconscious rebellion against that decision. My brain was desperate for excitement. So it was kind of ironic that the gloss went off air dry clay so quickly, and that on the same day I packed away the clay supplies I also finished the last dishcloth.

I was seriously considering just cutting the warp off the loom to get it over with, but decided to finish the last cloth and see how much was left. Turns out, not enough for another cloth. Which means I don’t feel like I gave up on them, or that they defeated me.

But I sure as heck won’t be weaving dishcloths again!

SketchBOX July 2023 & Lord Howe Island

Initially, I wasn’t sure if I was excited by the July SketchBOX contents or not. I have plenty of portable watercolour sets, water brushes and water soluble pencils and don’t really need more. But then, the reason I have plenty of watercolour sets is I am a sucker for them and the SketchBOX Signature one certainly looked very portable and had good colours. While I have one quality watercolour grade hardcover travel sketchbook already there’s always room for another.

Possibly my hesitation was because July is winter in Australia. Melbourne’s winter is for the more dedicated urban sketcher, and I have not even managed to become a fair weather urban sketcher. Painting with the art society, visiting my mother in aged care and seeing friends was taking up most of my energy, so it wasn’t likely I’d be making a start soon.

Then my mother passed away and things got busy and stressful and I found myself longing for a holiday. We’d abandoned plans for an interstate car trip in Autumn because her health was deteriorating, but now we were free to travel I was too drained for something that adventurous. I just wanted to sit on a beach, read, and maybe do a small painting if I felt up to it.

So we went to the travel agent who was our hero when lockdowns forced the cancelation of a big Europe trip, with nine days until the start of the week we wanted to travel and a vague idea that Lord Howe Island would suit.

It did. There was only one accommodation venue available, but it was the off season and a room was available. So we took our first flights since 2019 and found ourselves in Paradise.

Well, Paradise in winter, when it’s too cold to swim and accommodation isn’t built for chilly nights. However, daytime temperatures were ideal for walking, so we did a lot of that. I did get to sit on beaches, read and do a bit of painting, however, so those aims were achieved.

I packed the SketchBOX July supplies, apart from the watercolour pencil (which I was concerned would get jostled about enough to break the lead). They fit neatly into an old travel wallet. The only adjustment I made was sewing along the righthand pocket to make a section that held the watercolour set perfectly. The lefthand pocket was the ideal size for the sketchbook with the water pen tucked in beside it:

I also took a small plastic box with acrylic gouache paints in it with the idea of painting separate artworks on card, but realised when I got there that most of the plein air painting I do takes two to three hours, and that was a bit much to ask of the other half. Instead I used it back at the room to paint coral, leaves, seeds and shells.

It took me a while to get the hang of the watercolours. Results improved when I worked out that I didn’t like the way water brushes continually feed water into a brushstroke so that the paint dilutes, and makes the whole page more wet than it needed to be. I switched to a normal paintbrush from the acrylic gouache set and was much happier.

Overall, I think it is my favourite of the SketchBOX contents so far. Either this one or the liquid graphite one. When we were considering which island to visit we also looked at Norfolk Island. I’m now keen to go there… but maybe when it gets a bit warmer!

Post-Workshop

For a few weeks up to the end of the Maiwa workshop, and Dad getting the go-ahead to drive, I felt like I was rolling toward a cliff edge, in that I knew there’s be new terrain over that horizon but I couldn’t see it yet. It wasn’t that there isn’t lots for me to do. It was just that a part of me expected that whatever I decided to do would be scuttled by another big drama.

What I ended up doing was lots and lots of sorting stuff out. A large part of that was post-workshop tidying up and using up dye pastes. After going through the leftover dye pastes to see what colours were left and tossing anything moldy (surprisingly little) I planned some projects to use it with.

I also tried using a new dye source – white mulberry – on a piece of leftover fabric from the workshop. It was supposed to be green with paler leaves created with stencilled discharge paste, but I forgot that the cloth hadn’t been mordanted and only got a faint difference in greens. So I tried mordanting, and dying again and redoing the discharge paste. No change. So I overdyed with the last bit of logwood I had and the result was the opposite to what I expected: the discharge areas took up the purple more than the background. It was a lesson in why the workshop creators chose the dyes they did – reliable results.

For the last a square of workshop cloth I did a print of a layered leaves with mordant-dye paste.

I’d already been through my fabric stash, and only found a scrap of heavy twill cotton to play with. I tried out a dip pen stamp on it.

There was a bag of bits and pieces in my old dyeing supplies that included a cotton scarf from when I made sun-printed scarves as presents a decade or so ago. Of the dye pastes I had, the colours with the most paste left over included myrobalan/iron and two shades of madder. The myrobalan steams up to a nice olive green and the madder becomes pale pinks, so made them into mordant-dye pastes and painted roses.

The bag also contained a white t-shirt. I wanted to try doing two fabric dyeing methods on one object, so I dyed it with iron, used discharge paste to remove circles around the neckline, chalked and dried it. Then I painted the circles with lac and madder mordant-dye pastes.

There’s plenty of dye paste left and I still have ideas I’d like to try, but I’ve run out of fabric and I really want to start painting still lifes. While I was doing all the above I was also sorting through all my art, printing, dyeing and paper-making materials and stowing them away in the laundry cabinet. We removed a chest of drawers (you can see the unpainted area in the pic below) and installed shelving to make a little art nook.

The printing surface has a new, clean cover (blue) and has been stowed behind the table, and I’m starting to set up for painting.

I also made ink out of madder from my garden, caught up on gardening, made tomato chutney and relish. caught up with some friends. sorted through a huge pile of accumulated fabric and clothes belonging to a friend and myself to send to recycling. did my quarterly tax, and finally went to plein air and portrait workshops.

And suddenly I realised I was on the other side of that cliff edge, and everything was fine.

Intentions vs Reality

Seven weeks were left of 2022 when I began thinking about my intentions for 2023, which felt early but maybe only because the weather felt like Winter right up and into December. When I asked myself want I wanted to do next year the words “get my sh*t together” flashed into my mind. So I wrote a list of what sh*t needs getting together and noted that most items were tasks I’ve been putting off for a long time. I considered and dismissed various reasons why and was left with one: because they aren’t much fun.

So I asked myself if I could make them fun. Perhaps take a different approach? Maybe break them down into more enjoyable tasks? Possibly reward myself when they’re done and have that be the fun part?

The idea inspired me to decided that my motto for 2023 was “Make it Fun”. However, so far 2023 has had other ideas. Getting my sh*t together took a major back seat behind just getting through each day.

After the first drama passed a gloomier sense of clarity set in. There’s nothing like dealing with elderly parents to make you review what you need to let go, be that possessions, activities or people. Getting my sh*t together was suddenly about more than just a few neglected tasks I hadn’t done, but ones I’ll need to do in future, and ones I should avoid having to do. It also felt like an illusion. Like housework: something never finished and harder to get to when there are dramas in your life.

I thought… perhaps a more realistic motto might be: “Remember to Have Fun”. So it was in that spirit that I decided not to delay doing the Maiwa “Print and Paint with Natural Dyes” workshop I’d signed up to, but get stuck in. Being busy and distracted meant I didn’t always get results I like, but so long as I was learning something and had something to occupy my mind that was fine. It was truly art as therapy.

There are two weeks of the workshop to go. I have one day free. I’m going to create a few posts and set them up to self-publish just in case another drama happens. Thankfully, I did keep records of what I did to remind me of what I did. So here goes…

Projects of 2022

Making this post has been a bit of an eye-opener. There’s so little to report! It’s not because I wasn’t being creative. For the first seven months, most of my time and energy for making were going into the 8-shaft weaving course. So much that I’ve had a big case of post-course apathy since. The remaining creativity went into my daily art challenge, which left me inspired and energised, and then the ink-making course, which was SO much fun and has me exploring calligraphy and fountain pens (but not, yet, producing actual projects using either). It didn’t help that a very wet Spring brought on a crazy amount of weeds in the garden, and the Parental Drama consumed a month. What I’m intrigued by most is the fact that, when I managed to squeeze in a bit of craft time, I mainly tackled sewing projects.

A month-by-month list isn’t going to work so I’m switching to subject-based observations.

Sewing: I made a pair of pyjama pants, a pair of plaid shorts, two night dresses, two 50/50 skirts, several cotton knit tops, a wrap dress, a test shirt and a fidget blanket.

Art-related: I made a backdrop for a 007 party, redesigned a french easel, and fashioned a wet panel carrier out of a hamper box.

Weaving: The only woven project I did outside of the course was the Wonky Blocks tea towels, which were a very late Christmas present.

It may not have been a big year for projects, but it was a huge one for learning. Not only did I explore weaving, ink-making and art, but quite a bit of life assessment. I’m not going to push myself to do more projects in 2023. The tasks I’d like to get done aren’t all shaped like projects, easily photographed and described in a blog post. But there will be creativity of some kind, because that is the best kind of de-stressing activity I know.

Plein Air Wanderings

The main aim of our recent holiday was to visit friends in Adelaide. I wasn’t keen to risk the chaos of unreliable flights and understaffed airports, yet my back wasn’t going to stand up to long hours of being a passenger in a car. So we planned to take a meandering route there and back, staying two nights at each location in case I had to lie down for a day to heal.

We stayed in the Euroa campground first, where a bunch of our friends had arranged a weekend away. It’s a nice spot. A pretty creek winds through the place. People were fishing or kayaking, walking dogs or riding bikes down the path alongside. Paul and I stayed in a cabin, and I was so keen to get painting that I did this not long after we arrived despite a cranky neck headache.

The next morning I took a little longer to paint one of the bridges.

On the Sunday we bid our friends goodby and headed to Boort in central Victoria, where Paul spent most of his childhood. I didn’t paint anything as it was only a one-night stay, but if I’d had the time I’d have painted the lake.

The next day we headed to Mildura, managing to catch only the leftmost edge of a storm as we left, then later just missing the top of a long ribbon of rain. There was a little extra blob of rain on the weather radar that didn’t look substantial, but when we and it reached Mildura at the same time it turned out to have grown into a full-on thunderstorm with torrential rain and large hailstones that had me seriously worried our car would be damaged – as mine had been in a storm several years ago. Fortunately there was no damage and we made it to the campground.

We had arranged to stay in a cabin on the river, and it was a lovely spot. The next day we went for a walk around town and the riverbank and stumbled upon the art gallery of the local artist society, where I was told I could buy art supplies from a local hairdresser. (I needed some linseen oil.)

That afternoon I did a painting of riverboats from the cabin. The sun kept going behind cloud, so it was easier to paint something that was in the shadow of trees.

Our next drive was to Adelaide. I’d noted that our windscreen had hardly any bug splatter on it, and I hadn’t seen many birds so far – mostly carrion-eaters. Now there were no bugs and no birds, and the roadkill lay bloated by the side of the road. Perhaps it was because were were passing through the fruit fly quarantine area, and all the bugs were being sprayed out of existence.

We also noted people were jumping fences and trampling canola fields to take photos, and figured farmers might not be too keen about that. Sure enough, this week there was an article about the biosecurity risks and nuisance it causes. Filing that under “The stupid, inconsiderate things people do to follow the latest Instagram trend”.

Once in Adelaide the only painting I did was my daily art. We stayed with friends, visited friends, had dinner at friends’ places, and spend many hours chatting with friends.

When the time came to farewell our friends we headed south, following the coast to Robe. Just before we arrived we learned a couple at one of the dinner parties had Covid. So we spend the rest of the holiday staying away from people – eating takeaway rather than going into restaurants, not going to touristy attractions where we’d encounter people, and cancelling visits to two friends living in places on the route home – and monitoring ourselves for symptoms.

Which we never manifested, thankfully. I did a painting on a Robe beach, but it was terrible and went in the bin after a failed attempt to fix it when I got home. The next stop was Dunkeld at the southern end of the Grampians. The day we arrived the weather was good but the sun was in the wrong position and my back was not happy. The next day it rained. The day after it was sunny, but we were heading home. Before setting forth, however, we drove around to take some photos, and when I saw the view from the Arboretum I had to stop and do a final painting. And I’m glad I did.

Despite the near-brush with Covid, it was a lovely break. There were moments when my back did get cranky, but nowhere near as much as I’d feared. We saw our friends, I got some plein air paintings done, and really benefited from a break from routine and familiar surrounds. It had been four years since our last trip, and I’m glad we travelled locally rather than set off overseas. I’d like to do more trips within Australia. Maybe next year.

Is this the New Normal?

All through the pandemic so far I’ve heard people say they want everything to go back to normal. I doubted everything would, and predicted that some things would change permanently for good and for ill. Because that’s what happens over time anyway, even without a catalyst to speed up the process.

Twenty years ago I was broke and living alone. I barely drove anywhere and could only afford an hour a day of internet, which was mostly spent dealing with emails. A few years passed and when my income improved and I could get about again, online and in real life, it was like I’d been living on the moon. So much had changed I scrambled to grasp some of it.

Three years ago I knew I was heading into a new phase of my life. There’d be good changes (more time to explore hobbies), bad (the stress of my parents’ declining heath), and a lot of questioning of identity and purpose. I was ready to embrace change… but I couldn’t have predicted the pandemic.

“Evolve and Simplify” is my motto for this year. Now, nearing the halfway point, do I feel like I’m managing either?

Evolving:
Definitely! Until October 2019 it was always writing first, then art and craft equally in importance, but it has shift to art first, craft a close second, then writing a distant third. Socially, I’ve become much less tolerant of selfish people. More recently I’m contemplating what it would mean to be considered ‘disabled’, whether by myself or by others.

Simplifying:
A little. I’m changing parts of the garden to make maintenance easier. All social media has been relegated to one session a week, on the desktop not the phone. I’m resisting the lure of new hobbies, wanting to consolidate knowledge and skills in existing interests instead.

In the second half of the year life will get much simpler when I finish the 8-shaft weaving course and the daily art challenge. In their place I hope to weave some of the structures I’ve learned but at a lazy pace, and increase the amount of art I do. I’d like to try some weekly workshops or joining a plein air group, and go back to always having at least one painting on the go.

Simplification can go too far, and evolution doesn’t always go in good directions, but I’m hoping that, overall, I can embrace and benefit from the changes to come.