More Weeding Out & Lightening Up

I love those Before & After magazine spreads where they show someone's total hoarder house, with stuff spilling out of overstuffed closets and piled on top of every flat surface, and then they show what it looks like after some Organizational Expert comes in and removes everything but the furniture, a ficus tree, and three pair of shoes. Of course, the idea of someone else coming into *my* house and going through my stuff is horrifying because I know exactly what it would be like: they'd come in with big boxes and start loading up all the stuff they thought was crap, and it would be all my very favorite stuff. The worn and mended stuff, the old and faded stuff, the funky stuff. They'd leave all the stuff I had planned on getting rid of in the next round of purging, mostly new stuff that hasn't ever been used. You know: the stack of journals still in shrink wrap, the spare set of Good Colored Pencils, the dress shoes in the box Just In Case.

So I've been working on it my own self. I have A Goal, of sorts: to get rid of everything I don't 1) use or 2) adore. That leaves rather a lot of stuff, as you know: we all  have Extra Stuff. The Good Stuff. The Just in Case Stuff. The stuff we feel guilty about not wanting: stuff someone gave us, someone we love but who maybe doesn't have exactly the same taste we do (the flowered apron, the cut-glass vase, the linen placemats (no, I do not own any of those things)).

I want my house--at least the rooms in which I spend the most time--to have only stuff I love. Not other stuff. Now, granted, there are rooms in my house that will never get there: our bedroom, The EGE's den, the kitchen. This is because I secretly suspect that The EGE is the one who was my mother's child and not me. She was a packrat. She would never, ever have described herself that way, of course. She was frugal, she didn't waste, she kept things Just In Case. She grew up during the Depression, when everything was precious, and she spent the first 25 years of her marriage moving from town to town as a doodlebugger. To do that, you had to be able to fit everything you owned into a little trailer and get it all packed up and ready to go within a week, tops. You couldn't own much. When they didn't have to move any more, she began accumulating things--furniture, clothes, papers. Stuff. And she never got rid of any of it. No, she wasn't a hoarder; until the last few years of her life, her house was spotless, everything in its place. But she was one person in a three-bedroom house, with one bedroom doubled in size and turned into a den, so you can imagine. Lots of stuff. And as she got older, it overwhelmed her, so much stuff.

I want my old age to NOT be about trying to take care of stuff, finding places for stuff, insuring stuff, dusting stuff.

Snort. "Dusting." What a concept: I don't dust. Nobody here dusts. The EGE vacuums my desk and various surfaces for me; dust is just what happens in West Texas, and you learn early on just to leave it. Eventually it will bond together with its own kind, and then you vacuum it up.

Someone else who lives in this house does not have those concerns about being overwhelmed with stuff. This other person sometimes makes me a tiny bit crazy (he this person might point out that I do a perfectly good job of that myself, but ignore him them). Just this week this person took a load of paper to the recycling bin and came back with some of the stuff I'd thrown away. And also went through that bag in that photo down there and pulled out stuff he they could use. Thank goodness
This Person has a den in which to put their stuff. It is NOT a zenlike den. The Non-Zen Den.

Anyway, I said I'd show the latest results. The first photo is the huge give-away box with a smaller box of leather on top. The leather goes to Angie in Arizona--periodically I weed out my Leather Bin and pack up some to send her. I'm not accumulating more; I'm just slowly parting with more of what I already had, and she does cool stuff with it. Since I took this photo, there's also an envelope going to Lorri--a vintage slip she can use and said she'd like to have.

 Then I went through what used to be The Paper Room and pulled everything I haven't touched in the last couple years and piled it up here, in the photo below. The boxes are full of paper and cardstock--business-card size, notecard size, just a ton of stuff.

 Some sheets of heavier paper:

 Also a bunch of markers--I put all the permanent markers in the box to give away and put the non-permanent ones in here--The EGE loaded all this stuff in these last three photos into his vehicle this morning and took it to the art teacher at the high school where he's subbing today, so it's all gone to someone I hope will be happy to put it to good use.

There's still more to do, of course. I'm slowly weeding my wardrobe down to Only Clothes I Love, and I'm going to start work on my--gasp--books, which will be painful and time-consuming (I have to at least START to read a book before I decide I don't want to keep it, right?) That's going to take a while. You know: you start a book to see if it's any good, and it turns out it IS good, and so you have to read it, and because you read only at bedtime, that takes a long time, and so weeks later you haven't gotten to any of the other books yet. But you did read a good book, so it's not like it was time wasted. That's what's going on now.

Now I'm off to take a walk before it gets hot. Then maybe more dyeing--I got three loads done yesterday and have two more to go.

If you've got any Before & After photos, I'd love to see them--link us up! XO

Re-Mades

You know, like "ready-mades," as a noun? These are re-mades. I've shown y'all the first part of them, and now here they are, finished.

This one, before:

 Linen top with dorky stuff on the front:

 Residue from the fusible webbing:

T-shirt patch from Jesse Reno:

Finished--the thicker lines are all sewn over with a backstitch. Most of them are invisible, but if the ink washes out, you'll still be able to see the major lines.

 I gave him some stars--too much white space:

 I also gave him an eyeball.

 Cool pockets (please ignore Clarice's fur. Thank you.):

 Racer back I'm not too crazy about. In fact, it's a little snugger than what I like for wearing something underneath, and I don't know that I'll ever bond with it. If not, that's OK--it will go live with someone else. I've done my part by saving it from dorkiness.

Then there's this Cynthia Ashby cotton and linen one I showed y'all a while back. Hideous color:

 Severe issues with the neckline:

 And the armholes:

 Nobody was ever going to wear this dog, and that's too bad because I'm sure it was several hundred dollars worth of dress.

I love how it turned out:

 It took the dye fabulously:

 I added a band from a grey t-shirt--the color of the dress was impossible to deal with any other way. It didn't look good with purple or raspberry or pink or fuchsia, and I didn't have anything that was the original color that I could have put in the dye bath. So I went with grey, which I like:

 Now all the problem areas lie nice and smooth (it took some serious manipulation during the stitching to get it to work):

 The underlayer is linen; it's quite a heavy dress, actually:

 I can wear it with this one:

 Or even this one, another Cynthia Ashby thing I got in order to try to salvage. It's a very funky fit and needs some work to make it less wonky. It's more purple, less raspberry, but they go together well to me:

I'm trying to get through all the things that had to be remade into remades; I've got a bunch of Jumprons and boleros I want to work on. I think that, and then I think, "But I love salvaging stuff!" When I get this close to the end of the salvages, I always manage to find a bunch more to put in line. 

In the next post, I've got photos of The Absolute Coolest Thing I've Ever Bought, Ever. I'll try to get it up later today~~

With a Little Pink

I love it when a bunch of projects are all in the last stages of completion, and then suddenly you have a bunch of stuff to show for what you've been doing. Here's what this one looked like last week:

 And then I cut it off, cut off the sleeves, lowered the neckline--I showed y'all the steps here.

And now it's finished, and here it is:

Pink t-shirt banding on the bottom, the neck, and the sleeves, and stitching around the pockets. Then I changed out the buttons for some super-cheapo plastic ones I had in various sizes--I like that; it makes it seem not-so-serious. Like pink and orange is going to be serious, anyway.

I may do more to it later--I'll wear it, see how much I like it. If I love it, it might go on to become SoulWear, with something added to it. If I just like it, then it can live like this. I'll wear it over jeans--cropped or skinny. I'll try to get a photo of that, but it will take a while~~

The Hair & Other Stuff

I wanted to write this post and call it Getting Clean & Sober, but that would be a good title to nobody but me: I've never been anything but clean and sober, and some would take it as making fun of people with addictions, when it's not: whenever I adjust my health/dietary/lifestyle habits, that's how I think of it: Getting Clean & Sober. Others would stumble across it while googling and think I had something useful to offer about how to get off meth, which I do not. I can tell them how to cut back on sugar, but that's probably not what they would be looking for. Maybe it should be "Getting Even Cleaner & Soberer," but that just doesn't have that ring to it. I don't know why this is how I think of it; I suspect it's too many detective dramas where The Perp uses this as an alibi for why I Didn't Do It: I've gotten clean and sober.

Whatever. I'll try to make this short, since it's about me, me, me and is of little interest to anyone else. But people ask about my hair--where the orange hair went--and I can't explain that without explaining everything else. Briefly, though. And you'll thank me for that. [OK, so I failed. Short and sweet just doesn't work for me. Sorry about that.]

I think I wrote at the end of last year that 2013 was going to be the Year of Learning Not to Worry. As I've written about before, I'm just the teeniest, tiniest bit a worrier.

Oh, hell: I hold the world championship in worrying, OK? I've worried all my life--no need for details because I've written about that before, too. I come from a long line of depressed people; my mother attempted suicide several times and was institutionalized. Blah, blah, blah. So I've always paid attention to mood stuff, esp. the worry. And I'd always assumed it would get better as I got older, that I would mellow out and relax and chill and stuff, you know?

What a fool I was. It just got worse. I kept hearing that little voice in my brain saying, "The worry is going to kill us." [Note: that sentence does not indicate that I have either 1) schizophrenia or 2) multiple personality disorder. After reading on, you'll find this as funny as I do. Or maybe not.]

I thought it was just me, but other people said the same thing, so I began to think maybe it was a common trajectory, this age-related increase in worry for people who've been doing it for a very long time anyway. And then a friend of mine, a woman my age, told of finally going to see someone because she was experiencing the same thing and it was interfering with her (very fabulous) life, and she began to take an SSRI, something she'd always resisted. And over the course of the last year and a half she's related her experiences with this, and she said exactly the one thing that could have spurred me into action about this. She said she couldn't believe this is how normal people lived their lives, and she couldn't believe she'd waited this long.

I've always thought that would be the worst: if I got old and started taking something right before I died (we're talking really old here), and my eyes popped open when the drugs finally kicked in, and I went, "Holy crap! THIS is what it's like for everyone else? Why didn't anyone tell me?"

So I went to see my gynecologist. Back in my early 20s, I took The EGE and sat them both down and explained my mother's history and gave them instructions that the two of them were NOT to let me go there. Or anywhere near there.  We've discussed this periodically throughout the intervening 30 years. And now I said, "OK, I don't want to keep going *here*, either, with this worry thing." I was tired of it. Coupled with the palpitations, it was making me miserable, waking me up in the middle of the night,  blah, blah, blah.

So in January I started taking the lowest dose of the SSRI Mendez chose for me after I gave him a list of Things I Will Not Tolerate (1) nausea, 2) weight gain, 3) sexual side effects). I'm not going to name it here because: my friend had excellent results with what her doctor prescribed for her, and I asked why Mendez didn't choose that one, and he said, "Because I went by what you told me, and this is the one that will do those things and not do those other things." Of course, those aren't his exact words because he uses Doctor Speak. But if he'd given me the one she had, the one I would have guessed was the one that would work best, it might not have been a good match. As it is, this one seems to be good. I can't tell a huge amount of difference, but then the dose is so small--about a quarter of what my friend was prescribed--that it wouldn't be. The worry is much diminished, if not entirely gone. I can double the dose; he's leaving that up to me, and I'm going very, very slowly. I hate drugs. I hate taking them, and I hate thinking about side effects (please, no scary warnings! And, yeah, I know all the snarky things about "Head Meds," which very nearly made me not even post about this: people on Facebook post comments about the overuse of "head meds" and how people should just buck up and clean up their lives and not rely on drugs to solve every little problem, and I want to hunt them down and smack them silly. They, obviously, are normal people with no quirks and no issues and no things that have been plaguing them all their whole entire lives. We should make them all saints and then send them to a remote island until they learn to mind their own business, is what I think. But that's just my opinion.)

I am, of course, hyper-vigilant and extra sensitive (meaning: really noticing every little change and blip) because of all the stuff my mother went through, and I went through with her. In addition to depression, she had anxiety, and although it was something she didn't want to discuss, I think the episodes that sent her to the emergency room beginning in her 60s were probably anxiety/panic attacks. I had seen her in high worry mode, and it was not pretty.

For many people, there's still the stigma my mother felt: she wouldn't take antidepressants because that would mean she was "crazy," and she wasn't crazy, so there was nothing wrong with her, so she didn't need a prescription. Right? That was our battle for many, many years. And lots of people still feel that way: SSRIs are used to treat anxiety and depression and OCD, and those are mental illnesses, so if you have one of those, you're mentally ill, and that means you're crazy. Right?

People believe that, I'm sure. I don't. And it turns out I also know a whole bunch of people like me, people who take an SSRI, many of them for anxiety that just went into overdrive. They've been taking it for years, and I had no idea. But: these are all some of the nicest people I know, the most fun to be around.

Was I worried about taking them? Ha. I was terrified the part of my brain that I adore would leave me, that I'd no longer have Ideas, or a sense of humor, or be able to think. My mother began having real trouble before there were SSRIs, and her MD prescribed not an antidepressant but sleeping pills and tranquilizers, and she was pretty much a zombie for a long time. And the last what? 20 years or so of her life--she took Darvocet every day because, she said, it kept her from caring about anything. I got her to quit, I thought, but after she died, I found her huge stash hidden in her house. So you can imagine. Drugs! Drugs are scary! Drugs will make you sit on the couch for hours without moving! Yiiiiiiiii~~

But my brain is still my brain, and we have even more fun together now--it gets to play more, since it's not spending so much time trying to prevent the total collapse of the free world and the spread of A New Plague and deforestation and dental calamity and global warming and AIEEEEEEEE~~

And oh! The EGE and I stood in the parking lot and laughed about this while the crime tech was fingerprinting our vehicle after the burglary in Dallas. When The EGE called from the parking lot and told me we'd had a break-in, I calmly went into action, calling the police and all the insurance companies, arranging everything, going out to inspect the damage. Very calm, very cheerful. I turned to him later and said, "Huh. I guess the meds really are working."

Oh, right: the hair and stuff. So I decided that taking prescriptions was enough for my body to have to deal with, and maybe I should quit putting dye on my head. I thought about this for a while because I loved my orange hair. But your brain works in mysterious ways: you put an idea in there, and it will take it and work on it and send something back out to you, like a message in a bottle arriving in the surf. And one day I looked in the mirror and thought, "That hair looks kind of like clown hair, you know? Huh. I never noticed that before." Once that idea had floated up to me, it stuck, and as you might know, I LOATHE clowns. They're not scary to me; they're creepy. I suspect they're all sexual predators, and every time I see one, I think of John Wayne Gacy and his clown costume. Yeah, yeah: if you know and love clowns, don't yell at me. I KNOW there are perfectly nice, normal, child-friendly people who love being clowns. Still, I'm not inviting them over for tea.

So I decided to quit dyeing my hair, and then I decided to quit putting color on my toes, too. I don't much like feet and have liked my own feet only when my nails were perfectly done (by me: the idea of professional pedicures creeps me out). I had to think about that and about how stupid that is: that my feet are OK only when the nails are perfect. And the same with the hair: I'm OK only when my hair is freshly cut and dyed. What's up with that, anyway? It's just a continuation of the whole culture that tells us we're OK only if _____________________ (whatever it is they're trying to get you to buy).

So I quit all that stuff. I quit wearing very much jewelry, and I let the piercing go, the one in my right ear that I'd been working with for over two years. I talked to a friend who's a pharmacist, and while one glass of wine is OK, you don't want to drink any more than that (although I know people who do while they're taking SSRIs and have no apparent ill effects). To make the occasional glass of wine more special, we quit drinking wine at home and go out several evenings a week for a glass, making it An Actual Occasion rather than just red table wine with dinner. I've cut way, way back on sugar. While The EGE still keeps chocolate hidden for me, it's now dark chocolate, which I hate. When I think I reallyreallyreally have to have some, he'll give it to me, and I'll put a tiny piece on my tongue and feel really sorry for myself but also really, really virtuous. Or if I want a real treat, I can drive all the way across town and spend a ton on locally made chocolates. I allow myself to eat those, but who wants to 1) drive all the way across town or 2) pay a ton of money for candy?

I'm still working on the salt thang. Some headway there, not a lot.

The cleaning out and purging (the house, not me!) is back in swing, too. I'm getting rid of a TON of stuff this week--I'll post some photos later. I can see the way I want my life to go as I move forward, with less worry, less stress, less stuff, and more space, more light, more clarity and time to have ideas and work on those. Jettisoning baggage, getting clean and sober, lightening up--however you want to think about it. Like I said, it's a long, slow process, but those are the kind where you learn all kinds of stuff along the way. And anyone who tells you you get too old to learn new stuff? Those are the ones you've got to watch out for; they're out in the alley, hanging out with the clowns.

Thanks for reading. I'm pretending there's something in here that's going to be useful for someone else. Otherwise, it's all just navel-gazing, and who has time for that crap?

XO

"De La Mer"

For all I know of French, that could mean "on the horse" or "over the star" or "in your nose." But it's what I wrote on this, and so to *me* it's the name of it, even if it's inaccurate.

So, anyway, this is one of the latest projects to be finished--I've got another one, and I set Ricë up out on the front porch in the good morning light, and then dang if the camera battery didn't die. So I put it in the charger and put the battery from the charger into the little camera, and it says that one is almost out of juice, as well. Now, this could be because it's been in the charger for who-knows-how-long, or it could be something more sinister, like a dying charger. Or camera. I'm about to just give up on cameras. They're like sewing machines to me: fabulous in the hands of other people; pretty much a disaster in my own.

Anyway. So this is a Heart's Desire by Mary Grace jumper, heavy linen, that looked like this when I bought it:

 I dyed it, cut some off the bottom and made it asymmetrical, and did a binding on the hem and couching around the neck, armholes, and pockets.

 Cut out and ironed on all the appliqués.

 And now looks like this:

 These with me in them were taken at the rest stop on the way to San Angelo on Saturday--our backyard is much lovelier, but when we're home, we're always busy, so we always end up taking photos here when we stop on road trips.

 I looked at the photo above and went, "Whoa. That makes my butt look big." Is it something we pick up in childhood, I wonder? Even when we know, logically, that we're skinny, we look at photos and go, "Dang, I look chunky." As I did when I saw this one, below:

I think it's genetic or something, that automatic response. Either than or we've all been brainwashed by something in the water. . . .in which case we here in Midland should be immune and think we look FABULOUS, since we have no water to speak of.

Never mind. Here's the back:

 The lines are more practicing the back stitch. Also a respite for my fingers: it's really easy to do on one layer of linen and a nice break from sewing through two layers of fabric with fusible webbing. I try to alternate among one layer, multiple layers, and beading so I don't push my fingers too much.

 This is the octopus that made me crazy---I had the idea that I would use all the colors of floss, and that no color would touch itself as I went around. That became a big irritant, and so I had to abandon that idea--it was tough, as you can imagine--and just use whatever floss was right there ready to be used next. I groused a LOT--this is why I don't plan things out ahead of time and why I don't follow patterns or plans. I get totally caught up in it and have a hard time getting free.

 At first, I thought the octopus would be beaded and sequined, but I realized that if I put beads on him, the starfish would have to have some, too. And then the sea grass at the bottom would have to have beads and sequins so it wouldn't look unfinished by comparison, and then the whole thing was going to be too heavy--it wouldn't move well and would be cumbersome to wear. Beading a small, close-fitting bolero is good: it doesn't move away from the body and clatter into things. I beaded the bottom of a couple of full skirts, and the hem swings out and catches on things and clinks into things, and it's just a pain. So I abandoned the idea of beads and sequins--it would have looked cool but been 1) way, way too time-consuming on something this large and 2) cumbersome to wear, more like a one-time costume than a garment meant to be worn.

 The two things I wanted to work on here--well, three: color (trying out all the blue-greens I had, a color I seldom use); couching (around the neck and armholes--I'm still thinking about how I feel about this, both the technique and the look of it when it's finished); and the backstitch, which is new to me. I want to use it for text on clothes and thought a couple of words would be good to see what I think of it. Writing free-hand and then embroidering the letters is way, way out of my comfort zone: I've always laboriously stamped text on clothes, one letter at a time. And for fabric journal pages, I've then gone in and--gack--embroidered the stamped letters. Well, that's not going to happen here: I want to do something that's covered with text, and stamping it letter by letter and then stitching it would make me lose my mind for real. So I tried this. While the result doesn't wow me, the technique is solid and will work--I'd go for more contrast, for starters, and would probably pencil in rough guidelines: you'd want the text to be readable, I think--I would. Not easily readable, but readable with effort.

 I think I can get used to the back stitch. I just have to loosen up and not get all anal about the tiny spaces between the stitches. I was removing and re-doing half the stitches, trying to find the optimal needle placement (splitting the last millimeter of the previous stitch), and I have to keep reminding myself that the projects I've ended up liking the best are ones that I didn't plan, that were haphazard and a little rough. Haphazard: what a concept. I'm working on it, though.

 You can see that, indeed, colors are next to themselves. And it didn't kill me to do it, either, even thought it felt like it for a while.

So that's De la Mer. I didn't think I was going to like it: towards the end, I was all gritchy about it, just wanting it to Be Over Already, thinking I'd finish it and let Lana find a home for it. But when I tried it on, I loved it. It drapes nicely. It's got great pockets. People like it and ask about it, which is always fun for me--I get to talk about altering clothes and stuff, and that's the best.

OK--time to go take a walk before it heats up over 100, and maybe by then the camera battery will have charged so I can finish taking photos of stuff. Of course, I have to move Ricë back in the house before I leave--something I once wouldn't have even thought about. But now? Oy.

Check back later--I'll try to have more stuff to see~~XO