I am Not an Animal!

I'm behind in my blogging.
I've been working on my New Year's resolution of cleaning up my clutter and getting my shit organized. Hardly worth blogging about but here I am...

The upstairs of my shop (where the public isn't allowed), has been a pretty scary Collyer-Brothers-Syndrome type of place for a couple of years now. That is, until this week, when I finally decided to tackle it.

Some would've looked at the mess and considered me at least borderline-disposophobic (google it), but really I'm quite sure I'm neither that messy nor compulsive.
I just hate waste is all, Is that so wrong?

Today I filled an entire contractor's bag with fabric remnants from my massive collection of extra "stuff". Just a baby step really---but this is indeed challenging, because (if you've read any of my previous blogs), you know I really can make use of some of the most obscure castoffs---eventually. It's kind of beautiful thing when you want to create something and all the materials are just lying around your house (if you can find them...).

Another recent baby step I took was throwing away the bag of hems I'd been collecting from when I hem people's pants in the shop. I had had this fantasy of someday making a big humble quilt made entirely out of Hudsonians' pants' hems. Long dark strips stitched together log-cabin style...it was gonna be so cool ...Then one day a little voice inside me just said "Oh Jesus Get Real, Lisa", and I threw them out. (The fantasy lingers, however).

It is a vicious cycle, though. For every successful purge there is always some sort of counterbalancing event that keeps the boxes piling up. An estate cleanout, or A gluttonous acquisition of cheap, justifiable goods --like recently, with the closing of the Watnot shop (more on this later) .

Sometimes a relapse comes in the discovery a new thing worth hoarding.
A few years ago someone dumped a huge buttload of old ceremonial Oddfellows' costumes on my doorstep. Mostly boring plain muslin robes --but I just couldn't throw them out . I decided to dye them all kinds of RIT dye colors, in hopes of making them more sellable ((and BTW I'm still selling them to this day)). At the time, though, I had no place to put them, and they sat stored in garbage bags in my basement for ages. To make matters worse, I became obsessed with all the fun colored lint that I was harvesting out of my dryer, and I became a lint collector.

Not long into the accumulation of lint I was vindicated, however, when someone was curating a local art exhibit about things that people SAVED.
My big jar of lint sat on a white pedestal in the middle of that gallery and was a huge hit.