Letting It All Hang Out -- Creativity is Messy!

The wonderful thing about a blog is that you can frame your world any way you want.  On my blog I can be smart, clever, creative, tidy, witty, young, and happy all the time.  I only have to show what I want to show.  I get to put whatever spin I want on whatever I show.  I get to play God (a little).

The happy corollary to that principle is that, in figuring out what I want to show and what I want say about things and who I want to be on the blog, I usually end up influencing my life for the better.  The process of living the dream of writing a blog and being the person in the blog transports me into really living the dream every time I write a post.  Just thinking about writing a post is usually beneficial in itself.  It's all a very healthy process that has greatly enriched my experience of my life.  It's magical to wake up in the morning with a blog post in my head.  Sometimes I go through life framing things in terms of blog posts -- which is a also blessing!

The bad thing about blogging is that, sometimes, a blog can, inadvertently, make other people feel bad about themselves.  For example, I almost exclusively show photos of clean spaces.  Some people think their houses pale in comparison to my (feigned) tidiness.  Unless you peer into the background on some of the in-process shots, you might think that I live in the magazine house that I want desperately to live in but can never seem to achieve.  The truth is, I hurl all sorts of junk out of the way before I take most of my photos!  There!  I said it!

I've recently gotten hooked on Pinterest (www.pinterest.com).  If you you're the creative sort and you haven't checked it out  you're missing out!  On Pinterest are many photos of fantasy craft rooms.  Perfect, neat, tidy, colorful, glorious craft rooms.  Positively dreamy.  Here's a sample:

I am very lucky to have a craft room.  I call it my "project room".  I designed it myself.  I love it.  It has many of the elements of the "perfect" craft rooms.  It has a huge closet lined with shelves, a big worktable, cubbies, cabinets and shelves galore, double and quadruple French doors, display shelves over the doors, a workspace for my sewing machine, and it's own little patio and garden area.  Plus it's crammed with historical artifacts from my life and family.  It's a good day when I get to play in there!

I've wanted to post a piece on my project room for weeks now.  Except I can never get it clean enough.  I'll make some progress and then I'll get into a project (or twelve!) and the room gets strewn with stuff on top of the stuff that was there already.  And the walls are only partially painted.  And I haven't painted the faux bricks on the floor yet.  And I just recently finished painting the French doors and the trim -- a task I started a  horrifying NINE years ago!  And then I started the flea market booth and now I make even more messes than before!

Soooo... in the interest of being real and unintimidating, I've decided to just show it to you the way it is.  If I ever get it cleaned up and perfect, I'll post photos and you can be happy for my accomplishment.  In the meantime, and at the risk of making myself look like a total slob and positively shabby in comparison to the Pinterest craft rooms, here is a photo tour of my playroom -- with abundant evidence of play!

Cabinets, cubbies, and projects in progress (for example, the green frame awaiting it's fabric center).

The fabric that will be in the green frame.

I adore my sage cabinets and the vintage barkcloth
 (on the right - that's been in the family since it was new)
that curtains off the area under my sewing machine.

My work table and a bit of a view of the windows. 
Drawers for gifts and wrapping supplies under the table. 
Cubby for knitting yarn bottom left. 
In the far corner (out of sight, unfortunately) is the off-white velvet armchair
that was in my mother's room when I was a baby.  I love having it.

The worktable is made from two sets of cubbies
(free from the curb after someone tore them out of their closet)
with a counter on top (repurposed from elsewhere in the house)
 that still needs a bit of trim.

My sewing space. 
Lower cabinets are stock cabinets just set in place with a counter laid on top of them. 
Upper shelves are just cheap shelving units from Walmart. 
All are painted sage green to unify them.
Above is my collection of vintage chenille for making baby quilts.
They are on a vintage store fixture that was used for displaying men's shirts --
but I always think of it as a vintage pie shelf! 

Love my french doors! 
The stained glass window is just hanging there for safe storage -- but I love getting to look at it! 
The blackboard on the right was always in my grandmother's laundry room during my childhood. 

My  "Yellow Stuff".  An accumulation of history (from left) my childhood sewing basket, my high school/college sewing basket, my mother's sewing basket, my grandparents' ice chopper, fun juice glass and foil/wrap dispenser, my Aunt Margaret's treat tin, my grandmother's flour tin, my ex-father-in-law's chicken plate, plus a few miscellaneous acquisitions to the right. 

The right half of the glorious closet.  Pretty close to being labelled-bin-heaven once again with just a bit of tidying!

I hope you feel all tidy by comparison now.  And now I must go dream of achieving perfection while I clean my project room to reclaim my pride.

The Bitter End -- Part Two

After I wrote the piece "The Bitter End" (see blog archive if you missed it -- August 26, 2011), a strange thing happened, more memories bubbled up, and some conclusions solidified.  So I guess the story's not quite done.

When I posted the piece (which, had no photos in it), a thumbnail photo of a house came up with it.  I have never seen this house before.  Usually, when I post a piece that has no photos, one of MY other photos comes up with it.  This is not what happened this time.  It's almost as if the evil spirit is showing me where it lives now.  I don't know.  But, if you recognize the house, beware!

As I reflected on the piece (which, by the way, got the most hits of anything I've ever posted!), I remembered other incidents.  The most dramatic of them I want to add in here.  It involved an antique dresser mirror that was my friend LaGayle's.  It looked a lot like this:

Though not a freebie, it was in the house because it was in my car when the transmission died.  So we put it in the house for safe keeping.  At least, we THOUGHT it would be safe!  As Mark was moving out, he went to carry the mirror out.  He carried it out the front door, across the front porch, and out the front porch door.  When he reached the front step, something forcefully shoved him off the step from behind.  Luckily, Mark had the presence of mind to toss the mirror off to the side as he fell in the other direction.  The mirror smashed into hundreds of sharp, jagged pieces but, fortunately, he was unharmed.  That mean thing managed to destroy the nicest piece in the whole house.  Of course.  But I am SO glad it didn't harm Mark.

The conclusion that I had in my head the whole time I was brewing "The Bitter End" (which was several months, by the way), evaded me when I actually wrote it.  But it bubbled up immediately afterward -- when I was on the road and away from the computer and unable to edit it in.  It was the overall conclusion that I had come to on the subject of evil spirits and whether or not we were really encountering one -- something that I don't believe in. 

My conclusion was this:  How much of this story do I believe?  I believe none of it.  And ALL of it. 

I do know, however, that something really wonderful came out of it all.  Whether there was something in that house or not, I don't know.  Whether there is evil among us, I don't know.  But I treasure the skill that Mark and I learned there.  We learned to recognize something dark, section it off, and kick it out.  That is a hugely valuable life skill.

I read a near-death experience story once (I read alot in that genre).  In it, a woman died (temporarily) and went to a place that was filled with all the negative human emotions:  fear, anger, hate, envy, bitterness, irritability, despair, depression, anxiety, loneliness, sadness -- the list goes on and on.  She realized:  all these negative emotional are the components of evil.  I had never thought of it this way.  I had always thought of it as: there are human emotions and there is evil -- as two separate things.  Now I see that evil is among us all the time and the daily challenge is to choose the good and reject the bad.  I truly believe that fear, anger, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, in particular, are the instruments of evil and that we have the power to reject and evict them. 

I do not say this lightly.  In my college years I was almost completely disfunctional from anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and agoraphobia.  If I could sit through an entire class without having to leave, that was an accomplishment.  If I could get out of the grocery store with everything I went in for (instead of having to cut off my shopping incomplete), that was an accomplishment.  If I could get all the way through my Tuesday night dinner date for $2 veggie plates at the 410 Diner with my roommate, Deirdre (bless her for loving me through that challenging time!), without having to go sit in the car, that was an accomplishment.  Every day and every task was a minute-by-minute hell.  For the better part of four years.  I know the depths of that kind of hell.

I have also watched many people I like and love struggle with the ravages of substance abuse   (I will be posting a piece on substance abuse soon called "Evil Comes In A Shiny Can" -- stay tuned.)  I believe that this is a tool the devil uses to gain access to the soul.  I really do.  I have watched it too many times. 

The point is:  Mark and I have learned to see when something dark overtakes us (often we have to point it out to each other).  We can recognize it (though often not immediately).  We can label and contain it -- which diffuses it (often much more quickly that you might imagine).  And we can tell it "NO!" and kick it out. 

Whether or not this comes from "real" encounters with "real" evil doesn't matter.  This is a life skill that catapults us in the direction of love and light and good. 

If you like a happy ending, like I do, I have one for you:  The evil's wicked plan has backfired!  Good wins!