Separating what we want from what we need

Still under construction (can you see all the pins?) and constantly evolving, I give you the hamster family update. Working with 100% wool is an amazing pleasure -- the warmth, the hand -- but very, very different from cotton and I've definitely been learning along the way. For me, anyway, the lack of crispness in the fabric has led to a lack of precision in the results (as does working without a pattern or a definitive plan) but given that I've been trying to loosen up it has been a great exercise. I also wanted this to have a storybook feel to it, and in thinking about what 'storybook' means to me, I've found that letting go and letting a softer, naive, imprecise piece emerge does bring me where I've wanted to go. It's fun, that's all.

My one-a-day clean out project has also really come along -- an entire cabinet cleared out of its accumulated wreckage and reorganized. The pantry cabinet is next. (Yes, sigh, all those moldy old condiments were in a cabinet other than the main pantry cabinet -- I did tell you that I had too much!) The not-buying-more part is going to be really hard, and I'm trying to figure out what is reasonable on that front. For example, Hamster Head Portraits has made me really want to go to the thrift shop to mine for more wool. When is it reasonable for me to buy more crafting materials; do I have to use up everything I have on hand? [I won't live that long.] And Dean has been asking if we can check out a local flea market, which turns out to be pretty famous, pretty big, and barely 3 miles from our house. It opens next month. Then there's Anime Boston coming up -- should we go even though going is simply going to guarantee some buying? It comes down to figuring out what's a reasonable amount of pleasure to derive from shopping and buying things that fall squarely outside the category of 'need.'

On the 'want' front, take a look at Felicia's critters made from recycled clothing.

By the way, am I the only one who has a hard time getting right on the first try the business of "type the letters you see" when attempting to post comments on blogs? The style where the letters are black and gray on a distressed background really make me squint and guess (usually wrong) about the letters. The groovy style where the letters are big and wavy are a little easier -- there, the problem isn't not being able to read them but rather getting my brain to see what's really there in the patternless jumble when it wants to see pattern and predictability. Dean did some language evaluation testing and on one of the results it was noted that he had a difficult time reading and making sense of nonsense words and I thought -- well that's kind of a foolish test. I think he and I share a trait of wanting to see and make sense of things and since he wasn't told "these are going to be nonsense words and you have to try to read them as though they were real words" he struggled to try to make sense where there wasn't any (just as I would do) but that wasn't the "right" way to do the test. There's just no one right way to see the world, no one right way for a brain to work. Thank goodness.