Scary season is upon me, which isn’t exactly as it sounds…it’s not scary because of the workload; it’s scary because the workload means my shop has become an utter hellhole.
There are scraps everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I even devised a new scrap storage system, but it doesn’t matter — just when I get them under control, I find I need 1/8 yard of this or that, and everything ends up on the floor of the studio once again.
Just when I find enough horizontal space on my gigantic work table to cut out pieces, it quickly becomes engulfed in yards and yards of swatches, bolt ends, and yes, more scraps. Piles of scraps behind my machines = I can’t push them back to use the table space in front of them; piles of scraps around my chair = I have to climb over the back just to sit in it; piles of scraps around my thread spools = every few hours my cones stop feeding and I have to perform a sort of archaeological dig just to find them again.
I clean up my scraps every night, believe it or not; but right now the volume of merchandise coming out of this studio is at a point where the scrap count reaches critical mass about two hours after the start of each work day. The chaos makes it difficult to work, though oddly enough, it makes me work faster because I’m not in the calm, relaxed, lovely little space that is my studio when it’s clean. No, the workshop is a hazardous place to be during the month of May, so the faster I can get my work done and escape, the more likely it is I’ll be able to find my way out anyway. So I let it continue.
I didn’t come up here to write about my mess; I actually came up here to look for a chalk marker that is, no doubt, buried in a corner under a pile of scraps. But while I’m here, I’ll share a photo of a simpler, less-scrappy time, when these girls were tiny. Here they are, holding their first club dresses, circa 2003. Allison already has the best club dress of all — a Team USA dress — from her 2015 World Championships trip. Hopefully Emma will earn that dress this summer.
Leave No Stone Unglued 