Sewing Room Crime Scene
Chapter One: The Saboteur

This is the saboteur. Hire her for weddings, funerals, and Bat Mitzvahs...she makes chaos out of order faster than you can do it yourself! An added bonus: she sucks at business so you can get her to create chaos for FREE!

What you are about to see is shocking. I have hidden nothing behind the flash photography.

Sadly, my income doesn't allow me to buy a proper lens for my crime scene photography so it is difficult to appreciate the true scope of the crime here. For that I would need a lens that is a little more panoramic. This is my drafting table. What is on the surface of this table:

glue gun, ribbon pins no one bought, pom pom reams, hand made cards, paper labels for other products no one bought, old patterns, thread rack, iron, fabric, purple fleece that makes my skin crawl, unfinished knitting project, many rulers, at least three pairs of scissors, boxes of sewing accessories, box of ribbon, oilcloth bag, weird crafts I made but didn't like and are now shaming me, unused zippers, stencil, one battery, tape measure, calling cards, beer bottle caps, pattern pieces to who-knows-what patterns, a strange beaded thing a kid neighbor left at my house three years ago that I keep meaning to send back to her before she goes to college (she's about 12 now), the stapler I was looking for for months, old sewing machine parts to sewing machines I no longer own, printer ink, tape dispenser, hangers, and various lids to lidless bins.

These boxes contain a lot of crap. When I say a lot of crap I'm not being modest. I'm scared of them. I've eliminated one but the other two are currently attempting to strangle me. The various types of contents found include:

Shirts that don't fit me, folded fabric scraps, folders, envelopes, paper, binders, paper, catalogs from my business, receipts, more envelopes, random lengths of bias tape, curtains, bubble wrap (?!), magazines, scrap stuff, a cheap clock, a cheap phone, address stamp from over ten years ago, misc. store display stuff, tissue paper (which is currently coming out of my ears), ribbon, zip lock bags full of miscellaneous stuff I have avoided going through for fully ten years now.

The Floor, which looks like a craft store exploded on it, has the following items on it:

Bits of fabric, labels, packages of craft scissors, cards, shamelessly ruined oilcloth, manila envelopes of every description, bit of paper, shreds of tissue paper, stacks of tissue paper the kitties peed on at some point without me noticing until now, random lengths of ribbon, Max's school projects, pattern pieces, plastic bags, paper, bags, bolts of fabric, paper bags I'm afraid to investigate, old letters, corrugated cardboard, books, plastic bins full of crap that is able to multiply itself.

What do you get when you are a writer, a generally crafty person, a pattern collector, an urban homesteader, and a failed business?

You get an unbelievable amount of crap that can never be reckoned with nor tamed nor stuffed into a ten foot by ten foot room. It spills out like a sea of locusts into the basement and the garage. I think my heart is made of pattern paper, rick rack, and weird miniatures.

This is my weight to bear, apparently. No matter what I do I keep landing in this same coliseum full of chaos with teeth. It's now been almost an entire year since I officially ended my business yet I have not been capable of dealing with all my stuff. I bring this up on my blog just about once a month. There is so much money tied to this crap. I wasted so much money trying to be a success and now it is just a pile of unwanted stuff collecting dust. I have been giving some of it to friends but frankly, they don't seem all that crazy-interested in taking it off of my hands.

Part of the problem is that they seem to feel guilty taking something from me that I bought for my store and failed to sell. Part of the problem is that there is only so much Mrs. Meyers a person can go through in a year.

I know what has to be done but it's like having to come to terms with who I am and that's not such a pretty activity. I just love a double edged sword: the longer I keep the stuff the longer I live with the reality of my failure and risk the ghost of my store rising up from the garage, the basement, and from my sewing room to come strangle me while I sleep.

Some people don't want me to get rid of it all. Some people think I should try a lot harder to sell the crap, not realizing that every day I fail to sell the crap is another day I have to feel like a stupid piece of shit business person. Another day I have to understand all too well how I landed us in such a deep financial quagmire. Every time someone suggests I keep trying is just another day I get to deliver the same message to my very tired head: you suck you suck you suck.

I tried to explain to my dad why the magazine is not about making money. I tried to explain how I am saving up for printing costs because it's just about realizing a dream but I'm not allowed to invest in ventures ever again. He had excellent suggestions for how I could do it as a real viable venture, starting off doing an online magazine and telling subscribers that their subscription will go towards a printed version after the first few issues. But that means trying to do something successfully.

I don't do that anymore.

It doesn't matter what I do or how hard I try. I am not a businessperson. I am a writer. In the end it is the only thing I consistently do well and isn't something I will ever make money doing.

Yet...yet...how do I describe how hard it is to let go of all this crap because it could be useful, could be made into cool stuff, could be sold somewhere? But my head is ready to combust. I am in here, instead of doing anything else right now because this room is like a disease eating away at my life. I can't do my living room project until this room is cleaned up and out because right now I can't find my sewing machine feet in the mess nor the space to sew the chair covers. I cannot move forward until I shed the past.

So I have begun the process. I am going to give myself one whole month, the month of December, to get rid of every last vestige of my failed venture. To clean out the stench of what I'm not meant to be, the person I can't be.

****Continued In Next Post****

Invisible Snow

Sometime soon I will resume writing more about food and including some recipes as well. I am only this past week really getting back into cooking after a whole lot of eating out while moving. In the meantime I want you to squint your eyes almost shut on the above picture and tell me if you can see the snow? Point and shoots don't capture snow very well. At least, mine don't. I'm hoping that the camera I'm buying from my crafty friend Mary (at The Craft Addict) will capture it better. I love snow. Even in April! It snowed giant flakes yesterday in the late morning.

Weird weather? Hell yes!! Last week there was one day that got almost to the 80's. Now snow.

I have no desire to live in a big city again, but if I did, there is only one city I would consider moving to: Portland, Oregon. It's so beautiful! The flowering trees alone are enough to take my breath away, but all the gardened nooks and crannies, the crazy number of bicycles and scooters in evidence everywhere makes me giddy. While I will always consider San Fransisco one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I'm sorry to say that I have put Portland on the top of the list, right next to Edinburough.

This is my mom's neighborhood. That's my mom in the purple.

The best news is that Pippa is officially free of ring worm. Penny still has a tiny speck of it but because it is so tiny the Vet has given them both clearance to be out of quarantine. As long as we don't sleep with them. So the acclimation of the pets has begun and it is a tedious process. The heartening truth is that Chick doesn't want to eat them, she wants to play with them and lick them til they're sopping with dog slobber.

Pippa is fairly tolerant of it though she's constantly trying to figure out how to avoid this dog whose tongue is bigger than she is. Penny is not at all willing to be covered in Chick's spit. I don't blame her a bit. Chick was being an adorable puppy trying to get them to play by nudging them with her paws. Unfortunately, too hard of a nudge with her paws could produce a kitten pancake so I have to force the dog to sit and mellow out. Which she does for two seconds.

The encouraging part is that neither of the kittens is so fiercely hateful of the dog that they've tried to hurt her. Penny has made a couple of gentle swipes at her nose but not put her claws out. This is encouraging because Chick was tortured by Ozark and in the end I'm pretty sure she changed her agenda from "Play with weird creature" to "Eat small orange feast". If the kittens don't torture her they may come to some kind of truce, maybe they'll even develop one of those enchanting rare relationships where the dog and the cats snuggle up together.

We have finally found out why it seems that we are surrounded by nursing homes disguised as regular homes- it's because we are surrounded by three homes for developmentally disabled adults (two of them for men only) and one hospice. For some families this might seem like a giant shadow on the dream house situation. I can't say I'm particularly excited to find out that we're surrounded by pretty iffy characters...but to be honest, I don't really think it's much different than anywhere else. At least we know what kind of issues might be found in those homes, generally speaking you can be living next to Jeffrey Dahmer and not know it until someone finds a human head in his freezer.

There are two reasons why I'm not particularly concerned:

These homes are under constant supervision by professionals, day and night.

We have a ferocious black dog who has already terrified EVERYONE in our cul de sac. No one will try to enter our property without permission.

It just seems so typical of us to find our dream home in a cul de sac where people come to die or to live under the caring iron rule of professional assistance. Anyway, it's the kind of thing we're used to. Philip's parents, the whole time he was growing up, had him and his brother spend every Thanksgiving and Christmas with the homeless people of Sausalito, the majority of whom were drug addicts or crazy people...often both at the same time.* I grew up around a lot of hippies who were pretty much fringe drifters; people who put their toes into the pools of regular life but always ended up drifting back to the outer edges of society with their pot and their guru sloguns.

It it flipping cold outside today so I think this is the time to dig into the sewing room I promised a sneak peak at my newest project but it will have to wait for one or two days as I unpack my sewing crap. I'm so excited about that room but it won't really come together until it's painted which certainly won't happen until after my trip to Scotland.

For those not yet in the know: my dad is getting married in Scotland in May. I am going to go without my boys because we can't all afford to go. Both my brother and my sister will be there and it will be the first time we've traveled anywhere together in over twenty years. I'm super excited and the only shadow over it all for me is how I don't have time to slim down and I am embarrassed to have my family see me so large. (My dad and my brother have not seen me in two years) I have decided that I must at least have some clothes for the trip that don't make me look worse than I already do and I am going to make a new coat.

I think it's time to go and make more coffee and then start dealing with the room. And the mess. Yes yes. I can't do it. What doesn't kill you may not make you stronger, but at least you're not dead.





*Not to build their character but to be good Christians. They sponsored an "open door" night at their church every Friday night where they would cook meals for the homeless and poor. This included Thanksgiving and Christmas.

A Room Of My Own
(a before shot of my everything room)

This is my room. My sewing room. My writing room. My guru room. My sanctuary. My spy tower. My hide out. My club room. My retreat. Doesn't look like much right now since it's filled from floor to ceiling with crapola. It's seething with paper and fabric and string and patterns and just about everything a person like me deems necessary to survive. I'm going to redefine my definition of necessary very soon.

My last sewing room was orange and I loved it. I love the energy of orange and I still want to have some orange somewhere but I don't think I want it in my new sewing room because the pink and grey carpet would argue with orange. I want no arguments in my sanctuary. Except for the ones that go on in my own head.

As everyone knows, I'm not a fan of carpet in general. I have to admit that I like this one. Very Victorian. And not plush. Plush is just a big trap for hair and dirt and dust and...

Excuse my Howard Hughes moment. This room could be the perfect place to enjoy my delicate constitution and heart palpitations. I'm going to need a fainting couch though. And a lackey to cool me off with giant palm fronds when I get a little over heated from the exertion of complaining about my very mysterious illnesses.

Well, I've got lots of work to do. I need to get that room set up so I can make a coat. I will at last be able to contribute to the New Vintage Wardrobe flickr group because I'm making a coat from a reprinted Vogue pattern. I'll give you a sneak peak soon. It will probably be a while before I get the room painted because I need the coat for my trip.

Hope you all have a great Wednesday!