1. Not your ordinary 2×4 – I love what Tim did here with rounding off the corners. It’s a small detail, unlikely to be noticed unless you’re looking up; but it makes it classy and impresses those who notice.
2. Shelves, stocked with dye – And room to grow! The shelves are deep enough to hold two (one in use, one backstock) and ultimately should be able to house all of the available colors.
3. Crock pots a-ready – I have base yarn on the way, and these should start seeing use by the end of next week!
4. Standing in doorway, looking to left – We debated putting doors on the shelves under the sink, and decided not to; eventually, though, the shelves under the crock pots will have doors. Notice also the small bar above the sink; this’ll be great for moving yarn from the crock pots to the sink without having to take them off the hangers.
5. The drying rack – Looks remarkably like the drying rack from the store… probably because it is. Tim cut the middle shelf out (the one that all the African Violets were on) to make it shorter so that it could fit in the smaller room.
6. View outside over the crock pots – maybe this view every day will inspire me to rip down some of that crazy ivy. That bar, by the way, is on an adjustable chain; so if I need to make it higher or lower it’s going to be incredibly easy to do so.
7. View outside over the sink – I can not wait to have time to do a garden this fall; my poor vegetable gardens have been unused the last three years because I knew I didn’t have the time to devote to caring for a vegetable garden. I can already taste next spring’s tomatoes…!
8. Lovely gift from Beth – No reason really to include this, other than our friend Beth did the macrame herself, and I feel like it’s a good luck piece.
9. Standing at back door – I don’t know that the winder is going to live there permanently, blocking the coffee mugs and taking up valuable table space. BTW, mom, do not worry about that table – not only will it not be near anything being dyed, but I have a slipcover for it just in case.

All hail The Mighty Tim (some call him… “Tim”…), who is just all kinds of fabulous!

This is my office. It may look no worse than usual, har har har, but it’s actually coming along really well. I’ve pulled out about two boxes of stuff to donate and another two bags of stuff that can be thrown away.

Here’s the living room, relatively clean, even!

The other side of the living room, with hutches filled (and a pile of framed photos and art that I need to hang on walls).

Kitchen – done!

Dye bar, about 90% done (shelves are put in but doors still need to be made/go up; this isn’t a priority though as I won’t need doors until I have a backstock of yarn that I need to keep away from cats and dogs) –

Other half of dye bar, with coffee mugs –

Overall what still needs to be done? Tim’s still working on the drying rack, that should go up in the dye bar later today or tomorrow. Doors for the dye bar. Eventually, down the road, new kitchen cabinet doors (very far down the road). Still some unpacking, straightening, and rearranging of small things to be done (like hanging all those pictures). Overall, though? It is really coming together!

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I was quoted in the paper, talking about the 3/50 Project? My friend Juanita saw it, and called me at the shop – she didn’t know about the shop; in fact, I hadn’t seen Juanita in years. She owns a ceramic shop out on Williston Road, and I hadn’t been there in years since I hadn’t been working on ceramics. But I’ve been itching to get back into it for a wide variety of reasons (I miss it, I need to be doing something creative that isn’t about yarn, I miss it, I’m good at it, I have all this stuff why waste it, on and on). So I decide that this is a confluence of events and I should to to Juanita’s on Tuesday in order to pick up some slip and new paints.

All day Wednesday and Thursday (and by “all day” I mean the time “before and after I go to work”) I putter around the house, finding and reclaiming old paints, locating old brushes and taking stock of both them and whatever tools I can find.

Friday morning I go to clean out the ceramic room. I pull out everything that doesn’t have to do with ceramics (OK; I leave the comics and photos in there, on the large bookshelf). Since the room had become a stockpile for All Things I Didn’t Know What To Do With, I wound up taking out two very large bags of trash, breaking down close to 2o boxes, and just generally Purging. I piled up all the supplies for my other hobbies in a different room, expecting to go through and sort and prune from that… because it still looked pretty tight inside the small room and I wanted to get a table in there for a workspace.

I decided that instead of four three-high adjustable shelves, I could get more in there if I made three four-highs. So I did one, and then went to do the second one… and that’s when everything came to a screeching halt. The shelves were in corners, so they could have walls for support. Those walls had paneling on them that started just a couple inches above the shelves… which meant I couldn’t get the shelves any higher because I couldn’t get the bracer for a fourth shelf into the hole on the third shelf. Unless… unless I wanted to move the shelves over by about an inch. Which means unloading the shelves because with the molds on them, they weigh close to 400 pounds or so. FLAIL!!!! Also, FAIL!!!!

I go to get Tim, thinking that if I have to move one thing, I might as well think about moving other things around, but I’m flailing at all the spatial stuff – things that I think should fit turn out to be an inch or two longer, and I really need to plan this out before I do it, and yadda yadda. Enter, The Tim.

This is getting pretty long; I’m going to put the rest after the cut.

So. Enter… THE TIM.

Also enter, THE CATS. THE CATS are very excited that the ceramic room is open – they never get to go in there, and… well, you know about cats. Curiosity, and being little fuckers who break things, and all. So while I’m standing there talking to Tim about moving stuff, and getting the table in there, and blarg… Tavi keeps winding herself around our feet. So happy to be in the room. So happy to be where she’s not usually allowed to be. So happy to show us that she’s there. And generally being a pain. So I look down at her, exasperated, and say “if you want to be in here so bad, I should just switch rooms with you!”.

Blink.

Blink.

And then it was like a mad race between Tim and I, shouting out ideas of how things could be changed, built, moved, made better (we have the technology!). And this is the place where Tim rocks like a rocking thing that rocks a lot – this was Friday morning, and I told him that I was really ready to work on things and that it was important to me that I be doing things by next week… whether I had a new studio or not. I would be fine either way, but I didn’t want things to be in limbo for a long time when I had greenware precariously packed in the trunk of my car.

Friday after I went to work, Tim plugged everything into Visio and came up with floor and shelf plans.

Saturday he purchased and cut all of the wood for the shelves. Saturday was also the day I threw the fuck out of my back.

Sunday he deconstructed the habitrail in the cat room, built shelves for the molds, moved ALL OF THE MOLDS HIMSELF into the new area.

Monday he reconstructed a new habitrail for the cats in the old ceramic/new cat room, and moved my work table into the new ceramic room.

Tuesday I spent my day off pouring ceramics and making messes.

It. Was. Awesome.

One of the bedrooms in our house is a glorified Cat Room. It’s also the Paperback Science Fiction and Hardcover Biography room (shut up, I come from a family of librarians and writers) and doesn’t see a lot of action other than that.When we have people over, or need to quarantine a cat, it’s nice to have the space to do that. And when we had five cats, and two of them didn’t like other cats, it was also nice to have the space to put them all in and trust that everyone was going to have a corner.

OK, this is going to have to be a filler post. Sorry for keeping you on the edge of your seats! I’ve been trying to get back to this post for most of the day, and am going to just give up and publish it the way that it is. Trust that [hopefully] tomorrow, I will finish the story!

This may shock some of my more recent readers, but there’s something crafty and creative that I like to do more than knitting. I KNOW. Many many years ago (back when Sesame Street was in single digit age), G-ma taught me how to do ceramics. And up until five or six years ago, I did them pretty regularly. I would spend summers with her, and much of our time was spent cleaning greenware, painting, firing her kiln, glazing. When she had the stroke, she indicated that her kiln and all of her molds were to go to me. They moved from the house in Merritt Island to the farm, then briefly into storage, then into this house when I bought it. I kept up with doing ceramics, firing the kiln every couple of months or so, until Tim and I got married. The last big thing I did was to make all of the centerpieces for our wedding. After that, we got sidetracked in the house by renovations – power was cut off to where the kiln was, and coupled with the back porch not really having enough room for both my ceramics and Tim’s woodworking… well, renovations took the front seat. I piled the molds into this tiny stupid room we have – most of them that weren’t in current use were there anyway – and my tools and paints got set aside in various places around the house. The kiln began to gather dust.

But I still needed a creative outlet, and thus turned to crochet… and eventually knitting… which led to spinning… and the rest is history.

In the back of my heart I still missed ceramics; but it was easier to shut the door on that than it was to find space in the house in which to spread out. Painting takes a while – we didn’t really have a table on which I could paint that was also not cat accessible. Greenware is very fragile, so it should be kept away from nosy curious graceless fat cats (like we have). The room in which my molds were stored was this crazy tiny room, really more of a glorified closet, and I also stored my comic books in there, boxes of photographs, and all of my other craft supplies (soap-making, candle-making, chocolate-making, bath salt stuff, scrapbook supplies). I started just tossing things in there when I didn’t know what to do with them. Old gift bags that might be re-used. Boxes for shipping stuff, on those rare occasions I might need to ship something. The room became a wreck, and soon I hated to even go in there to look for things.

For my birthday a number of years ago, I asked some friends to help me clean it out an organize it. That worked for about a year. Then it was back to the way it was. I suppose if I’d been actively using it as a craft room instead of passively as a crap room, it might have been different. But… no.

Lately, the last year or two, I’ve really been missing ceramics. It’s something I did steadily for thirty years – and loved – so how could I just turn my back on it? I kept meaning to go out to my friend Juanita’s ceramic shop and buy some slip, but kept putting it off (I’m only off on Tuesdays, what if she’s not open, I have other things to do, it’s not like I have somewhere to spread out enough to pour anyway).

But something happened the week before last that brought it all to a head.

To be continued…

They came and chopped the tree down on… I think it was Monday (I wasn’t home, at any rate). I left the camera for Tim, though, and he snapped a couple pictures for us. Say goodnight, tree! They chopped and dropped, and hauled it off to be burned – because of the beetles, we couldn’t destroy it ourselves. Believe me, if it were at all possible, we would have taken the wood out to Doris’s to feed her woodburning stove this winter.

That’s one saga I’m glad is over. I hope it’s over… I keep imagining that the trees around it are looking more and more brown and dead every day, as eeeeevil beetles consume them from the inside out. I’m sure that’s just paranoia, though, right?