Stash

It just may be time to come out of the closet.

This is stash.

Four drawers in a lateral filing cabinet, filled with rag rug balls of fiber sorted by color. Photos weren’t color-adjusted; the red isn’t really that orange and there’s more actual difference between the blue and green drawer. The black drawer is divided into raw fiber and tied-up balls ready to be used in any rug that needs black. I started using black much more consciously in rugs #21 and 29, and now it’s just easier to keep several hundred yards tied up all the time so I don’t have to think about it when I’m ready to start a new rug. Thanks to Jinny Beyer for pointing out how much more lively colorways can be when black is a design element.

The filing cabinet and another shelf unit loaded with bins of more rug stash, sorted by color (yellow, grey, orange, purple, blue, other misc. fiber stash). Two bins of brown live on top of the lateral filing cabinet and just barely fit under the ceiling.

Clothing washed and waiting to be sliced or rolled. Moving from plastic bags to pillowcases as I find more linens in my stash aquisition efforts. Pillowcases breathe, while plastic traps air and fabric gets musty.

I think it’s temporary, but the truth is, the in-process bins have moved out to the living room because there’s no more room in my fiber studio.

I found one skirt in black and silver that I liked, that I could afford, and the lady at the booth said, “It’s ‘one size’,” and I smiled at her, all 5’2″ possibly 110#, and gestured to myself, and said, “but I’m not!” and she immediately grasped the problem.

I’m going to stay close to this issue, because I am into glitter and shine and embellishment in a very big way and the shops in Cary’s Chatham Square offer it by the yard. $100 for seven yards of embellished fabric works out to $15/yard, which is as good as I’d find anywhere. However, I’m not going to wear a sari (they don’t make the silk wide enough to be long enough for me, for one, and it’s not my culture, for two) AS a sari and the other traditional Indian women’s clothing isn’t cut for someone of my size.

There’s still a bit that I don’t understand, though: the aesthetic of color. Bright, yes. Vibrant, yes. Lush, yes. Harmonious? not to my eye. Why are there no woven patterns in the sari lengths? borders, embellishment, yes. Plaids or prints, no. Two vendors had tables of bulk-buy blouses to rummage through made of inexpensive printed fabric; I can’t find my way into understanding the color choices that the people who designed the prints made.

For today, all I know for sure is that I don’t understand the music, either; that both music and color follow a form of scale, and that quite possibly a culture that bases its music on a tonal scale I don’t comprehend might also base its color choices on a chromatic scale that eludes me.