- With the Tour done for another year and the house pretty much de-Toured, it’s time to move on to the next problem in my list. Rugs are becoming a volume problem: Where to store the finished product. I have scheduled a show at the Brewery in Pittsboro and will be able to display some 10-12 rugs, mounted on framed-up pegboard. I have three done already, and sold one rug to be mounted that’s in process now. Where am I going to keep these rugs while they’re being mounted; between then and the show, and then after, presuming they don’t all sell? They can’t fit in the attic; the basement is always damp and then only “not wet” because we’re in a nasty drought. I hate to think I need to rent a u-store-it unit but it may come to that. Contemplating grabbing some of the storage from my rental property but I don’t think that’s good landlord karma. But it’s tempting… Heck, I could keep the whole property as storage, although that would mean carrying the mortgage myself.
Earl the cat proved that my current system–sit the framed rugs on a table, leaning against the wall, has no future. He tried to squeeze his plump little cat body in between two of the rugs, which sent the front one to the floor. As it fell, he bolted, and managed to arrive at the floor microseconds before the rug, with an unexpected Bernouli effect, floated down on top of him. He panicked; the dogs panicked, and I had a pile of disrupted knitting on the floor where they knocked everything sideways running away from the flying carpet.
These are some of the tangible problems that keep artists grounded. I had to calculate how many cable ties I needed to buy to have enough to mount 10 rugs–6.5 per square foot of rug, on average, which comes to +-600, which means the bag of 1000 is not at all extravagant.
Looking up at the entry above, I realize I’m still stumbling into art. The rugs have been big this year in part because of their accomodation to a part-time effort. Chainsaw carving has time “wrappers”–I have to get set up, get dressed, carve, and then undo the effort on the other side, and I need three or four hours of open time in order to make any progress. I can do something furthering with a rug in 5 minutes. I can knit a square foot in an hour in the car if John’s driving. Right now, this is the shape of my art time. I am envious of artists who have bigger blocks of time to create; Bob Burridge’s email talks about finishing a 38-painting series and I’m pretty sure he works on several at a time, in big blocks of studio time. OK. Not me, not today. Today, the phone rings and I sit down to tie up more on a colorway. Or I’ll go to my slicing station and generate a few t-shirts worth of raw material.
Every now and then, I need to snatch a block of time to make design decisions and calculate yardages and pull colors, but I’m not dead in the water the rest of the time.
Today’s immediate problem is to figure out how much tie-up I need, and then to set that up, for a drive to Orlando and back next weekend for my cousin’s wedding… A bit of a pity this stuff is so bulky, because we’re taking the Mustang, and John will be unhappy about the lint. I can’t let that much production time go, though… esp. not with a housewarming rug to finish and a show coming up in the spring. Stay tuned.
