Change!

This post is about CHANGE. GOOD change.

On July 1st, I retired from my job. I've been a programmer since 1975 (including some years when I was out of work after 2001). In a way, working feels like you have a mortgage on your time - in exchange for your time, you get paychecks. Retiring feels like paying off that mortgage.

So what's ahead? Masses of clutter clearing, of course. But mostly I want to finally weave. I'm in the process of getting a warp on my big loom. I've made every stupid mistake you could possibly make (the warp has a color gradient for a baby blanket). My back has complained loudly and frequently, so I take lots of breaks. But I'm persisting. With any luck, there will be a baby blanket ready for the baby shower I'm going to Saturday!

Other good things are happening. Eldy and Sam installed the wall-shelving I had purchased for storing cones on yarn on the wall behind my loom. I have been on a quest for about a year to find a good solution for storing cones. It started last year with a DVD shelf I bought.

DVD Shelf Holding Cones of Silk

I had hoped to use it as a sort of sofa table behind the couch to store DVDs, but when it arrived, it was too big for that. So instead, I put it in my little sanctuary room, and it holds cones of silk - my good stuff!











A shoebag on the back of the door to that room holds skeins.  Some are silk. Some are tencel. All are luscious and shiny!











But best of all, Eldy and Sam installed the shelving I purchased from Ikea in my loom room. This is on the back wall, behind the big loom, and it's perfect! It is the Algot system - I bought a "kit" that had the uprights and four of the shelves with brackets. Yesterday I went to Ikea and bought 2 more shelves. I haven't finished migrating my cotton cones to the shelves yet - you can see I'm about halfway there. But I really like these shelves. They're just over 7 inches deep, which is perfect. And I've got some shelf labels that I bought at Amazon a while back that will be used to label the shelves (3/2 and misc on top, 5/2 cotton on the second shelf, 10/2 cotton in the next 2 shelves. There will be finer stuff on the bottom shelves.)

 

 

 

Ikea Algot Wall Shelving (7 1/8" deep)

This is another big change - most of these cones have lived in bins for the last few years (remember those - that migrated from an outdoor shed, to the closet when I got the loom room?) Let's just say there's a lot of reorganizing going on in the loom room closet, too.