~Palettes~

(apologies for my spelling.  Hopeless.)

Today, after hours of wrestling with the taxes (both personal and corporate), we found an error IN OUR FAVOR.  Can you believe it?  When does that ever happen?

And today, while I was running to the store for the eye drops Piper needs, now that his eyes have gone permanently dry – and onions – wait.  Could onions cure dry-eye?  Well, maybe we won’t try it.  I found baby clothes.  GIRL baby clothes.  Little summer newborn dresses and cherry cover white onsies trimmed with arches of crimson stitching, and summer plaid over-alls (pink, lime and lavender) lightly embroidered with frogs and lady bugs.  And realized that I have my first girl baby coming, a granddaughter.

I’m not much of a girl myself, but somehow, I am charmed at the thought of a new little girl in my arms.  Will she be Ginna the dancer?  Or Lorri the baseball player?  She’ll be Little Sister whoever she is, wearing red cherry onsies and lime and lavender plaid over-alls.  The rest is a mystery.

These pictures don’t have a thing to do with what I’m writing.  I just don’t want to tax anybody’s attention span too badly.

But that’s not what I was going to write about.  I was going to point out that one of the problems with being what I am – a sort of jackess-of-all-trades (and yes, thank you, I know ex-zactly how that sounds), mistress-of-none—is that no matter what crafty art or skill you take up, you need a palette.  You can’t just buy one bit of something and be done with it.  You have to gather—everything needful.

I’m thinking about this because I’m trying to corral all the yarn I’ve been gathering.  What I had before – fall sweater yarns, some wool, some acrylic blends –  won’t do for horses or eggs or donkeys or Siberian huskies.  And I’m so Waldon-ized now that I wrinkle my nose and hold up my skirts when I step around the polyesters.  And Julie does her things all in cotton –

But it’s not just fiber in the palette, it’s color and weight and texture too.

And the felting: fiber.  Not only wool, but type of wool: merino?  romney? top?  raw? long fiber or short?  And color.  And texture.

I will admit, I have about thirty pretty big boxes of cotton quilting fabric – wonderful fabric I can’t afford to even look at for fear I’ll feel the pull of it.  And if you do glass, it’s the same thing – color, texture – antique or cathedral or shot?  And if it’s wood – oh, the wood – the type, the grain, the hardness.  And wire – color, gauge – square, round?  And all the same with beads – a million kinds, colors, shapes with the accompanying chains and spacers and closures.

If I had a studio, it would have a million drawers – walls of them, drawers under windows (there’d be a lot of those, too), over the windows—each one full of kinetic energy.

I don’t need drawers for words.  Not yet.

The over-arching palette is the one for tools: needles, both tiny and huge, smooth and barbed – lathes and cutters and pliers, and awls and soldering irons and pins and clever things for small tricks.

And the idea palette– books of pictures and advice.

But the thing is—beyond the problem of space and organization of these things (because once you start to gather a palette, there’s a huge danger you’ll forget what you’ve got and go get more) – here you are, sitting in the middle of an embarrassment of raw materials.  And now you’ve got to do something with—at least SOME of it.

If you haven’t already worn yourself out just taking it all in.

Once, G said to me, “It’s all right if you collect quilt books.  You don’t have to use them.  You can just collect them.”  And I could be pretty happy just looking at the pictures.

But I can feel a huge pull to do more: I run up to a pile of colors and things and dance around it, hands itching to do something.  I just never can settle on one thing.

I think I want to know – am I the only one who’s like this?  Standing right there at the banquet table and not able to figure out what to put on the plate?

But I’m willing to bet, whatever idea I finally come up with, I’ll figure out pretty quick: however much wool or fabric or glass I’ve got— none of it’s quite right for the project I’ve got in mind.

So, okay, when I die—watch for the estate sale (assuming that my girls learn from my mistakes).  It’s going to be one heck of a party.