Episode 4: Where it all goes when we are gone

“I would believe that easily,” Greg responded. “I mean, with regards to your ability to do anything with it all in your lifetime.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’m not gonna get to it all.”

“I would believe that. That’s easy for me to believe,” Greg nodded with a smile.

Go into any creator’s studio and you will see that they have more supplies than they will ever use. In a wood worker’s space you will find bins full of  wood, in a quilter’s studio you will find stacks upon stacks of fabric. And an author generally has floor to ceiling shelves for the books they call ‘friends.’ My house is my studio, and it’s no different. In fact, I have more fiber in my stash than I can possibly process in my lifetime. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed by this, and I worry about what will happen to it all when I die. But mostly I feel immense joy. My stash is a carefully curated collection of ideas and dreams. And that’s pretty wonderful because I love those possibilities. They hold hope and inspiration which is something we all need.

I think of it like this: we are all makers in one sense or another, and our hands love to create. Which means that collecting ideas and inspiration (and the materials to use for those ideas) is part of life. Whether we make food or clothes or songs or yarn, the presence of materials to create means there is potential. It doesn’t have to be a huge complex collection. However it shows up, your stash represents hope for the future.

Now, there can be a dark side to this because creative folks generally have more ideas and more materials than we can use in one lifetime.  Which can lead to getting bogged down and overwhelmed. So it’s crucial to find a way of relating to all of these possibilities.

Whether you are curating a fiber stash, harvesting wood, or collecting fabric or books or pantry spices–even if you don’t have a specific plan to make anything with those materials–consider this; all that possibility is packed with joy. And who doesn’t want to have a more than a lifetime supply of joy?

Welcome to A Fiber Life. In this episode I’m talking about the fine line between inspiration and overwhelm. I’m going to tell you how my old entrepreneur mindset did not prepare me to be a fiber artist. And I’m going to share with you how my relationship to materials, and all of the potential they represent, evolved. I’ll introduce you to my friend, Ann Smith, who helped me with this shift in a profound way. You’ll get to hear how she relates to her stash, which is truly groundbreaking (you may want to take notes). And Ann reveals the reason why she’s not worried about her stash outliving her. So, if you are someone whose head is exploding with ideas, or your storage for materials is beyond capacity, this episode is for you.

I have a notebook that is titled my “Yes, No, Maybe” notebook. I made it during an intense time of growing my business as an art therapist and trainer. I was working with an incredible coach named Andrea Lee, and was trying to figure out my next steps. Each week that we met, I would come to her with more and more ideas for groups and workshops and retreats and new ways of networking. I was flooded with ideas. I think I told her once that it felt like there were as many ideas floating around my brain as there were leaves on trees. And I just didn’t know what to do.

So, Andrea, in her infinite wisdom, told me to get a notebook and divide it into three sections. “Yes, No, and Maybe.” And each time I had an idea, I was supposed to write it into whatever section of the notebook I felt it belonged.

I worked diligently on this coaching homework. After a while, I had a few No’s, a few Yes’s, and lots of Maybes. The next time we met, I shared the lists with her. I thought this was the end of the activity and felt good to have my ideas organized a bit better. But she had a next step for me. She told me to go back to my list, find the section of “Maybes,” go to the top of that section and cross-out the word “Maybe.” I followed her directions as I wondered how that could help the situation. Then she told me to write the word “No” as the heading to that section to replace the word “Maybe” that I’d just crossed out. Her point: every idea in the “Maybe” section was actually a “No”.

This was miraculous for me because it released me from the agony of sorting through all of those “Maybes.” It helped me become less overwhelmed and to stick with the few items in the “Yes” section rather than wasting any more time with the “No’s”. And my business thrived.

Fast forward a decade, and I’m not growing my business anymore. In fact, I changed my lifestyle from being an entrepreneur to an artist/farmer.  And, well, this is where my stash began. Sure, I was a knitter before we came to the farm. But that yarn stash was mild compared to what has happened since we moved. I’ve collected tools and fleeces and fiber braids and weaving yarn, and I just can’t name it all here.

“I think that there’s another side to it,” I told Greg. “That sometimes I feel overwhelmed, because there’s so much possibility. So, like I have this black mohair that I actually haven’t ever seen, and I really really wanted to try. It’s a raw fleece, and I really, really wanted to try processing it. And because it was black, I thought it was going to be so cool. And so I keep thinking, “Ooh! I want to get to that mohair.” But there’s also a number of other things that have the same nature to it. Like, let’s say I got a lot of cashmere that I want to blend. And there’s all those fleeces in the downstairs closet that I need to scour and wash. There’s a lot, and I just found a new way to braid roving and make it and then felt it and make it into a braided rug. And I really, really want to make that. I thought maybe you’d be interested in, because you can braid.”

“I could. I could probably have enough dexterity to braid,” Greg said. “I would be interested.”

“See?” I said. “It’s a possibility, and you know it’s right there. And then we could dye it natural dye and then I could sew it up because that takes a little bit more effort you know with the handwork and stuff or you could try but anyway… There’s a sense of overwhelm that I try very hard to  keep at bay and just say, “You know, it’s fine as long as I have some projects that I love and I’m working on. I don’t have to rush to get to the black kid mohair.” Though now that I’m talking about it I really feel like I want to start it now.”

“I can see your eyes kind of sparkling a little bit about it as you’re mentioning it,” Greg said. “I can see that kind of light up a little bit of a thought. Like, you haven’t remembered it in a while.”

One of my favorite childhood books is called If you Give a Moose a Muffin.  Basically, there’s a moose who comes over to play, and his creative inspiration starts when the kid gives him a muffin. Which then gives him the idea that he needs jam, and then to pick blackberries, and then make a picnic, and pretty soon the moose and his kid friend went all the way to create a puppet show. See, the picnic tablecloth turned into the stage curtain, and then they were off and running with a lot of fun and mess involved in the whole process. The bottom line? I am the moose.

I didn’t know that there was an actual name for this “Moose” condition until I took a creativity course from Sara Saltee. She is a wealth of knowledge about the creative process and helped me understand that there were many parts to my creative self. But the part that is dominant is the one that collects ideas and materials. It actually has a name! Sara calls that part “The Curator.”

My notes from her course describe my curator like this: “In this mode, you create carefully selected collections or arrangements that celebrate and preserve a vision of excellence. You have the gift of discernment and an instinct for the exceptional. You enjoy learning deeply about the things that interest you, and come alive when hunting for remarkable examples of them. You are enthusiastic about helping others deepen their appreciation of the objects, experiences, or ideas that exemplify the best of what you love.”

When I understood that my passion for my stash and the acquisition of tools and new fiber was a necessary part of my creative process as a fiber artist, there were fireworks. It made so much sense to me. As an entrepreneur, I had to shut out other possibilities and stay focused on one goal at a time. But  I’m really not built that way—in my heart of hearts I’m a curator who loves to find new things and new possibilities to add to the collection. And now that I have a fiber stash and understand that I’m a curator, I can have a completely different approach to possibilities. They are not things to be weeded out and whittled down to only one at a time. They ARE the activity.

I talked with my friend Ann Smith about her fiber obsession.

“Wherever you see a basket in this house, you will find fiber in it pretty much,” Ann told me as we toured her home. “I seem to enjoy organizing it and figuring out where to put it almost more than using it.”

Ann’s got amazing design talent as a weaver and spinner and knitter, and she’s been a curator of fiber nearly her whole life. Which is part of the problem, she admits.

You see some baskets?” Ann began. “Here. This is a decorative fiber stash,” she said, handing me a colorful weaved container.

“This is a decorative category of stash,” I replied, looking around her dining room. “So this area has your fancy dishes and your dining room table. And then in the corner, you have the basket full of really nice yarn.”

“Some of it’s hand-spun,” She proudly admitted. “And some of it is not, but it’s coordinated with the basket.”

“So, it’s just sitting there. Do you have pets?” I asked.

“No. Oh, no.” She quickly replied.

“Yeah, this would not work with pets,” I said, figuring most animals would playfully tear through it. “And there’s another basket with pictures of your grandchildren. Do you have plans for this other than looking at it?”

“I have plans in my brain,” Ann said. “But, but I know it’s there. So when something might come to fruition, and I go, “Oh, I’d like some gray and white blends, hand-spun,” I know it’s there.”

We moved to find another basket under a table.

“We’re still in the dining room, which is not the fiber room,” Ann said. “We’re still in the decorative category.”

I peaked in it.

“This would match perfectly if you had, like, fuchsia,” I said. “So you have some nice brown and gray that goes with the wood of the basket, and it is under an oak table. So it barely shows.”

“And then we could go around this way,” Ann said, guiding us. “And here by our nice brick fireplace is more of my fiber.”

We weren’t even to her actual fiber room yet, and already the size of her fiber stash was impressive.

“God, how much do you have of that?” I asked, astonished, looking at one particularly large and uniquely colored fiber stash.

“Let’s not start with that already, Lisa!” Ann playfully scolded while laughing.

“Merino alpaca, 50-50. This is beautiful,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ann said. “And someday maybe I’ll use it, but I hate to ruin my display by actually using it.” 

“Then that would be bad because then you’d have to go come up and buy some,” I said.

“I might not have to buy it. I might be able to find some to replace it. But I just liked the look of this,” Ann said.

“It goes nicely with the brick,” I added.

So, if you are wanting to take notes, there’s fiber stash category number 1: The Decorative category. If you aren’t spinning or weaving your fiber, maybe it’s time to decorate with it.

“Now we can move on into the den,” Ann said.

We walked into the next room; the den, not yet Ann’s fiber room. 

“You’ll notice, there’s 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 baskets,” Ann counted. “And it’s hard to know what’s in those.”

“But there’s stuff brimming out there, and some has popped out,” I mentioned.

“One of the baskets is decorative,” Ann said. “They are maybe on a lower tier than some of the other storage areas, because they’re lower priority, but then I surprise myself sometimes. It’s like, “Oh, I forgot about that.” It’s kind of like Christmas most days when you look.”

We then found some specific fiber called “memory fiber.”

“Oh, there’s lots of memory fiber because, you know, whenever we travel, I have to look and see where there’s a yarn store or fiber store or something,” Ann said.

We pulled down a box on top of a high shelf.

“Well, this is Collinet yarn. Which has a memory because it was when my sister, a cousin, and I went to Wales and we went to the Collinet factory in Wales, which I’m pretty sure that’s not even there anymore,” Ann said.

“It’s so beautiful. It looks like it’s hand dyed” I said admiringly. “That whole basket is full of it.“

Okay. Let’s add memory fiber to the category list. Thanks Ann.

“Okay, then this bookshelf,” Ann said pointing to the giant wooden structure. “Hopefully someday my son won’t want it back. I hope I get to this stuff pretty soon.”

“This is sort of like “next- in-line” yarn,” I commented.

“Well, kinda,” she replied. “The ones that are next-in-line are probably already bagged with a pattern, but okay.”

Are you keeping track?  Low-priority fiber, and Next-in-line fiber. It’s all important fiber.

“So this is all hand-spun,” Ann referenced pointing at another pile. “This is a guest room. There’s a nice bed with a quilt on it. And a bookshelf. But then there’s also a shelf with a glass door. And inside is beautiful, complete yarn. All hand-spun. There’s also that basket.”

I went into another basket in the room.

“I really can’t get it out because it’s stuck in here,” I said struggling.

“You have to be careful because I think it’s so dense and so smushed. Some of you may have felted by now,” Ann said.

“I can’t even you you spun all that,” I remarked. 

“I did spin all that,” Ann replied. “I’ve been spinning for quite a while and I hope one day I’m going to lay this all out on the bed and color it, kind of coordinated, and then make some blankets.”

“It’s something for one day. Oh! How about we call it “One Day Fiber”?” I suggested.

“Yes, and it will be pretty to look at when guests come. They will go, “What, what, what, what’s that?”” Ann laughed.

We found more low-priority fiber in the file cabinet in the garage. There was Left-Over fiber in the closet. Basically, it was all an amazing array of fiber; much like you would find in a huge yarn store.

“It feels like one, too!” Ann said

After touring Ann’s fiber stash, I felt like I was able to completely take on the role of curator. She showed me that my curation methods (just buying fiber and putting it in a closet) could be honed and become even more exciting. I could now have “decorative fiber” and “memory fiber” and “one day fiber”–the possibilities were expanded. And Ann didn’t cross any category of her’s out because the possibilities were an important part of her whole process.

But I was still wanting to know whether Ann worried about what will happen to her stash when she’s gone. 

“I just want to ask you a question for just a second,” I began seriously.

“Sure,” Ann said

“Now, I’ve been sort of wrestling with this problem myself, and I see that my problem might be a little bit not as progressed as your problem. But the way I would put it, is that my stash has exceeded my life expectancy,” I said. 

“Oh, yes. Me too. Many times over,” Ann said, not missing a beat. 

“Well, doesn’t that worry you at all?” I asked.

“No,” Ann replied quickly. “I mean, I know how some people like to clean things out because they don’t want to leave them to their kids. But you know, I really don’t come from that point of view, because this is what brings me joy. So why should I get rid of some of my joy? In my life, you know, I dealt with all my mom’s stuff,” Ann continued. “I’ve already warned my kids that they are gonna have to deal with this. But you know what? It’s easy, because all you have to do is call Lisa Mitchell from the Whidbey Weavers Guild and say “Ann’s gone. Her stash is available,” and you know, anybody from the guild will come and help take care of that stuff.”

“Isn’t that called a “dead weaver’s sale”?” I asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. I guess so,” Ann said. 

What does a term like “Dead Weaver’s Sale” actually mean?

“I think it means exactly what it says,” Ann began. “But I don’t think you necessarily have to be dead. Maybe it could be a moving Weaver’s sale. Or someone just not weaving anymore.  You know, I think we could re-categorize some of the ways that this happens.”

“It’s like a sisterhood,” I said thinking about it. “Where people sort of take care of each other stashes that their family doesn’t necessarily know what to do with.”

“Or doesn’t have an interest in it. I mean, you know, I think that a lot of times, weavers and spinners, they go and get all excited about how they can make their stash huge,” Ann said, talking about others who might want her stash. “I mean, they can add to their stash. And so it’s like, they become Ann.”

“Permission to have joy and take over,” I said.

 “And I would be happy for these people that I know from the guild to have it. That’d be fine with me,” Ann added.

Now that I realized the continuum of joy and possibility that my stash could impart, I decided to bring this idea to Greg to see what he would say. 

“Now, if something happened to me, what would you do with my stash?” I asked.

“Well, I would shed a lot of tears, and I think I might not be able to touch it for a while,” Greg said. “I think I would leave it. If I were going to stay here. I think I would leave it in hopes that sometime someday your spirit would come back to it. I think that’s what I would do.”

“Wow,” I said with a smile.

I get it.  It would be a lot to take care of my stash. So I took the question to my daughter Ruth.

“Okay, so here’s the thing,” I began. “I am dealing with a little bit of an issue. And the issue is that my fiber stash has exceeded my life expectancy.

“Uh huh,” Ruth said, sounding unsurprised. 

“And I would like to know if anything happens to me. Do you want my stash?” I asked her.

Ruth sat and thought for a few seconds.

“Um, so I guess this is my perspective on it: if there was some sort of like, sentimental value in it for me, I would be more inclined to say ‘yes,’ but I have a lot of other things related to your farm and you guys that are sentimental that I would find much more value in keeping. I feel like somebody who would really enjoy that stash might be more of a better suit than me, because I wouldn’t know what to do with it personally at all.”

“I think you’re being so nice about it. Are you saying ‘no’?” I said.

“I am saying ‘no.’ Ruth said firmly. “But I’m not even trying to be nice. I just feel like, you know, there’s probably somebody out there in the world who would think they struck fucking gold with your stash of fiber, and would know exactly what needed to be done and would love it deeply. And that person is not me. So, thank you for the offer. But I’ll take a hard pass on that one. Is this something you’re starting to worry about where your large stash might end up eventually?”

“Well, I don’t think it’s a worry necessarily,” I said. “It’s just this extreme curiosity of like, ‘what do people do with all their stuff? Particularly, stuff that is so specifically desired?’ I mean, it’s not like a lamp.”

We chuckled.

“I would be happy to help give and distribute those things as a gift,” Ruth responded. “I would be happy to do that. Because that would be like helping you, but I don’t want the stuff necessarily. No.” 

“Okay, so you might be a good person to like, deal with it,” I said.

“I could,” she replied. “I am prepared to deal with any things that you leave behind, even if you have lots of things left behind. So maybe you could ask your group friends what they do, because they clearly know.

“Well, they would say they’re gonna have a ‘dead weaver sale’,” I said.

“There you go,” Ruth said. “I would get in charge and get in-touch with people who do one of those. And you tell me who does it, and then I just give them all your shit. And I would pay them to do it because I’m not going to do a Dead Weavers sale. Somebody else can take care of that. I would pay them to deal with it.”

So you can hear the plan. My stash will spend some time with Greg, and then Ruth will call up the guild and hand it over for a Dead Weavers sale. And my ideas and dreams will keep going–into hands and stashes of others. It makes me feel great to think that my stash doesn’t have to be limited right now or ever. 

I reconnected with Ann about my epiphany.

“It’s almost like, there’s a secondary part to my stash collecting. There’s the joy of collecting it. And the memories and the decorating, and then also the using it. But then there’s also that somebody else could have a lot of satisfaction with it,” I said.

“Exactly, Ann said. “Because, you know, there’s a whole camaraderie of people that will get that much joy out of it, too.”

So, if you are overwhelmed with ideas or materials. Congratulations. You are creative and human. Your ideas don’t have to become something in order to be important. They represent the possibility of something new. They hold change or transformation or just fun. They give us something to look forward to. They tell us that as long as there are possibilities there is  hope.

If you are a curator who feels bad for not using everything you’ve collected, try putting things in categories. “Yes’s,” “Maybes,” “Decorative,” “Some day,” “Memories.” All the categories are wonderful–except the “NO” category.  Stay away from the No. Don’t limit your curation. Embrace it. Because more possibilities means more joy–for now and for the future.

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to hear more stories about our farm life and what we learn when we live close to nature and use our hands to make things from what we raise, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast listening app–or, if you want to be notified every time we post a new episode, you can sign up for those notifications on our website: www.afiberlife.com.