house

July 1, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Fruits of our labors

Since I finished the studio yesterday, today I changed my focus to the garage. I’ve now fully organized the dyeing/surface design equipment, on a giant set of utility shelves, and have more or less unpacked the weaving equipment. I need to clear more space before the loom is usable, though, and need to repair a cable, re-set the live weight tension, and reattach the treadles and Compudobby before I can start weaving again. Still, we make progress!

Meanwhile, other things are making progress, too. This may be the last zucchini photo – the plant is now large enough that I can barely fit it into the camera frame! But here is the latest photo of the rampaging zucchini:

Each of the three main branches is now about ten to twelve feet long, and in addition to shooting forward like lightning (six+ inches of new growth per day), they are also sending out side branches.

And to think that just four weeks ago it looked so sweet and innocent:

I’m morbidly curious just how long the zucchini can keep this up. I egged it on a bit last week by applying some organic fertilizer, and am wondering if it will go all the way up to the backyard fence if I keep giving it more water. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, if the zucchini doesn’t eat the house entirely!

At any rate, here’s something just as exciting: our first zucchini!

It’s bigger than it looks, about 3.5 inches across.

The puzzlement, of course, is that this is clearly not an Ambassador Zucchini as it was labeled. So what do we have? The stems are prickly, which suggests that it’s a summer squash of some sort, and I’ve seen photos of ball-type zucchini that look similar to this one, so I’m continuing to call it zucchini until I have positive identification otherwise. But if you recognize this variety, please leave a comment to let me know what it is!

June 30, 2012 by Tien Chiu

The best birthday gift of all

…the studio is FINALLY unpacked and ready to go!!

I am very pleased with how it’s worked out. The room is small and packed with stuff, but it doesn’t feel cramped at all – instead it feels cozy and efficient. Tools, books, and materials are mostly within arm’s reach (a few steps away at most), and neatly organized. The room feels spacious even though you couldn’t possibly fit one more thing in.

Here are a few photos that I hope will convey what I mean. The room is small enough that I can’t capture an entire wall in one photo, so I have done a roughly panoramic set of photos that I hope will give you the general idea.

Here is my starting point, the big stash shelves directly across from the door:

Eleven of the fifteen boxes contain yarn (about 175-200 pounds of it, mostly fine threads, mostly silk and cashmere). Three contain fabric and interfacing, and the last one contains fine arts supplies (acrylic paints, pastels, drawing pencils, charcoal, and what have you). The bag at lower left contains a fine supply of reusable bags.

Just to the left of the Stash Shelves is my ironing board, which sits directly under the window:

To the left of the window are my spools of thread, neatly organized in hanging totes – rayon embroidery thread in the top tote and regular sewing thread in the bottom. If I need to take the spools somewhere, I can simply take the entire tote off the wall, snap it closed, and be on my way in twenty seconds.

Underneath the spools is my craft table, which is covered with a handy set of Olfa cutting mats that butt up against each other, giving me a continuous cutting-mat surface. The three pieces are held together with thumbscrew-joints, which means they don’t shift in cutting.

Beneath the table are two more storage boxes, one with sewing patterns (which I mostly don’t use anymore, but am keeping for awhile Just In Case), and one with leftover samples, scraps, muslins, etc. from previous projects. Also under the table is a chest of drawers, which neatly organize my sewing tools. Previously they had all been crowded onto the table or onto the pegboard, which made it impossible to find anything.

Above the table is the pegboard, of course. It contains anything that is either too awkward to fit into a drawer (the big quilter’s rulers, for example) or which I want to have immediately to hand (scissors, rotary cutters, screwdrivers, pincushion). It has vastly less Stuff on it than it used to, but the individual items are easier to get at – previously, for example, I had just two hooks with six pairs of scissors teetering on them! Now they are spread out over the peg board and easier to reach.

To the left of the pegboard is the bookshelf:

The bookshelf contains weaving, dyeing, and sewing books; all other crafts have been relegated to the living room (and a lot have gone to Goodwill). Even with draconian culling, the books just barely fit.

(I have just realized that the iron is in the wrong place; it should be on the wall next to the ironing board, of course! I will move the iron-mount tomorrow.)

Continuing around the room, the next item is the computer desk, which I could only shoot a little bit of:

The big monitor is turned sideways so it’s vertical rather than horizontal; this conserves horizontal space (which is at a premium) and also lets me fit more stuff onto the screen vertically, which is handy when looking at a long list of emails. The laptop stand lets me use the laptop screen as a second monitor.

(And yes, that is a tie-dyed bathrobe hanging on the chair. Are you shocked? I sincerely hope not.)

To the left of the desk is the door, which I didn’t photograph. Here are a few of the built-in shelves immediately to the left of the door:

These are partially empty; I’m reserving them for future use.

And here is the closet immediately next to those shelves:

Most of my larger tools are in the closet. (I spent half of yesterday building the shelves.) My dress form is just barely visible in the foreground at bottom left.

And just to the left of the closet is my design wall, currently sporting the mood board I put together for Phoenix Rising:

I plan to use this wall to work out my thoughts on design, visually speaking, before moving to materials. I may cover it with cork, so I can pin/tape/etc. things to it.

And that’s it! We’re back to the Stash Shelves again (you can just see them to the left).

The amazing thing, to me anyway, is that it all fits! There is exactly one inch of empty space on the wall with the window – the Stash Shelves, the ironing board, and the craft table are butted up against each other. The next wall has less than an inch of space – the craft table and the bookcase fill the wall entirely. It’s like the furniture was made for the space – but I can assure you, it wasn’t!

So now I have finally got a decent working space again. I haven’t the slightest idea what I’ll be doing with it tomorrow, though I’m not too concerned – let tomorrow take care of tomorrow! For now, it’s past my bedtime, so it’s off to dreamland. Stay tuned!

June 29, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Happy birthday to me!

Today I turned forty-two, which as we all know, is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Read Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if you don’t believe me.) Alas, I feel no wiser than yesterday, but at least it’s a cool age to be, if only for a year!

Being a notorious party girl, of course, I celebrated by installing shelves in my closet, sorting out piles of random stuff, and running a bazillion house-related errands. Fully organizing my studio is proving elusive! Just as I think I’ve got a handle on it, more Stuff creeps out of a corner. And setting up new infrastructure (like the shelves) to organize the Stuff can easily take half a day.

But I am working patiently at it, organizing things and tying up loose ends. A website/service called Trello has been a wonderful support for me in keeping track of the to-dos – it’s basically a Web-based Scrum board, listing tasks in columns (default is “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done”). Tools like this are a dime a dozen these days, but the wonderful thing about Trello is its pure simplicity – click in a column, type in the task, hit return, and you’re done. And you can drag and drop to reorder the tasks, or move them from one column to another. That simple.

Anyway, I’ve been using Trello with four columns: “To Do Later”, “To Do Today”, “Doing”, and “Done”. This lets me keep track of all the things I’d like to do eventually, but focus on the things I’m actually doing today. “Doing” shows what I have in progress, and the “Done” column tracks shows what I’ve finished. (It’s totally unnecessary, but it cheers me up to see the “Done” column growing!) I really like it.

Tomorrow Mike and I are going up to San Francisco to celebrate my birthday. (We’d have gone tonight, but the SF Giants are playing a home game tonight, and neither of us felt like contending with 10,000 baseball enthusiasts.) We’re going to one of my favorite restaurants – a Japanese sukiyaki and shabu-shabu place. I adore sukiyaki, especially when it’s cooked at the table, and I’ve missed this restaurant badly ever since we moved out of the city. So we’re going there. It’s not fancy, but it’s comfort food, and it will be a nice place to celebrate.

Back to organizing samples! I put away about 150 samples yesterday before running out of sheet protectors, but more sheet protectors and binders arrived today, and I still have an eight-inch stack to contend with. Hopefully I can finish those up by the time Mike finishes fixing some stuff around the house, and then we can go off for sushi and some wonderful Indian ice cream, in lots of exotic flavors.

June 28, 2012 by Tien Chiu

Almost there

Yesterday I went on an unpacking rampage, and processed about 2/3 of the boxes in the living room and rearranged the garage. Now we can reach the sofa in the living room (which was previously barricaded with boxes), and the boxes in the garage are efficiently packed and organized by content types, so we can actually find things we’re looking for. They are not unpacked yet, though, because I need Mike’s input and help with organizing his items. That will likely have to wait for the weekend.

On the bright side, however, it appears likely that I will actually be able to use the loom soon. (That was why I rearranged the garage!) There are things packed on either side, and I’ll have to run an extension cord for electricity, but I think I have enough space to throw a shuttle. A few repairs will need to be made first, but nothing too difficult.

Most of my stuff is now unpacked – the boxes that remain are mostly Mike’s stuff, which he will have to unpack and organize himself. I’m guesstimating that I have another half-day’s worth of unpacking (random/miscellaneous items from dining and living rooms, plus cleaning up my studio) and then I’ll be DONE DONE DONE! Which means I’ll finally be able to start fiber work again. Hallelujah.

And here is the latest zucchini photo:

It’s getting harder and harder to show the entire plant, and to give an accurate idea of how fast the thing’s growing. So here is a single tendril. Five days ago, it was barely encroaching on the patio, and now look at it!

It’s grown at least two feet in the last five days. Egad!

And here is something equally ominous and exciting:

Yes! It is starting to bear its first fruits. Let the flood of zucchini commence!

June 26, 2012 by Tien Chiu

The joys of unpacking

I’ve spent the last two days furiously unpacking both studio and the rest of the house. To my utter astonishment, I now have the studio roughly in order – there is only one half-empty moving box yet to be filed. Admittedly, there is a big pile of stuff on the table, and an ominously large stack of samples in a corner pile that need to be dealt with – some from Complex Weavers sample exchanges, some my own that need to be categorized and filed. The stack of samples and other stuff that needs dealing with is about eighteen inches high, though some of those are large items that take up more space. The actual mass of samples is “only” about five inches tall.

Here is a photo of the most interesting corner (the studio is too small to take a photo of the entire room):

I’m pretty pleased with myself – the organization is quite different (and more efficient!) than what I had previously. Thread is hung neatly in storage boxes on the wall, random objects like pins, sewing machine needles, etc. are housed in the many-drawered cabinet underneath the table. Previously they had been strewn randomly across the craft table, or precariously teetering in baskets on the pegboard (where I could never find them). While there is still quite a bit of random stuff to put away, at least now I have an organizational scheme, and a place to put everything. As a friend said once, “Now I have an ‘away’ to put.”

(The cabinet-with-drawers, by the way, is new: I bought it from Ikea yesterday. While Ikea is not known for its fine furniture (I bought it because it was cheap and I was broke), I do adore buying things from Ikea because it’s so much fun to assemble the furniture. Their instructions are clear, simple, and precise, making assembly quick, neat, and satisfying. It’s like putting together a small jigsaw puzzle: it’s so much fun to find each piece and put it in the right spot, and then there’s the final “click” as the last piece goes ceremoniously in place. Delightful!)

I’m also pleased with myself because I had worked out the layout down to the last inch, and to my surprise, it worked! In particular, I had calculated that there I could fit both table and bookcase against one wall, with just one inch of wall to spare. I was worried about mis-measurement, but in fact they both fit, with 3/4 inch to spare! I got it exactly right. Happiness.

Now, of course, there is the rest of the house, which is still full of boxes. (A girl has to have her priorities!) Actually I have unpacked quite a few boxes, but you’d never know it by looking: the living room is jam-packed with boxes of books, and the kitchen is in an awful state of disorder. I suspect that we have more things to put away than the cabinets will actually hold, and then there is the small matter of organizing the stuff that will fit. I hadn’t tackled the kitchen because Mike was still installing the dishwasher (there’s nothing like trying to unpack around a Giant Box occupying a quarter of the kitchen), but he finished it last night (yay!) and so I will tackle the kitchen today. After that I will unpack the living room, and only then do I tackle the garage.

I’m glad I took a week off! I don’t think I’ll be done unpacking until Thursday or Friday.