Get Hooked at Sea 5 is OPEN for registration with Rebecca Martin of StoryTeller Wool!
About Rebecca and our onboard workshop: |
Rebecca Martin is a passionate fiber artist and educator based in Longmont, Colorado. Her studio is filled with all things wool, however rug hooking, both punch needle and traditional, take center stage. She is a certified Oxford Punch Needle Rug Hooking Instructor and in the process of becoming a McGown Certified Teacher for traditional rug hooking.
Rebecca’s creative work and articles have been published in Rug Hooking Magazine and the ATHA magazine. She teaches locally and online and has taught at both the ATHA biennial and the Sauder Village Rug Week.
Online lectures for guilds and Rug Hooking Magazine have been an enjoyable way for her to expand her teaching. When not hooking, teaching, or writing, Rebecca can be found hovering over her dye pots, creating rug yarn for her company StoryTeller Wool.
She has prepared an exciting workshop for us, Where the Wind Blows – Embracing the Unexpected in Our Art by Experimenting with Different Tools and Techniques. This experience will include both traditional rug hooking and the option to punch in combination, along with other creative and visually impactful techniques.
There is comfort and security in the known, the planned, the predictable. We see this in our creative lives as we reach for the same tool, favorite colors and materials, and employ known and practiced techniques. For the most part this works for us, so we carry on with the familiar, but this trip isn’t about the familiar, so let us embrace that in our art as well.
When you board the J&E Riggin you are embarking on the unexpected. The daily destinations are dictated by the wind direction. Your clothing choices are influenced by the weather and can change throughout the day. There are expected elements, like a place to sleep and regular meals, but all delightfully unexpected – you are falling asleep in a berth on a 1920s schooner, you are dining on the beach.
As we sail and experience Maine we will explore rug hooking in a new way, with no set destination. Our familiar hooks and wool strips will sail with us, but so will punch needles and yarn. Proddy and quillies will be embraced as we see what creative combinations we can create when we open ourselves to the unexpected. This experience is open to all, seasoned rug hookers and those brand new to the art. Let’s see where the wind blows. |
About the Schooner J&E Riggin & our trip: |
The well-loved J. & E. Riggin is a beautiful, historic, two-masted schooner that has been rebuilt to accommodate guests on overnight adventures. She was built in 1927 as an oyster dredger for Charles Riggin in Dorchester, New Jersey and is one of a very few vessels of this kind that still sail today. Her name, J. & E., comes from the names of Mr. Riggin’s two sons, Jacob and Edward. This special windjammer has enjoyed the reputation of being able and fast and lays claim to having won the only official oyster schooner race ever held in 1929 on the Delaware Bay. After being rebuilt and re-rigged as a passenger vessel, the Riggin has sailed Penobscot Bay since 1977. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991. - from the J&E Riggin website
She is now captained by husband and wife team Justin Schaefer and Joceyln Schmidt.
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Our trip includes:
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Only 16 spaces available! Yes, you may bring a friend, partner or spouse. |
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About our organizers, 207 Creatives: |
207 Creatives is a partnership of two fiber artists, Ellen Skea Marshall of Two Cats and Dog Hooking and Elizabeth Miller of Parris House Wool Works, who have joined together to bring you unique fiber events and experiences. We are, what you would call, slow makers- our craft takes time to produce. Planning, drawing, hand dyeing wool, color planning a piece, cutting the wool strips (worms), hooking it all by hand and finally the binding.
The two of us run our own shops and businesses, each offering something slightly different than one another. At the end of 2016, we decided to support each others’ work by encouraging customers to consider the other shops if they were looking for something we didn’t offer directly. Since then, we have worked together to develop and host hooking events to help you enjoy some fiber experiences.
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Want more information or ready to sign up? |
Contact us at 207creatives@gmail.com or Beth at 207-890-8490. We will send you all the pertinent information and a registration form.
We hope you'll join us for this transformative, creative journey! |
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These are just a few online options that are intentional and value driven. I think if you join at least one online space that is not owned by one of the big social companies or driven by the traditional data-harvesting, attention-selling business model you will quickly find out how different and valuable online participation can be. These options are different because they are run by individuals or small organizations that care about your wellbeing and want to provide an ad-free, troll-free, data-mining free experience with the primary purpose - not the bait - being human connection.
As promised, here is a great book recommendation if you want to reduce the time you spend online in a passive, mindless manner and bring your internet use into a more intentional mode.
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I loved this book. It is well written with a historical and philosophical context to why we need to be pulling away from the addictive, mindless use of internet content and social platforms. It's not just a lecture, though. It provides useful, actionable suggestions and methods for making our internet use more valuable and intentional. Newport has another book called Deep Work that is also helpful especially if you are old enough to remember the days before all of this digital distraction and before the deification of "multitasking" (which, by the way, we aren't wired for). If you have ever even briefly wondered why it can be so hard to concentrate or even converse deeply now, both books are a great read.
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No one likes an intervention. No one likes to be told, "You're doing it wrong," or even that "There's a better way." However, I think we can clearly see that "traditional" social media platforms have had both intended and unintended consequences that have been damaging to our society, culture, and democracy. That is not to discount the positives of connection these platforms have offered. It's just that if someone presents me with an offering that is part healthy and part poison, I'm probably going to pass and look for the all-healthy option. Every option I've provided here I am personally either running or subscribed to. I hope to see you in one or more of those, or if you have others that you love, drop a note in the comment thread and let us all know too.
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My teaching includes - and has for a long time included - encouraging rug hookers to create their own designs. I have talked people out of my own patterns in order to encourage their own design journey; I am *all* about hookers designing for themselves. What I am not about is taking a baseball bat to the knees of studios that also sell patterns and kits.
I am noticing a false dichotomy developing in the rug hooking community that is damaging to those small studios who are still making a go of it with patterns and kits and I want to address it right now. The owners of those studios are, in some cases, people I know well and love. Having run a retail operation for the past decade-plus, I know how tight their margins are, how many hours they work, how difficult some customers can be, and how absolutely devoted to rug hooking these studio owners are. I also know a few people who have sold their pattern and kit lines to larger studios and who appreciate the revenue that is coming from the continued sales of their designs. That revenue helps underpin what these same artists are able to do on the strictly creative side, which is often teaching, making art, writing, and more.
Can we stop bashing commercial patterns and kits, which pretty much only serves to eat our own colleagues alive? Can we understand that we are smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time, that we can preach the gospel of individual expression and design while also not disparaging studios that also offer their own creative designs to the public? I think we can.
Those within this community who are advancing this false dichotomy between self-design and commercial patterns have often never run a retail studio. I have. I have had the quiet, personal, no-one-else-is-in-the-shop-right-now private conversations with other studio owners about how tough this niche is, how wholesale costs keep going up, what the import costs are for our Canadian colleagues, how upside down the margins can be, how difficult some customers are, how we literally get shoplifted, how we answer customer inquiries at midnight, and more. I - and they - have often offered non-shopkeeping teachers and artists wholesale pricing on the materials they needed for their own work and for classes they've been teaching because we maintain resale certificates and they don't and we want to help as much as we can because we know how hard every single aspect of this niche is. When, in return, we see semi-viral social media posts crapping on one of our product lines, it stings.
Here's the deal: not everyone in rug hooking wants to design their own. I SO very much wish they did. As I said earlier, I spend a lot of time designing workshops and teaching students all about self-expression and personal design, from the journaling and sketching forward. Each year a colleague of mine, who also sells a beautiful line of patterns, and I organize a trip aboard a 1927 schooner here in Maine for our guests that pushes their boundaries and results in - guess what? - their creation of their own deeply felt designs. I just taught for four days at Fiber College opening up the world of self-expression and design to more students. I get it. I'm 100%-f**king-here-for-it. But I can do all of that AND support my friends and colleagues who put painstaking care and creativity into their commercial pattern lines.
In my own hooking life, I have hooked exactly four designs that were not my own. I had a reason each time, mostly because I knew the recipient of the piece would really dig the pattern that I purchased from another artist. I honestly don't love hooking designs that aren't my own, which is why I've designed all the others myself, for me. There is a singular joy and sense of deep expression when we design our own work. On the other hand, I had one customer who never designed her own. She really loved the traditional primitive aesthetic and while I custom designed several pieces based on her specifications, I could never persuade her to sit down with the pencil herself. She hooked my and other artist's designs all the way through a life-threatening illness and pulling those loops brought her a centering peace. Who am I to say that's wrong? Who am I to say that she - or for that matter I - should be shamed about the creation or use of purchased patterns?
I'm here to tell you that the reality in the small rug hooking studio world is that a lot of owners are on the struggle bus, financially, from a morale standpoint, and more. A lot of studios suffer several existential crises per year. It's difficult enough that the market is dominated by a few large studios that many of our customers treat as destinations akin to Disney. We don't need also to heap shame on customers and/or studios that deal in commercial patterns and kits, many of which are inspired and beautiful. And shame is certainly not warranted considering that patterns and kits are hand-crafted pieces of artisanship. Not even all of our customers know that these patterns are hand-traced each time they are made, carefully drawn on the grain of the foundation, sometimes flipped for our punch customers, and sometimes customized on request. In our studio, materials for kits are hand-picked with careful consideration, measured carefully with extra added in always, and then, if requested, cut to the size the customer prefers to hook with. These are not mass-produced products. Every single one is hand produced with a lot of thought and care.
Commercial pattern and kit lines are sometimes the gateway to hooking for people who have never seen it before. These lines also employ people in our craft, especially in the larger studios but even in the smaller ones too. I've had more than one beginner tell me that she wants to work with a pattern, just this first time, to focus on the flow of loop pulling without any other task in front of her.
I could go on, but you get my point. False dichotomies have no place in rug hooking. We're better than that and hey, even if we aren't, our niche is too small and fragile right now for us to be beating up our own. Haven't we had enough false dichotomies tossed our way in politics and advertising, hoping to impact our behavior or shame us in some way? I'm not for shame, but I am for rug hooking surviving and thriving into future generations, along with healthy and profitable studios available the world over to supply the things we need, whether we design for ourselves or not.
About the featured image: This is my kitten, Tesla, back over a decade ago and the subject of one of the first commercial patterns I ever offered, "Tesla's First Snow." It's sold many iterations, both in its original and customized form, and I'm proud of it.
]]>This past weekend I traveled four hours to take care of my almost two year old grandson while his parents were at the hospital having his new baby sister. When you are spending the day with a two year old, everything slows down. Don’t get me wrong; my grandson is a very busy, active toddler, but…the thing that ground to a halt was my own busy, active mind in the context of my professional life. Thoughts of the next marketing task, the next inventory buy, the continual chess game of making the financial pieces work best for Parris House Wool Works were silenced in favor of, “Let’s go play on the swing set” and “I have missed so much by not being able to spend more time with this sweet child.”
For over a decade now I have poured just about everything I personally have and am into my small business. I will be fifty-eight years old in just a few weeks. It’s long past time to re-evaluate and this reality was brought straight to me, express delivery, by the day spent with my grandson.
But that delivery was a long time coming and I have been feeling the effects of burnout for quite some time. This blog post is not an appeal for sympathy. Rather, this post is an appeal for all of you to re-evaluate your own priorities, a cautionary tale, an offering from a life slightly misdirected.
Let’s start at the beginning when I opened Parris House Wool Works on Etsy as a side gig to my full time real estate career. I would be making a killing at real estate in today’s market had I not abandoned it in 2013 to make space for Parris House Wool Works to become what it is today, but I don’t regret leaving that career. We’ll get to what PHWW has become today in a minute.
I started Parris House Wool Works because I had fallen in love with rug hooking following the death of my mother in the spring of 2011. At that time, I needed a hands on, tactile art that was meditative, serene, and expressive. Rug hooking was, and still is, that art for me. At that time also, I was starting to experience burnout in my real estate career. The effects of the real estate market crash just prior were dragging on here in rural Maine and I was making very little money for very long hours and hard, frustrating work. But the worst part was that it was becoming evident that the big banks and government were only interested in helping the big banks and government. There was no federal bailout for the homeowners themselves and the banks were cash drunk on taxpayer dollars and were therefore not motivated to compromise in the interest of their borrowers. Injustice galls me. I had to make a change.
So, I purchased the inventory from a local hooking shop that was going out of business and shortly thereafter, left real estate to pursue running a rug hooking studio full time. I knew that I did not want to be tied to a bricks and mortar storefront and that’s why PHWW has become a primarily online venture. I started by following the business model of the shop owner I’d purchased my inventory from, but it soon became apparent that what ostensibly worked for her would not be a great fit for me. And I have worked sixty to eighty hour weeks ever since, discovering what works, what doesn’t, and earning hard won experience along the way.
Parris House Wool Works is a success by many measures. I’ve built a favorable reputation in this niche, I have a wonderful online community on our social media platforms and am building another on Mighty Networks, our gross sales figures in most years have been enviable relative to many other small rug hooking businesses, I have been given the opportunity to write two books and teach at some of the best venues in the country as well as in my own studio. My work has been published in magazines I’m very proud of, featured on a major national television show, and written up in newspapers multiple times. I have wholesaled my work to much bigger retailers creating associations I treasure.
Let me go back for a moment to the part about our gross sales being enviable in most years. This is absolutely true. Our customers have been very supportive of this enterprise, beyond my initial expectations. However, the operative term is “gross sales.” In rug hooking, actual profit margin on retail sales of supplies is razor thin. I mean looking-at-the-very-edge-of-the-razor-straight-on thin. So a studio that has a comfortable looking gross sales figure may be netting out next to nothing, nothing, or end up in loss territory. This was true for many, many studios in 2013 when I first took this business full time, and it is true for them today. This is what we are up against in rug hooking:
This is the scenario behind the possibly glazed-over, far-away look in a studio owner’s eyes when a customer asks for a discount, says “I could just make this at home,” “I’d like to return this half hooked kit; it’s just not for me” or, “I think I’ll save the two dollars and buy this from (insert big studio name here).” And although every studio owner’s “why” and every origin story is different, the market forces are the same. The one caveat is that studio owners in Canada have it even tougher because of the exchange rate, shipping charges, and import duties on American raw materials that they may depend on.
In short, retailing rug hooking supplies is brutal. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that there are lots of other ways to be a professional in rug hooking than putting the primary focus on retailing supplies. After a decade of working in this niche and at least a few years of wear and tear on my body and mind as I approach a burnout state, I am looking at those other ways more seriously.
Here’s what I will be doing.
Here’s what I will not be doing:
Making changes is not without risk. In fact, there are elements of this shift that are anxiety provoking for me, and your own shifts may be scary for you too. I go back to, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” It’s all any of us can do. I have much bigger changes planned along a longer timeline that may well change the “where you are” part of the adage, but for now, this is what I can do with what I have where I am.
In writing this “manifesto for my survival,” I have found clarity around what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. I highly recommend grabbing a pen and paper, or your preferred laptop or device, and doing the same.
I would like to thank a two year old and a newborn for this final shot of clarity. Additionally, I would like to thank my body and mind for sending up attention-getting stress responses, hoisting high all the red flags of burnout that I’ve been ignoring. I would like to apologize to my intuition for ignoring it also, way too many times.
Again, this is not about garnering sympathy. This is one woman speaking to mostly other women – you know who you are – who may be on the same trajectory, whether you are a small business owner, a stay at home mom, a corporate employee, or something else. Burnout is real, it can be devastating, and we have to watch for and address it.
I joke that Henry David Thoreau is my dead soul-mate. I should listen to him (again). We all should. He said:
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
]]>I rarely go to Rockland without a visit to the Farnsworth Art Museum. Every once in a while I'm in Rockland with my dog, Wyeth, so of course, museums are off limits then. We left Wyeth home for this trip, however, so all was normal.
At the time of this writing, the Farnsworth is having an exhibit called Betsy Wyeth: Partner and Muse. The exhibit is a moving and educational collection of pieces by NC, Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth that was bequeathed to the Farnsworth after Betsy Wyeth's passing in 2020. These works were part of Andrew and Betsy's personal collection and therefore were rarely, if ever, seen in public previously. It was this exhibit that I was most excited to see when we purchased our tickets on Monday, and it certainly did not disappoint. The paintings are on exhibit through January 9th, 2022 and I highly recommend taking a look.
However...there is another exhibit ongoing through January 2nd, 2022 that I was previously unaware of called Women of Vision. The exhibit honors thirteen women who have contributed significantly to Maine culture. As I was walking through this exhibit area, I was admiring all of the work. Then I saw it...
This hooked rug, Eden by Marguerite Zorach, is incredibly commanding when seen in person. It is large (and in charge...), with so much texture and detail, hooked mostly in wide cuts, some curling over on themselves. The museum description says it is wool on burlap, backed with linen, but after looking at it closely (not touching), I am not certain that is 100% accurate. There were some loops that didn't look like wool to me, but that is a small detail. I am also not sure if this is the original color palette or if there is some fade to it, having been hooked over a century ago in 1917. It is truly affecting to stand in front of it. I was awed and somewhat overcome.
Here are some detail photos of the piece:
The Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine also has some wonderful paintings by Marguerite Zorach that I have become familiar with, but on this day at the Farnsworth I discovered another of her paintings in their collection.
While I always find myself standing for a long time in front of Zorach's paintings, and this one, Land and Development of New England, was no exception, there was something especially tactile and energetic about the hooked rug, Eden, that made it hard to walk away from at all. I think my husband was amused, without fully understanding, that I would have camped out in front of Eden for hours had it been possible. I admire and am grateful to the family who donated it to the Farnsworth so that the public could enjoy this remarkable piece of textile art. To view other objects in the Farnsworth's Marguerite Zorach collection, click here.
If anyone ever questioned that the technique of traditional rug hooking could yield fine art, Marguerite Zorach's work puts that question definitively to rest. I often tell my students not to allow any limitations on their imagination when it comes to developing their technique and style. The notion of treating rug hooking as though it should have limitations in the form of hard and fast rules or rigid genres is shattered when one encounters a piece like Eden, or, for that matter, much of the work being done by contemporary hooking artists all over the world.
The Farnsworth is a treasure in Midcoast Maine and I highly recommend a visit. I would also like to add that the museum shop there has kindly ordered my book, Heritage Skills for Contemporary Life: Seasons at the Parris House, to carry in their book section. So if you visit, you may pick up a copy (and lots of other beautiful things that help support the museum) there if you'd like.
I hope this post has inspired your own creativity in whatever medium you practice and that you will confidently allow your imagination to drive your process.
]]>Go ahead. Raise your hand. Nod in agreement. Stare in to space remembering the last time that happened. Or maybe, for some of you, that's never happened. Maybe you're too young for that to have happened or you're just incredibly good natured. But if it's happened, please read on and if it hasn't, maybe read on just in case.
I am fifty five years old. 2020 has been one of the most memorable years of my life, and likely yours too. It's memorable because of a global pandemic and all of its associated hardships, an incredibly active storm and hurricane season here in the United States, a very strange drought stricken gardening/homesteading season here in Maine, and a political situation I never thought possible in my country. Some mornings I wake up and have to reorient myself to much of 2020's reality in the first few moments of the day.
I often think, "I will never live long enough to see the world recover from this." That thought adds to what was already a strong imperative for me: to live long enough to fulfill some of my dearest dreams, upon which I got what I consider a very late start.
For reasons far beyond the scope of this blog post, I did not start to pursue a life in making and fiber art until well in to my forties, and ever since I have felt as though I am driving up life's passing lane, pedal to the metal, trying to make everything work before I'm too old to make anything work. I have been encouraged recently by a book I'm reading by Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. In it, the author, a distinguished retired professor of history, decides to embark on an art education and career at sixty five, age be damned, and the story is both compelling and inspiring.
In any significant pursuit, things go awry. It is in those moments when I am most likely to think or mutter under my breath, "I'm too old for this s**t." I'm not fresh out of college with my whole life ahead of me. I don't have time for too much trial and error much less entire years lost to pandemic and political chaos. I can now see inevitabilities of history that I very much want, but will never live, to see. With every success I am able to manage in spite of this, I am blooming late.
The other morning I went out to my garden to see how things were going, especially since I've been so busy that it's been a little neglected. My sunflowers had finally bloomed. I had planted them way too late in the season and I'd been wondering whether they'd bloom at all. But they did because they had no choice but to keep moving forward from the moment I set their seeds in the ground. Late or no, it was the natural order of things. Although they are now coping with fall's short days and freezing nights, still they bloom. Will they survive long enough to bear seeds for next year before a truly killing freeze cuts them down? I have no idea. It's mostly out of my hands.
I am not fatalistic about age. I do not accept that we have to be any one way or another at any particular age. I take reasonably good care of my health, I run three or four times a week these days, I make sure I'm always learning something new, and I keep moving forward in my late blooming fiber art career. I am, however, realistic. I don't have another half century to play with. In fact, the harsh reality of life on earth is that we don't ever really know if we have another half hour to play with, and this makes me all the more determined.
So, the next time (or the first time) you think, "I'm too old for this s**t," know that if it's an obstacle you're referring to, yes, you are. In reality, you are whether you're twenty five or eighty five because there is simply no time to hand over to not blooming. We're all too old for this s**t if whatever this s**t is is in the way of our most cherished dreams. Like the impending winter threatening my sunflowers, some hazards can not be avoided, but others can be skillfully sidestepped or even fiercely defied. My sunflowers' blooms are as beautiful in October as they would have been had they arrived "on time" in July. Better for them, and us, to have bloomed late than not at all.
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Where the difference comes up for me, though, is on issues where perhaps more understanding between hobbyists and professional artists/designers/studio owners is needed. One of the most important subjects for which this is true is artist attribution.
This post is not going to delve in to the details of copyright law. There are some very good posts available in the rug hooking community on copyright law written by other artists and legal experts. Additionally, sometimes guilds do programs on copyright in an effort to educate their members about what is or is not allowed under the law. Having had a few designs infringed upon over the years, I know how it feels to have intellectual property laws and conventions violated, and it's not pleasant. But, what I am going to talk about here is more about how a respectful, warm community should treat one another, and that is with respect.
No one gets rich designing rug patterns in our traditional rug hooking niche. You can name the most successful people in our field and none of them are flying around on private jets or buying multi million dollar estates. In fact, for the vast majority of us, this is mostly a labor of true love that, if we're lucky, will pay for itself and then a bit more. I can not emphasize this enough: every sale matters to us. While every sale doesn't matter enough for us to take any kind of abuse or to silence who we are (see my blog post 'Shut Up and Sing' for reference), every sale that does not include those things matters to our bottom line.
So, if we care about our financial bottom lines, is this really a labor of love? Yes, it is. I have a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration/Marketing and a wealth of pre-rug hooking corporate and real estate work experience that I could be more handsomely paid to put to use. Additionally, I would not be able to maintain an inventory-heavy based business (as opposed to zero-inventory businesses like drop-shipping premade products and just acting as a middle man, or strictly service sector businesses, as examples) if I did not earn some profit from adding value to that inventory and selling it. These realities apply to my retail and wholesale rug hooking studio, but they also apply to artists who strictly make and show finished art. Those artists still need to support all of their supplies, their time, costs of promoting their work, gallery fees, and, in many cases, their very lives. In short, artists and makers of all kinds need to make money and there is nothing shameful about that.
Artists and makers also thrive on kind words spoken not only to us, but to others about us in ways that help spread the word on who we are and what we are doing. Of course we each have our own ways of marketing what we do and know that the primary responsibility for that is on us. But word of mouth is a powerful help to us and, in fact, many of us use it to raise one another up too. If you follow my social media you will notice that I am often promoting someone else's work on it. I believe a rising tide lifts all boats and I am grateful when other artists promote something I am doing as well. Employing word of mouth is the easiest, cheapest, most non-committal way you can help another artist. It is so easy and cheap, in fact, that there is almost no reason not to do it when the opportunity arises. There is especially no reason to skip it when someone is showing their finished piece hooked from that artist's pattern.
This is why I am so taken aback when I see my patterns, or those of other artists that I sometimes recognize and sometimes don't, hooked by others (legitimately, assuming the patterns were purchased from the designers) and presented online for admiration with zero reference to the designer or studio of origin. I want to be clear. Pattern designers and studios LOVE seeing their work hooked in the multitude of creative ways our amazing and talented customers hook them. We LIVE for that and are so GRATEFUL for their business. This is fact. I have literally cried tears of joy when I've seen one of my patterns hooked in a particularly impactful way.
However, when the work is then presented online or in a show with zero mention of the design's origin, we feel diminished in some way. We may feel diminished just because, hey, it would be great to have the recognition; we put our souls in to this work and many designs have deep meaning for us. We may feel diminished because we know that if people knew who designed the piece, they might come to us for that pattern too. We may also feel diminished because we know that others might come to us for something similar, if not that pattern. Or, we may feel diminished because it seems as though our creative genesis of that work has literally been forgotten.
But it's not just about us. When I was learning to hook rugs, I started to recognize different designers just by seeing a finished piece. I can still recognize many artists' work in an instant and, if it's based on a pattern for sale, I know exactly where I can get that to hook myself if I choose. The reason I have this body of what feels like intuitive knowledge when viewing hooked rugs all around our community is because the original designer was made known to me. In other words, the artist attribution was present enough times that I was able to learn on sight whose work I was looking at and how to procure it myself. It is literally a service to all rug hookers, whether they make a hobby of hooking or make a living of hooking, for us to always share a design's origin.
Finally, it's just the right thing to do.
I have often heard that people just don't know how to do this, so I thought it might be good to offer a little primer here on how to do artist attribution for each commonly used social media platform and, if you have one, on blog sites. So here we go.
General things to think about across all social media/online platforms:
Do you have the name of the artist or studio spelled correctly?
I know. A lot of us have crazy names and even crazier names for our studios. My maiden name was Colangelo, which no one could spell, so you'd think I'd have chosen a simple name for my studio. I didn't. Instead I chose to name it for our beloved historic home. So, as an example, even though our studio name is Parris House Wool Works, I see attempted attributions (which yes! I appreciate!) to Paris Hill Wool Works, Paris House Wool Works, Paris Hill Hooking, and lots of other adaptations. When checks come in this way, the tellers at my bank look at me and say, "You know...we can't accept this." So, just take a moment to make sure that you have the right spelling/word series for the artist or studio you are making an honest effort of naming.
What social media platforms is the artist/studio active on?
If you follow the artist or studio on a particular social media platform or blog space, just pay attention to how they name themselves on that space. This will help you with tagging them in your post. As a general rule, a social media platform shows you when an artist/studio has been successfully tagged by turning a different color and becoming clickable. If they are not on social media but have a website, often you can link their website to your post.
Facebook:
To tag an artist/studio on Facebook know how they identify themselves on that platform. For example, our FB page is simply 'Parris House Wool Works' and if you go to it and look under our page name on the left sidebar, you will see that to tag us on Facebook you just type:
@parrishousewoolworks
This will be the same format for any artist or studio page you want to tag. They will have a name for the page and underneath an "@" something that is how their page is tagged on FB.
So the FB post would just include a line that would be typed, "Design by @parrishousewoolworks" and Facebook would convert that "@" phrase to show "Parris House Wool Works" in a clickable way.
Facebook also does some searching while you type, so as you type it might even suggest the page and all you'll have to do is click on it on a little drop down menu that pops up.
Instagram:
Tagging on Instagram is done exactly the same way. Please note that because different platforms have different name length allowances, sometimes artists/studios are named differently on different platforms. For example, our IG handle is just @parrishouse.
Twitter:
I don't love Twitter because Twitter is mean these days, BUT, if you're going to use it, tagging is done similarly. Our Twitter handle is @parrishousewool.
Pinterest:
I'm just going to say that Pinterest is a real problem. Our Pinterest handle is also @parrishousewool but Pinterest does not make it easy to tag or maintain provenance for an image back to its original maker. Although we have over 13,000 monthly viewers on Pinterest, it is the platform we pay the least attention to at the moment because of its flagrant disregard for keeping images with their origins.
We do our best by watermarking some images and having most of our images link back to our website or shops when clicked, but Pinterest is the most difficult social media platform on the internet on which to protect your copyright or have an interested customer find you if they don't see the image on your page first.
Your blog:
I'm thinking that if you have your own blog you probably don't need this instruction, but the best way to provide artist attribution on your blog post is to hyperlink the website of the artist you wish to credit.
Here's what to do:
Type the name of the website for the artist/studio you want to credit.
Highlight that and then click on the "link" icon in your editor.
Put in the website's URL and hit "save."
The name of the website should then show up in the body of your text as a clickable link. Always be sure to test it to make sure it works prior to publishing your blog post.
Caveat - different blog platforms and editors may have a slightly different series of clicks, but this is a fairly universal way for it to be done.
Hashtags:
Finally, most social media sites and some blog platforms allow the use of hashtags. Hashtags are great because they help people to find large collections of things they are looking for. Hashtags you can use can be as broad as #rughooking or as specific as #parrishousewoolworks.
For example, I have a hashtag for my upcoming book, #seasonsattheparrishouse, and a hashtag for my lake cottage, #sunsethavenmaine. When our guests at Sunset Haven use the accompanying hashtag, all of the pictures ever tagged that way by anyone are collected under that tag and can be searched that way. It's not only fun, but it's a great way to help others find an artist, maker, or page you'd like to help out.
Hashtagging is usually done in addition to the kind of page tagging I've spoken about above, as an extra way to put that post in to the larger collection of posts on the internet about that artist/maker/page.
I hope this explanation and mini-tutorial has been helpful. Please understand that this is not about ego or greed on the part of artists and makers. This is about survival, especially in a pandemic year when so many in person classes, shows, exhibits, and more have been cancelled for your favorite artists. The internet is one of the most powerful tools we have ever been given to disseminate information and, as hard as it may be to believe at this moment in history, it can be used for good. Crediting artists and makers for their work is an absolute good, with no downside at all. There aren't too many things we can say that about!
Thank you for reading and if you have any questions at all about how to do this, send me an email at parrishousewoolworks@gmail.com. I am happy to answer questions or explain any of these ideas further. And for those of you who I see tagging Parris House Wool Works in your posts, thank you from the bottom of my heart. It means the world to me.
]]>At fifty-five, I'm not keen on lost years, mainly because I realize that more than half my years are over. There is no time to waste. There never has been. This is probably most evident to the hardest hit by this pandemic, those who have lost loved ones in it.
I would not be honest if I didn't just come out and say I'm angry about it all. I'm angry that COVID-19 exists at all, with no one in particular to direct that anger at because to anthropomorphize a virus doesn't make sense. But I'm also angry at every single person in power who mismanaged the response and every single person allegedly not in power (forgetting that people do have power when they are united) who did not or still do not take the situation seriously. It would be easier to wax poetic about the silver linings if over 170,000 Americans had not perished so far, but they have. Never having been one to subscribe to the "they're in a better place" trope, I'm angry.
So, the question in my mind remains: is this a lost year?
I guess life is one long (if we're lucky) timeline of wins and losses, with most things being on some kind of continuum between total win and total loss, between inexpressible joy and devastating grief. For me, motherhood has been a 100% win, well, from my side of it anyway. I'm not professing perfection as a mother; rather I am saying I wouldn't change anything about my sons who are still at the tippy top of my list of reasons to be alive. Losing my brother in an accident in 1986 was a 100% loss. There are no upsides to tragedies of that magnitude and in case anyone is struggling with what to say to someone who has lost a loved one, do not talk about silver linings of any kind. Some things are just flat out losses and that's that. Most things in life, though, are somewhere in between.
I'm just not sure where 2020 falls on this continuum. I am thinking that it's different for everyone. In our propensity to use dark humor to cope, memes abound on social media, the latest one being, "Who had double hurricanes for August?" as the latest storm approaches our Gulf coast with the term "unsurvivable" being used to describe certain forecast elements. For some people 2020 has been a continual stream of inconveniences. For others, it's been a period of seemingly insurmountable tragedy. Is such a year lost?
All of this is what I was thinking about as I was walking Wyeth through my neighbor Becca's big hay-field around dusk this evening. He was taking his sweet time with the business at hand and so we walked the entire perimeter of the field, which takes a while. As we walked I saw primordial looking ferns, a wild grape vine that probably took root via a passing bird, depressions in the grass where deer had bedded down, random feathers, a few remaining black eyed susans, small Queen Anne's lace blossoms, a downed tree, and the first fallen crimson and yellow maple leaves of the season. The wind out of the northwest was chilly, a cold front having just moved in last night. The changes I was observing were telling me that 2020 is going to be over in the blink of an eye and I asked myself, "How can I redeem it?"
On the redemption side of the ledger I will always remember that my grandson, Oliver, was born in 2020. If I am fortunate enough to live to see him grow up and have children of his own, I will always remember that the joy of his birth was a sweet respite in an unusually difficult year. I will remember long distance friendships made or strengthened by being forced to use even more online tech than I did before. But what can I do, as a matter of conscience choice myself, to redeem this year of my life?
As I walked through that field looking at everything nature offered both at my feet and in the sunset sky, I thought this: I will devote the rest of this year to making more things that channel nature. That's it. I am angry to the point of despair about both the pandemic and the current United States administration, but I do not feel called - as I thought I did for a while - to make that much art about either of those things. I keep coming back to nature. The eternity of nature, the sheer willfulness of it, the audacity of those ferns which have neither changed nor perished in millennia and the mountains which continue to stand and have since the last ice age, all of that, is a huge f-u to the passing troubles of this year. It is steadfast on a planet where nothing and no-one else is. Even in the wake of mankind's carelessness, it is not really that we are destroying this planet altogether; no, it is that we are destroying its ability to host us. Earth will live on long after we are gone. Those mountains will still be there and the ferns, which have survived every mass extinction, will remain as well. Their fidelity is to survival itself, even if it seems that ours is not.
Is this a lost year? I still don't know. I guess any redemption possible depends on us, individually and collectively. If there's anything we must remember about this year, it's that we survive, or not, together.
]]>Nonetheless, our infamous power company left us, and many others, with no electricity for sixteen hours during and after the storm. So, on Wednesday morning, I was carefully avoiding opening the fridge or freezers, not even once. This meant breakfast was not going to be the Kodiak Cakes frozen "power waffles" I like so much, or cereal (not getting the milk out...nope), or even previously collected eggs stored in there. No, this breakfast was going to have to come from the chicken coop and the garden, so I put my Mucks on and headed outside to see what I was about to eat.
It turned out the hens had a few eggs laid already and there was a single yellow tomato ripened. I picked a summer squash, some kale and chard, a few wax beans, and some basil and returned to the house to cook it all up. Well, I didn't cook the tomato. I just sliced it, sprinkled olive oil, cut basil, and black pepper on it, and ate it that way.
Honestly, this was a better breakfast than usual and I was left to wonder why I didn't make this type of meal first thing more often. It didn't take a lot of time and it was much healthier than my usual go-tos also.
Similarly, I was unable to pop the radio on, so no BBC news, no NPR or Maine news, nothing. I sat and ate my home grown breakfast in silence, save for the drone of a couple of generators down the street, my hens making much ado about nothing, as is usual, and some construction sounds where a house is being built beyond Becca's field. In this way I was spared any bad news, which often arrives in audio clips of disordered world leaders speaking.
The day before I had listened to a podcast about the formation and breaking of habits, addictions even. One of the examples used was hard to believe in our current age of widespread opioid addiction. Apparently, during the Vietnam war there was a significant problem with soldiers becoming addicted to heroin while overseas. The drug was easily available and helped them cope with not only the horrors of active warfare, but the boredom and loneliness associated with service away from the front lines. The United States government thought that this was going to be an enormous problem at home once the addicted soldiers returned, but much to everyone's surprise, a good number of the soldiers came home and were able to relatively easily ("relatively" being an operative word here) kick what is unequivocally one of the most gripping addictions known. How is this possible?
The theory, outlined in more detail here by James Clear who wrote the book Atomic Habits, is that upon their return home, the soldier's entire environment and routine was changed very suddenly. In other words, the environment, routines, habits, and accessibility of heroin in Vietnam were all taken away when those soldiers boarded their planes home. Citing a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, Clear says, "approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight."
I was dumbstruck upon listening to this information. In fact, I stopped working for a few minutes just to sit and contemplate this. We have a terrible opioid addiction problem in Maine. More Mainers have died this year of opioid overdoses than have died of COVID-19, about three times more. I am so sorry for and sympathetic to not only those who are addicted, but to their loved ones as well. I can not imagine the pain and I do not condone the stigma or judgment that is attached to addiction in this country. I want to make clear that I realize that addiction is overcome usually only after a strong battle and that that battle is sometimes, sadly, lost. But this podcast was on to something that I think is also in use in some rehabilitation centers, a re-calibration of a patient's every day life to help break harmful cycles.
How did I get from the topic of an an idyllic homestead breakfast to the subject of heroin addiction? It's this: according to the evidence, if we want to change our habits, compulsions, and even addictions, we have to change our environment. It's not about will power alone or even much at all. It's about how we set ourselves up, or allow ourselves to be set up, to carry on habits we don't want. I have set myself up every morning to grab a quick but often substandard bite to eat while I'm doing morning chores and listen to information I find toxic the whole time I'm eating and working. As in, I'm literally walking around unloading the dishwasher with a toasted frozen waffle in my hand and listening to all the bad news first thing in the morning.
On Wednesday morning, none of that was possible. The fridge/freezer was off limits, the toaster and radio were dead, and unloading the dishwasher was pointless; it's not like I could run another load. My environment had changed. Tropical Storm Isaias and a power company that has literally been rated the worst in the country in customer satisfaction, delivered an environmental change for me that has me reconsidering my entire morning habit structure. How's that for unintended consequences?
I am now doing an inventory of some of the less than desirable habits I have set myself up for: eating chocolate chips directly out of the bag from the freezer, blowing off regular exercise, procrastinating, leaving empty drink cups in my car until I'm out of cup holders, not weeding the garden, the list goes on. I've had some successes, too. For example, I no longer often work past 6 PM (mentioned in an earlier blog post as a goal) nor do I any longer bother to argue with hard core Trump supporters, especially online. My point is, I am looking at every habit I'd like to change - the ones that spur the thought, "I really don't want to be doing this but here I am doing this" - and thinking about how I can restructure my environment to set myself up for positive change.
This morning I left the radio off and took the time to make a decent breakfast again. I didn't walk around with it and, although it was a little less gourmet than yesterday's, it wasn't a frozen waffle. It's a start.
]]>This is one of many local attractions I plan to highlight in the blog over the coming months because someday we'll be back to hosting fiber art and homesteading retreats and Airbnb guests at the Parris House. If you aspire to a stay with us at any time, watch the blog for things to do in the area as part of your trip planning.
When you arrive at the Paris River Park, you'll find a lovely, small trail system that runs along the banks of the Little Androscoggin River. This is how the park is described on the Town of Paris website:
The Town of Paris leases the Paris Water District property at 1 Paris Hill Road, on the Little Androscoggin River, for use as an outdoor recreation park. Paddling, picnicking, fishing, wildlife photography, dog walking or just strolling are encouraged! During the spring, summer and fall months, come join us for a paddle on the Little Andro beginning at 1 Paris Hill on the second Sunday of the month at 1:00.
Last Sunday evening my husband and I decided it would be nice to take Wyeth somewhere new for a walk, so we loaded him in to the car (Wyeth doesn't like getting in the car, so "loaded him in" are the accurate words here), and decided to check out the trails. I have no idea why we didn't do so before. I think sometimes the amenities that are practically in our back yard are the ones we explore last.
The Paris Recreation Department does a great job of creating fun experiences at its sites and in this case, they had invited yarn bombing there. As a result, there were all kinds of creative crocheted and knitted embellishments at the entrance of the park. Additionally, there were hidden rocks as one part of a scavenger hunt going on there this summer, with finds posted on the park's Facebook page. This was probably an especially welcome and educational game for young families this summer as the pandemic kept most from activities and travel further from home.
We had a great time exploring the trails and are sure to go back with and without Wyeth, with our kayaks perhaps on a "without Wyeth" visit. As the images below will show, the park and its trails are well marked, the river is calm at this location and as you move north on it toward West Paris, and it's a welcome respite from our every day cares, which at the moment, seem plentiful.
Enjoy the images and we hope some day to see you at the Parris House and chat about this nearby treasure in person.
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One day I noticed a shattered robin's egg in the driveway. It was unmistakable, that "robin's egg blue" we all know and love and sometimes dye wool to match. Cushing Dyes even has a specific formula named for it. I thought that was odd and started to think about how this might have happened when I saw the cause...a blue jay dive bombing the little nest and eating the eggs.
I was immediately enraged.
My son, James, who is now a biologist/ecologist and teacher in Nova Scotia, was home for the summer at that time. I asked him in exasperation what we could do to save the robin's nest and the eggs. He said something to me he'd had to say before and has had to say since: "Nature isn't fair, Mom."
This wasn't the blog post I had planned for today. I suppose I'll be writing that one next week. This is, however, the blog post that I needed to write today.
I have a terrible habit of checking my email and notifications first thing in the morning. I shouldn't do it. I should write my morning pages and do meditations first, but usually I just reach for the phone to see "what's going on this morning." This morning my Facebook feed alerted me to the unexpected death of a person in our community who was truly a model human being. He was kind, creative, had a great sense of humor, was deeply connected to nature, and was an active and tireless contributor to the community. I did not know him well. Several years ago he reached out to "friend" me on Facebook because of our many mutual friends and interests and we ran in to one another in town now and then. What I did know was the kind of person he was and all the light he brought to the world.
And now he's gone and that's not fair.
I have struggled with this human expectation of fairness my entire life. I struggled with it mightily when my thirty-one year old brother was taken from us in an accident. I have struggled with it ever since when someone so inherently good is whisked away while others, who are so obviously...not so good?...remain for a very long time. 2020 has brought this phenomenon to us in numbers perhaps previously unimaginable in most of our lifetimes.
Fairness, as my son points out to me every so often, is a human construct and it even has varying interpretations. For example, an extremely privileged-from-birth human who now occupies the highest seat of power on the globe is forever decrying that he and people he admires have been treated "unfairly," even when that "unfairness" has heretofore been known simply as the rule of law or the American justice system. That individual's interpretation of fairness is very unlike most of ours, and yet it is real, or perhaps just useful, to him and he asserts it loudly and often.
Are there any objective standards of fairness? I don't know. Maybe decent people can agree most of the time on what is or is not fair in this world, but I think most of us wrestle mightily when bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.
Last weekend we took a trip out to Vinalhaven Island in Penobscot Bay and hiked the Lane's Island Preserve. On this preserve there is the old Lane family cemetery. I love old cemeteries. They are peaceful repositories of history, often the outlines of which are right there to piece together from the stone inscriptions. At this particular cemetery on Vinalhaven, we observed that the Lanes lost two little children over a century ago to who knows what diseases of their day. In those times, childhood mortality was high given the limitations of medicine. I could guess that the relative isolation of the island could have had something to do with it, but then again, back then, Vinalhaven was well traveled to and from and was actually an important source of granite. According to the Vinalhaven Historical Society, that granite ended up in the following historic structures (I quote their website here):
So, in spite of the prosperity that once existed on the island and the Lane family's place in all of that, they could not save their babies from what was then nature's bidding any more than our mama robin years ago could keep her eggs safe from the blue jay.
Since life on earth seems inherently unfair, granted that's according to our own constructs of fairness, what can we do? We can not stop the literal blue jays from destroying the robin's eggs, but can we stop the metaphorical ones? When confronted with "injustices" that we are helpless to correct, for example the untimely deaths of people we so needed to keep here to continue their good works, what can we do?
We have to be those people in their absence. That's what we have to do. We have to look back on their lives and emulate the things that we are able to. We can not duplicate a human being. We can not be them literally, but we can carry their spirits with us and be them in substance. We don't have to, and probably shouldn't, do exactly the same things they did, but we must work as they did to tip the scales in favor of fairness, peace, and justice here. Since we can not afford to lose a single person committed to love and light, we have to fill the voids they leave behind when nature, in her radical objectivity, takes them from us.
It's true that nature isn't fair, but we can be and we must be, for all of us. It is how the two steps forward, one step back journey of human progress is made and that progress is in part possible because we believe in fairness, even if it's not at all natural.
]]>For summer in to fall, I chose our pattern, Before the Blight. This pattern has a story. The title of the pattern has layered meanings. The most surface level meaning is about the elm blight that went through here and much of Europe and North America in the twentieth century. Here is a picture of the Parris House prior to the demise of the elms that lined Paris Hill, trees that some of our older residents well remember.
There are still impressions in the ground in front of the house where these mighty elms once stood and we have to watch our step when we walk there.
My design, Before the Blight, is an homage to the trees that formed a beautiful canopy over Paris Hill Road, once known as Main Street, and to a stylized version of the view one might have had coming out of the canopy, heading north toward the mountains in the distance. I wanted the sky to look a bit foreboding, kind of like it looked over the mountains just yesterday before some absolutely wild storms rolled in.
My hooked version of Before the Blight is not quite finished. I think I want to add some prodded leaves to the trees and possibly some more embellishment on the trunks and the green field, but the sense I am looking for in it is that moment just before something monumental, and perhaps not so great, happens.
On another level of meaning, I designed this pattern in early 2017 when I had the strong sense that a lot of not so great things were about to befall our country and that we were living in that space where a last deep breath might be possible before so much pain rained down. It was designed around the same time as Yearning to Breathe Free, Paisley Persistence, and It's Up to Us. While It's Up to Us includes the date 2017, we can make a version with any year you choose.
I want to be clear that this is not the only way to interpret the pattern. For a lot of people, this sense of foreboding may not be what they want to think about, especially right now. Another way I've looked at this pattern is as a "coming out of the woods" scene, toward openness, toward something beautiful. In truth, it can be both, or, it can be neither. It can be whatever you see, whatever you want, whatever meaning you find in it. I never presume to know what an artist meant when I view a work and I never believe it only has one interpretation. As a designer of patterns for the general hooking public, I love it when someone comes up with an interpretation of one of my designs that I never could have imagined. Hooking this pattern in a bright palette with a different intention would yield a completely different mood.
I hope that some of you will join us in the late summer/early fall rug challenge that is just now getting underway and bring your own spin to this pattern. This is a very simple pattern, but it also lends itself to a wide range of possible results and meanings. Show us your creativity and unique perspective!
To order this pattern at 15% off, click here. Customized versions or kitting to your specifications also available upon request.
]]>So, to be clear, I have had episodes of this nature beginning at age 19, and they are usually triggered by dehydration, lack of sleep, stress, overwork, and the like. They happen every few years and after a friendly and highly controlled encounter with an electrical current through the heart at the ER, I'm good to go again. In fact, the time before this, under the sedation required for this procedure, I expounded at length about rug hooking. I remember nothing but I'm told the ER doc learned a lot.
I'm ok now, or, I should say, I am better than I was on Friday.
Fridays are the days Heather and I usually get together to work. She gets orders made and shipped mostly on Fridays. Being as I was incapacitated last Friday, we skipped it, but I had an order waiting in the Etsy shop that needed to go out, so I tackled that today. It was for a 24" x 36" version of our Maine Mountains Abstract pattern, this customer having specified monks cloth as the foundation.
This pattern was originally created for, and ended up on the cover of, Making Magazine's Lines issue in 2017. At the time I don't think I fully appreciated the pattern, but as I sat at the drafting table transferring it today, it struck me differently. I was taken with the freedom and flow of the design, and remembered the ease involved in hooking it. There was something meditative about just drawing those swoops across the pattern. These feelings of freedom, flow, ease, and meditation have been glaringly missing from my life in any abundant quantity for quite some time. In fact, I would say I mostly experience the opposite. So, in a sense, drawing this pattern today reminded me of how far off track I am in this way.
I was conveying this sense of burnout to a friend this morning via FB Messenger. She affirmed that she was experiencing something similar. I think it is particularly easy to go in to full overload during this time of pandemic, social unrest, and ineptitude or worse in government. Those things set a baseline tension upon which are heaped the usual, and in these times, unusual, challenges in our lives.
As a result, I have been taking it a little easier this week. For me, "taking it a little easier" means not working from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and not eating meals over the kitchen sink or at my computer. Today it meant spending approximately an hour going to the new bakery in town for a cookie and to put in a special cake order and then going to our small, independent bookstore to pick up some books ordered previously. That last thing will lead to my fitting in more reading time instead of scrolling through my various news feeds seeing one hundred different analyses on the latest outrageous Tweet. I still care that the Tweet is outrageous; I just don't have to read about it for an hour. I also took the time today to listen to another artist speak online about her inspiration and process, which is helpful to anyone who wants to spend more time inspired and creating. This is not what my normal day looks like, but it should be.
I think it's possible to feel especially restricted right now and yet to feel that we have to push even harder to stave off all the damage wreaked by this pandemic. We can't go where we want to go or do what we want to do. If we have businesses we are, at the very best, learning new ways of being in them and at worst, dealing with impossible cash flow scenarios. We can't see people we love or travel across borders that heretofore had been taken for granted. Many people have lost livelihoods. Our best laid plans are postponed or cancelled. This is not a time to put additional restrictions on ourselves by voluntarily taking on more than we can mentally, physically, and emotionally handle, on top of what we have no choice but to handle in these times.
Friday morning my body told me just that.
For the rest of the summer I'm going to be looking for more freedom, flow, and ease in my life and who knows, maybe by the end of the summer I'll have made new habits and not ever go back to the overwhelming reality that I've been living for a while. This does not mean that your orders won't go out or the writing won't get done or the new online classes won't be designed and delivered. It also doesn't mean I won't be volunteering for our historical society or with some social justice initiatives I'm interested in. It just means that all of those things will have to happen in a more sustainable way for me.
This comes with risk, because I'm not at all sure whether or not there will be a negative cash flow impact as a result of this effort and being paid sufficiently for my work is not optional. Failing in my volunteer work is also not optional. On the other hand, my husband, who has been managing a team of his own for decades, believes productivity goes up when people have time and space for their lives outside of work. I'm about to find out.
This lesson of not living in a personally unsustainable way is not learned once and then finished. It's just not, at least for me. I've been in this same space before, backed off, and later gone right back to the overwhelm, but each time I get a little bit better at seeing it and responding. As an example, two years ago my phone would have been by my side as I wrote this. It's now in another room entirely with the ringer off. One step at a time.
I'm going to guess that many of you can relate to much of this post. If you can, feel free to share your experiences with burnout and overwhelm and what you have done to alleviate it. How many attempts have you made toward more freedom, flow, and ease in your life and how is your progress going?
I am reminded of a quote by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor and author of the classic, Man's Search for Meaning. Having endured horrors that most of us can not even imagine and that make any challenge I've ever had seem mundane, he said:
'"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."
So often we choose poorly. It's up to us to choose wisely, for ourselves and for everyone around us.
]]>It happened yesterday when I had my first listen to Ray LaMontagne's new, and eighth if I'm counting correctly, record, Monovision. I have loved Ray's work since before he was "discovered" by RCA records, since the time I knew his wife, my friend, Squam Art Workshops roommate, and poet, Sarah Sousa, as our librarian here on Paris Hill, through my serving their family as their real estate broker when they were still in Maine, and to this day. I mention this only to underscore that what I'm about to say should have occurred to me a very long time ago in listening to all of Ray's previous work in its infinite variety, but it didn't.
Ray's last record, Part of the Light, released in 2018, felt like social commentary to me in a lot of ways, although I want to be careful here to say that I never presume to know an artist's intent, even an artist I know. But to my ears, there were things said on that record that needed to be said in times when too many people don't seem to have any interest in being "the light" in this world. So, I wasn't sure what I would hear with this new record, recorded and completed in some of the most turbulent times in recent history.
The record is simply beautiful. That's it. It's breathtakingly beautiful. Sure, a song titled "We'll Make It Through" is what we all need to hear and know right now, but overall this collection of songs is not heavy handed or overt in messaging. Rather, it gently gives rise to an awareness of the totality of life's experiences, the difficulties and insecurities, the overcoming of obstacles, the ever presence of love if we seek it, the natural landscapes and vistas that surround us, and more that is simply within the realm of being human.
In the midst of being swept away by this particular piece of art, the epiphany arrived. Even in the worst of times, art does not have to carry an overt message, does not have to constitute an explicit protest piece. Its very existence in the midst of chaos and cruelty, connecting its recipients to what it means to be human in the best ways, makes art powerfully subversive. The creation of something beautiful, something with eternal themes that can not be eradicated or even substantially diminished by the woes of the world, is in itself an act of resistance and defiance. It becomes a monument to survival.
This made me think quite a bit about my own work and the work of others. Deanne Fitzpatrick's tagline - or perhaps rallying cry? - is "Create beauty every day." I have never thought of that before the way I do now. What does it mean in a world off the rails to still persistently sit down, or perhaps metaphorically stand up, and create beauty every day?
In the past weeks I have felt compelled to make some protest pieces and, indeed, I have some designs sketched out that relate directly to systemic racism. One is inspired by an interaction I had with someone I've known for a very long time who became quite angry and defensive with me on social media when I pointed out that "color blindness" is not what we're shooting for in this fight. There's nothing gentle or subtle about the resulting sketch or the forthcoming piece, although I do hope it is beautiful in some ways too.
However, I am also finding myself drawn to working on the large landscape of my neighbor's field, a view that has not changed significantly in centuries. It hasn't changed through Civil War, World War, the 1918 pandemic, the 1960s high profile assassinations, Watergate, or anything currently. The mountains still stand, the Redwing Blackbirds still dive bomb the pond, the weather still comes in from the west, and the sunsets still astonish. Additionally, as I stared at the peach colored blank wall in one of our newly renovated guest rooms, it occurred to me that what is needed there is a three-foot by three-foot hooked rug of orange day lilies, riotous with color and texture and accented with robin's egg blue and deep greens. A week ago I would have felt guilty about being drawn to these projects, but not now.
I will make the protest pieces I have sketched. I will make the series I've sketched about my experience of complex trauma. I will make the production pieces I am committed to for Beekman 1802 and the kit protos for Darn Good Yarn. But I will also make the eternal landscapes and the homages to the flowers and plants that faithfully return each year to the Parris House. Nature is simultaneously oblivious - because it doesn't think like we do, after all - and yet symbolically defiant of the evil that awaits our rejection and correction in this world.
Find something beautiful and carefully consider its impervious nature. Better yet, make something beautiful and recognize in yourself that imperishable creativity that nothing and no one can take from you. This is the generative place from which resistance and meaningful change are possible. This is the heart of what it means to be human. When we connect with that in ourselves and one another, we are stronger to go out in to the world and be the change.
]]>I woke up Tuesday morning ready for a full day of work here at the studio. There was a lot going on. I was preparing for a meeting for the next day with one of my retailers to talk about a new line of designs and products we are launching, I had a Zoom group meeting planned with delightful hookers from all over the US and Canada from 11 to 1, I needed to start some production pillows for Beekman 1802, was ready to assemble our new, affordable rug hooking essentials kit and photograph it, and also answer a spate of emails and web messages. And there was more, as there always is.
At around 9 a.m. I looked at my phone notifications and noticed something from Airbnb. Our guests at Sunset Haven had messaged me to say that the refrigerator had quit. I called my husband at work, something I never do, to see if he had any opinion on what should be done. In the interest of full disclosure, I did not find his solution tenable or best for our guests or us in the long run, so I was left to solve the issue of obtaining a replacement on my own. Once I had come up with what I believed was the best solution, I tried to call him back to just get an opinion on the alternative. Again...calling him at work is something I truly never do, respecting his time and his position at the company.
He was in a meeting, which effectively meant, no contact. All day. Not negotiable.
For as long as I can remember, my own time has never been respected in this way, as a woman, as a creative, as a small business owner, and especially as someone who works primarily from home. But even when I worked in a corporate setting or in a busy real estate office, I would field phone calls from family members (not talking about my kids here, for whom a "drop everything" policy was, to me, a must) in the middle of a work day. Since I started working from home in 2013, it has not been unusual to still get personal phone calls in the middle of the day or people just dropping by. I know...boundaries...but would this happen to a man in an office? Would this happen if I were running an accounting service, counseling practice, or some other more conventionally important business from the Parris House?
I canceled my entire work agenda for Tuesday and went out to locate and purchase a new refrigerator for our cottage (a task made more difficult by inventory shortages related to COVID-19), keep our guests informed of what was going on, and arrange for my husband to pick it up and take it to the cottage after work. After all, I can not haul a refrigerator by myself, as much as I wish I could. I then spent Wednesday playing catch-up.
There was no way my husband was going to leave work and tend to this mini-emergency. His work matters; mine less so.
My point here is not to complain, although it probably sounds like it is. My point is that I started thinking about the larger issue of the attitudinal "fish bowl" we live in in America, the hierarchy of what work is important and what can be swept aside easily or discounted, often determined by what the work is and who is doing it. I use the analogy of a fish bowl because it's just the metaphorical water we're swimming in and have always swum in and we often don't question it. Here are just a few of the assumptions that seem to be part of our overall thinking about work in America:
How do these attitudes and assumptions affect the way we think about others and how we think about ourselves? I would not be honest if I said that I am not affected by this fish bowl of assumptions when I think about my own work. My husband makes more money than I do and has an "important" title at his workplace. He manages more people than I do. The company he works for has X number of dollars in sales vs my microbusiness. The company was deemed "essential" during the pandemic, whereas my work is "non-essential."
Actually, let's just stop right there for a moment.
COVID-19 has exposed a lot about who is or is not essential or important. Prior to the pandemic, if someone had asked people whether or not the folks who make breakfast sandwiches and coffee at Dunkin for the local cops, EMS workers, and all the rest of us were essential, most would have misguidedly laughed. Those teachers who have to hear the tiresome and grossly ignorant, "Those who can do, do, those who can't, teach" BS over and over again are now keeping parents and students alike on the rails via the endless provision of online instruction and support. And yes, my colleagues in fiber art and I discovered that our own outreach to our communities with free Zoom sessions, beautiful and useful online content, and the provision of supplies for at-home projects to fill time and alleviate isolation have made a meaningful contribution as well.
Sure, if I have a medical emergency I need a doctor, not an artist, but in day to day living, I really can't tell you that a doctor's services are any more important to me than my favorite artists are. One of my favorite songwriter/musicians is releasing a new record this week. I have it on pre-order and I know when it arrives it is going to be as important to my soul and mental health as a doctor is when I'm sick or my accountant is when my taxes are due. I value all of them and I value the person who's going to hand me my medium iced decaf macchiato with skim milk at Dunkin or the barista at Cafe Nomad who knows I like lavender London Fogs because they remind me of my visits to Nova Scotia. Back in the days when I could afford cleaning help at my home, I can tell you there was almost no service more important to me.
I am not unrealistic. I studied economics in college. I understand the concept of supply and demand and how that contributes to the pricing of goods, services, and salaries in a marketplace. I know that there is a great deal of economic complexity to this. I also know, however, that America's particular brand of runaway crony capitalism, purchased politicians, regressive taxation, and plutocracy/oligarchy has diminished to the vanishing point any real semblance of free and fair markets, including labor markets.
I would like to see the day dawn in America where my husband's position, pay grade, gender, and race didn't factor in to whether or not his work was too important for me to interrupt on Tuesday, especially knowing that an interruption at work might just be the every day experience of one of his "lower level" female staff members. I would like to see a time when parents don't worry about their kids going in to the arts for fear they won't be able to support themselves because their work isn't valued the way a hedge fund manager's is in this country. I'd like to see small business owners have the kind of voice in politics that giant corporations do, not because they could throw the same copious amounts of money at politicians but because they demand and receive representation. I would like to see everyone who puts in a forty hour week (or, often many more than that) able to have their basic needs met. I'd like to see Americans value other Americans' honest work - all work - as much as they say they do.
So, anyway, that's what a broken refrigerator got me thinking about on Tuesday, and, because I know the current market value and profit margins for my own work so well, I know about how many kits, finished pieces, classes, dozens of eggs, jars of honey, and/or magazine articles I'll have to sell to pay for it. I'm not sure any creative wants to think of their work in those harsh economic terms. I don't. I prefer to think of my work in much deeper and philosophical ways. However, until we find a better, broader, more fair and viable for everyone fish bowl, sometimes we have to.
If this post has gotten you thinking about the way we value work and compensate Americans for it, here are some suggested actions:
I'd love to hear your additional ideas, and thank you for the work that you do.
]]>"Let's have a discussion.
I think given that racial inequality is so front and center in the minds of many Americans right now *and* because it's Pride Month, it may be time to just directly ask the questions:
Why do we see so few BIPOC and LGBTQ people in rug hooking? Other textile arts are starting to increase in diversity, but I don't think we are seeing that in rug hooking. Why is that?
For that matter, why are we seeing so few people under 40, or even under 50, hooking rugs? Or men?
What would it take to attract more people to rug hooking?
This is not rhetorical or academic. This is existential.
If rug hooking does not become inclusive, starting with young people, people of color, LGBTQ people, no one will be talking about rug hooking at all in a short fifty years.
Some elements to the solution may include:
- availability of more contemporary patterns & kits
- focus more on encouraging students to design their own
work
- turning kids on to rug hooking in school and camp programs
(black kids, white kids, brown kids, little kids, teens, tweens)
- not thinking our way to approach this art is the only way - we
have a lot of diversity in the way we hook and the "rules" we
hook by already
- teaching college and university fiber clubs (I have done this -
it's a blast)
- have social media outlets, galleries, journals of the craft, etc
that are not afraid to show "controversial" content
What else?
This is a conversation that needs to happen in the rug hooking world. We have a beautiful, adaptable, versatile art form to share with the world. We can do that and keep it alive in part by participating in our often touted American ideals of equality, free expression, and inclusiveness. How do we get out there and make it happen? Who will you invite to learn your craft?"
WELL...this prompt received 51 reactions, 99 comments, and 11 shares on my Facebook page alone, which in turn prompted more discussion and private messages to me from a variety of rug hookers and guild members/leaders. I was astonished. To be completely honest, I thought the post might be sufficiently provocative to make people want to scroll on by, but no...you stopped right on that post and delivered a lot of useful information and ideas. You stopped and delivered even though we're in the midst of a pandemic, even though we are facing economic crises, even though we are wrestling with a long-overdue hard reckoning on racial inequality in America and in the world. Thank you.
So what was the takeaway? Here's what I heard you say, and please feel free to call me out if I have missed anything or just get in touch if you want to add something.
Whew! That's a lot. Almost a week later, I have still not processed everything I, as one single teacher/studio owner, need to do with this information. It's everything I already intuitively knew about our craft and yet, with it spilled out on the page, it's a bit overwhelming.
I have to take this the way I take all overwhelming situations: figuring out the next best step, one at a time, until things begin to shift.
I want to be clear here. There are many studio owners, teachers, and artists in rug hooking taking these problems on. There are quite a few amazing human beings inspiring creativity, freedom, and inclusiveness in our craft. I'm thinking of Susan Feller, Karen Miller, Laura Salamy, Meryl Cook, Liz Alpert Fay, Patti Mullens Colen, Deanne Fitzpatrick, Donna Mulholland, Alexandrya Eaton, and so many more across the United States and Canada, Australia and around the world. If someone isn't mentioned here it's not because they're not doing the work. It's just that I can't mention everyone. Feel free to add your own examples.
But I have to focus on what I can do to help, right here at my studio in Paris, Maine. Here are some things I can do to make a start.
I want to put in a caveat here. I am not for one moment suggesting that we throw out solid practices that are part of the history and heritage of rug hooking. While I believe that there are probably scores of ways to do any one thing in rug hooking and that we should not be rule bound, I also believe that we should strive to master our history, knowledge, and fundamental techniques that serve as the basis for our own individual experimentation, finding our own ways, as we move forward. It is often said that knowing the rules then allows you to know how to break them. I know that sounds like threading a fine needle, but I also trust that many of my readers know exactly what I'm trying to say. (If you don't, message me and we'll chat more.)
We had 99 comments on our Facebook post last week, but I think what we had in common was this: we all want rug hooking to survive. We want it surviving and thriving in another century in ways we may not be able to imagine right now. If you want to continue the discussion, by all means comment here (comments are moderated only because we sometimes get spammed by strangers, not to edit out any of your ideas; all legit comments will be approved) or send me an email with any ideas you'd like us to consider going forward.
Thanks for reading and thanks for being interested in/devoted to rug hooking and fiber art.
I still believe in New Year's resolutions. My rational mind isn't a fan, but my heart is still in them. I think it's the new beginnings aspect. I love change. It's why I love the seasons in Maine and even the crazy swings within the seasons. For example, as I write this, it is 14 degrees F with a wind chill of 3 in Paris, Maine. Saturday is forecast to hit 51 degrees and Sunday we may have an ice storm. While I am not happy that some of the weirder weather is likely the result of man-made climate change, the variability that Maine weather has always dished out is something that has been cherished (or not...) by generations of Mainers.
It's not just the need for change that drives my advocacy for New Year's resolutions though. It's more about making promises to myself and others and committing to keeping them. I do this with inconsistent success, but the successes that I have in keeping some of them make my life better and often make life better for the people who have to interact with me.
What better time to seek change than at the turn of a decade? I know, I know...some would argue that the decade does not turn until January of 2021. I'm not on that train. I'm writing 2020 on my checks now so it's a new decade. Case closed.
I do a major reassessment and make adjustments three times a year: on my birthday in June, on the first day of fall, and in January. These are not evenly spaced and I claim no special logic here. It's just how I do it. This year's January reassessment is somewhat major. I feel a big shift coming in 2020, not only for me but for the world. I sense a real fatigue among those around me. I saw a lot of social media posts about 2019 that amounted to, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out." Part of my reassessment this year is based on the following question: "What can I do to position myself, my life, and my business better to assist in helping out where I can in this new decade?"
It turns out, the corny old adage is true: you can't offer water to others from an empty cup. Or to put it really bluntly, if you don't have your own shit together, there's no helping anyone else, at least not in the most significant ways possible.
With that in mind, here are my resolutions for 2020. They are not particularly unique. These involve the fundamentals of life, which are not unique. They are universal. If you don't have your mental and physical health, your finances, and your creative life where you want them, there's room to grow. I am not happy to admit that at almost 55 years old, I still need to work quite a bit on all of these fundamentals, but here we are, and while these are my resolutions I am hoping that what I have written may help some of you with yours.
Travel more/see more people I care about.
This holiday season I was so fortunate to have almost all of my people home for a visit. My four sons, my niece, and all of their significant others except one were home. We are able to get everyone together about every two years. I am now coping with the post-holiday amplification of missing them, so this year I'll be planning trips to visit them. That will mean trips to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, Connecticut, Texas, Massachusetts, and possibly North Carolina.
Dog-friendly Airbnbs are our go-to accommodations and, as Airbnb Superhosts ourselves, we enjoy meeting other hosts. We have often put off travel because it was "too expensive" or "we can't get the time off," but this year we are making a major effort to make it work.
Hook/make art/be creative every day.
I've told the story of Deanne Fitzpatrick admonishing me to hook every day several times before on the blog and in our social media. I have never forgotten it. I have also never heeded her sage advice, although I've recommended it to others. Until now.
The retail side of Parris House Wool Works has been all consuming for a long time. It's a major income stream for the overall venture and it has taken a herculean effort to get it where it is now, which is not even a fraction of where it needs to be. Ergo, I barely hook anymore, and most of my hooking is - you guessed it - for retail clients either through my own shop or Beekman 1802. What has changed significantly is that I now have considerable help with the retail end of things and I need to channel time freed by that in to actually making.
In 2020, the daily hooking commences for real. This has been my first resolution in 2017, 2018, and 2019 and it hasn't happened. It gets real now because, honestly, I'm getting kind of angry at myself and the world about not doing it. Hooking every day will get me through my backlog of customer projects and then I can get started on some heart and art projects. Some of these pieces may be challenging to look at or process. Look for those after March (yes, I'm that backlogged on customer pieces).
Write every day.
Today I'm writing this blog, tomorrow it will be the weekly newsletter, next week it will be some finishing elements of my book and also some work I'm doing as a contributor to another artist's book. I also have an open invitation to write for a couple of creative publications, including one that has also asked me to pitch a book. If the daily writing isn't any of those things, it's going to be the morning pages as prescribed by Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way or I might...I just might...start on another book idea I have. I should probably check in with my current editor on that one, right?
Writing daily can also include sending letters to the editors of newspapers, emails to our Senators and Representatives, or a handwritten note to someone we've lost contact with. Writing daily can be an act of resistance in a world that needs to hear the cumulative voices of dissent every single day.
But writing daily, even if it's in a journal that no one else will ever see, keeps us in contact with our language and with ourselves. It helps refine and focus our thoughts and, in the most fundamental way, it makes us better writers through the timeless principle of practice. Practice will never make perfect, but it sure does make whatever we're doing better.
Develop a more consistent meditation/prayer practice.
I recently loaded the Headspace app on my phone and it's highly effective. I can understand why so many people are using this app and are willing to pay for it. I have been using it almost every morning for three months and I have noticed a change in my ability to focus, stay calm, and maintain important boundaries. I also am more aware of when I am not able to do those things and can more quickly recover from a lapse.
The app is by far not my first exposure to a meditation or prayer practice; it simply makes it more of a habit. I have a long history of reading about/studying/attempting the practice of meditation. Some authors I've found helpful as a modern, western person are Thich Nhat Hanh, Howard Kabat-Zinn, and, Dan Harris. Dan Harris is a modern meditator, self described "fidgety skeptic," and also has a fantastic podcast called 10% Happier. It's all well and fine to educate oneself about the scientifically supported benefits of meditation, but if you're not doing it, it's not that helpful. So recently, I starting making myself actually do it.
The nice thing about meditation is that it's a practice open to athiests and "believers" alike. I am not an atheist, although I have absolutely no issue with those who are and deeply respect their reasons for being so. My own belief structure is complicated and humble enough that I totally get other humans being atheists.
My own faith tradition is Roman Catholicism and I have found, in the past year, the only Jesuit parish in Maine down in Portland. Part of my resolution that falls under meditation/prayer is to attend Mass more often at this parish and possibly become more involved in the substantial community outreach they provide. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, created a meditative practice known as the Daily Examen which I am also working on incorporating in to my every day life. I have always regarded the Jesuits as the hippy radicals of the Catholic world, often leading progressive change and causes within the faith and forsaking the pressures of local and national politics for the more revolutionary, and sometimes uncomfortable, message of their Christ. I hope to include some ancient Christian iconography in some of my art pieces in the future.
Take care of my health.
Some of you may recall that in November I sustained a debilitating back injury packing out the Paris Hill Hook In. I was almost completely incapacitated. My very wise doctor said, "You're going to need strength training and yoga from here on out if you want to try to prevent this in the future." So, after a couple of months of healing and a lot of holiday over-indulgence, I have begun.
My current practice includes strength training at the gym 3 times a week, walking/running 4 times a week, and yoga once a week. This is more than do-able for me. In fact, in a past life, decades ago when I lived in New Jersey, I went to the gym six days a week and had a personal trainer certification. I was pretty strong and never had to worry about whether or not my pants were going to fit or I was going to incapacitate myself with a random injury doing normal tasks. It would be easy to say that I'm too busy to do this, until I have a flashback of being completely bed-bound in November by an injury caused by not doing these things.
Hand in hand with this is the truth that eating junk doesn't fuel a good workout or good overall health. So, I'm paying even closer attention to what I eat and how it benefits, or doesn't, my health goals. I have been using the Weight Watchers app as a tool for this for nearly two years and it is highly effective, but there is also a food tracking component to my Fitbit app that's pretty good as well. I have observed, in myself and others, that most modern Americans have no idea how many excess and/or empty calories they are consuming in a day, and most have no idea what a healthy portion size looks like. I was among these and food tracking has helped me to gain that knowledge.
It's easy to make up excuses. So very easy. I have a great imagination so I'm the best excuse maker ever on this stuff. But even without a great imagination. the reality is that I have Hashimoto's disease and a cardiac nerve path defect that manifests in ways that sometimes end with electrocardioversion. (Good times in the ER, those.) I also have an ankle and a shoulder that are cranky and weak from previous injuries and a family history of heart disease and diabetes. I know that every possible physical vulnerability I have is made worse by inaction, so in 2020, I'm taking better action. And before anyone calls out my age, age is no excuse. I met a woman several years older than I am in the gym yesterday who is built like iron and told me she runs up and down Paris Hill at 4:30 in the morning. That's a 7 mile round trip with insane inclines. How does she do it? She put the work in. I have to also.
Caveat: some people have legit physical or mental health differences that might prevent a resolution like this one from being realistic. Most of us don't. We just have excuses.
Reduce waste at the Parris House.
I was given a great zero waste living book for Christmas this year, Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson. I'll be mentioning it and showing it off in the newsletter this week. (To subscribe, click here.) I had put it on my holiday wish list because I have been increasingly interested in zero waste living, which I regard as a bit of a misnomer. I'm not sure anyone can get to zero waste living, but I think many of us can get to low waste living.
Here at the Parris House we have already made some inroads on this in previous years. I have long purchased used clothing at thrift shops, sometimes with the tags still on, and I generally only have clothing I wear on a regular basis. We compost food scraps and also give them to our chickens. We grow a lot of our own vegetables in the growing season, which cuts down on the considerable packaging grocery store foods come with. We often make our own soap and laundry detergent and try to buy some things in bulk to reduce individual packaging impacts. We are slowly but surely getting the food storage here to all reusable glass containers instead of plastics that wear out and end up in the landfill. And there's more, but we are not nearly where we need to be.
As a result, those of you who may stay at the Parris House during our upcoming retreats may notice that we do not provide individually wrapped tiny bars of soap or shampoo and lotion in little single-use plastic bottles, but rather provide dispensers in the showers/baths instead. You may notice a stainless steel bowl on the kitchen counter in to which all the food scraps go. You may also notice where we fall short of minimizing waste and we invite you to make suggestions. One place I know we fall short is in our packing and shipping materials and I will be looking at fixing that this year.
Take better care of my business/financial life.
Starting and growing a business requires a huge amount of resources. Parris House Wool Works has been bootstrapped, meaning there have been no outside investors or outside capital-bearing angels. There have been no massive loans. There are no get-rich-quick schemes in a business based primarily on a heritage craft. In fact, I am aware of a few out there that have never turned a profit and are run strictly out of love and devotion for our art. I am not in a position to do that. And in case anyone is wondering, there are also no get-rich-quick schemes to be had from those annoying spam calls we get on our phones, no matter how insistent the robo-caller.
In 2020 I will be getting even more serious than ever (which is saying something) about growing this enterprise in to something that can not only properly pay its own bills but have enough left over to do more significant charitable giving. I do not expect the growth I am looking for to occur in 2020, however, my target for some of its financial goals is 2025 with the major groundwork laid this year.
Often we don't want to look at, talk about, let alone write a blog post about the financial side of what we do, especially when what we do is largely a labor of love as well. But we have to. I believe the more transparent and honest we are about needing to cover our expenses and then some, the more we embolden others to take up important projects too. In doing so, we are saying that yes, you can be successful while being nice, but you may not be successful if you are "nice" in ways that sacrifice your own well being.
When an enterprise starts to take better care of itself financially, it may look like the following: no longer giving away massive amounts of goods and services "to be nice," pricing products and services with an adequate profit margin on them instead of racing to the bottom to "be competitive," cutting some products and services completely out of the line or adding new ones, not being willing to take on debt or additional debt on unstable demand for whatever the requested product is, managing inventory in a way that may not satisfy everyone external to the business, not giving away the owner's time for free, saying "no" in the short term to be able to say "yes" more often in the future, vetting new ideas carefully using measurable standards, and more.
That's it, but it's more than enough to work on.
Identifying what isn't optimal in your life isn't being negative or "tempting the universe to give you more of the same." It's the very foundation of making your life better. That's why I do these sometimes harsh reassessments several times a year and each time I create a resolution, even if I fulfill it only part way and part of the time, I notice growth for the better in my own life. I have a lot to work on this year. Feel free to share your own hopes, dreams, and resolutions (those things that make hopes and dreams come true) in the comment thread.
Happy new year and happy hooking! - Beth
]]>As many who follow our social media or who are subscribed to our newsletter know, I hurt my back in a pretty agonizing way packing out the Paris Hill Hook-In on November 2nd. I picked up a heavy tote filled with wool in just the wrong way, having already aggravated my back working on one of our new guest rooms at the Parris House the week before. When it first happened, I knew I had done something pretty awful to a large back muscle, but the event was not yet packed up and toted away, so I kept going. Then I went out to dinner with Heather, then I got home and then...for about a week...I could barely move.
This was a gentle wake up call from the universe, and I say gentle because in the grand scheme of things, this is really no big deal at all. The muscle is healing and the medical professionals say all I need is more strength training and yoga to make myself stronger and more flexible in the future. I'm all for this because I've noticed those hive boxes full of honey and the chicken feed bags seeming heavier by the year. So this week will mark my serious return to yoga and my signing up at the gym. And actually going.
Still, as I get older, my own mortality is increasingly in my face. I am fifty four years old. My, and everyone else's, mortality has been in my face for a long time, though. My brother died thirty three years ago at age thirty one and I have known too many others taken from this life too early. Not to be a complete downer here, but life is impossibly short. Even if you get a hundred years, it's like the blink of an eye. My own weakening over the past several years and then my literal near-helplessness in the wake of this recent injury have been reminders that time is marching on and that if you're still having good days, you have to make the most of them.
I came out of this experience remembering in even sharper focus what I've come to know at my age: life's too short for unnecessary unhappiness. I'm delighted to report that the twenty-somethings in my life, my sons, their significant others, and many of their friends, already know these things. I am even more delighted when I see a particularly aware child or teenager, the kind some of their elders might think are a bit "too much" (they aren't), already valuing themselves, their happiness, and setting boundaries. I wish I had been that kid.
So what is this topic doing on a blog devoted primarily to fiber art and homesteading? I'm writing this here because nothing kills your creativity quite like some of the life sucking things I'm about to talk about. These things can suck your life energy down to nearly nothing, dampen your enthusiasm for living, and damage your confidence. No one is at his or her best when feeling drained. None of these ideas is new or original, nor do they comprise an exhaustive list, but they are fifteen things, all here in one place, that I hope you can consider to protect yourself in order to promote your happiness and your creativity.
OK, so let's get to it and at the end of the post I'll offer some resources that also address these issues.
ONE: Do not accept disrespectful or hurtful communication.
I realize that sometimes, in all of our relationships, there are going to be times when things get heated and we say, or someone else says, something we wish we could take back. That's unfortunately common. What does not have to be common and is not acceptable is this mode of communication becoming the norm. This may have occurred if you find yourself avoiding communication with someone because you know it may lead to some confrontation or drama. If after the problem has been acknowledged at least once, it continues, it's best to distance yourself or limit your interaction with the perpetrator.
I recently had to ask myself if I'd let someone who'd spoken disrespectfully to me to speak to my sons, my husband, my daughters-in-law, my friends, or anyone I loved in the way he'd spoken to me. The answer was "no."
You have inherent value and you deserve to be spoken to, written to, and treated as such. Do not accept any less.
TWO: Do not speak negatively to yourself.
If the voice inside your head is hostile to you, it's time to take some steps toward re-framing those thoughts. After my injury I ended up on the massage/healing table of a dear friend and happened to say, "My left shoulder is a disaster." She laughed a little and said, "Can we re-frame that statement?" The voice in your head may be responsible for exacerbating your pain, impostor syndrome, self-doubt, self-punishment, or self-sabotage. I do understand that some of us were raised with external voices that shaped our negative internal voice. If that is the case for you, as it was for me, see someone who can help you move toward a loving, self-affirming internal voice.
In other words, don't speak to yourself in ways you wouldn't, or shouldn't, accept from someone else.
THREE: Do not defer your passions.
When I was in high school I played multiple musical instruments, wrote in a journal, wrote long letters to people, did pastel art, and more. I was highly creative. I was also encouraged to do something "sensible" with my life. So I went off to college to study business administration/marketing and after enduring the hazing initiation ritual (it was 1983) of the university marching band seniors, I packed up my musical instruments, it would turn out, even to the present day. I put my creative self mostly away, put my head down, and got on with life.
This is a really unhealthy thing to do. I could write an entire other post on all of the mental and physical manifestations of creativity repressed, but I will tell you in this post right here that that repression is painful and not conducive to happiness or growth.
Maybe for you it's not music, or writing, or drawing. If you're reading this perhaps your passion is hooking or knitting or growing your own food. Whatever it is, don't put it on the back burner. Make time for it, nurture it, and observe how you feel when you do that vs when you don't.
FOUR: Do not neglect your health.
This is huge. I don't care how "in your head" you are or how much spiritual strength you have, if your body falls in to sickness and pain, your entire quality of life is changed. For many people, the choice is not theirs. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with the human body that we have very little control over. But there are also things we absolutely can control, or at least help control.
My back failed me after years of me failing my back. As I lifted that tote on November 2nd, my back told me I hadn't worked out, I hadn't done yoga and stretching, I hadn't kept my weight at its optimal level, and that I hadn't managed my stress levels. It told me I had not earned the right to lift that tote that way because I had not properly cared for the body I was asking the job of. It told me in an excruciatingly loud and clear way and now I have to tell it I'm sorry and take better care of it.
Whatever it is that you have to do to cherish and nourish your body, do it. I know habits and even addictions are extremely difficult to break, but help is available and your life will be the better for it.
FIVE: Put your phone down.
Seriously, limit screen time. There are all kinds of apps for this, for both your cell phone and your computers. I find my relatively screen free days are my happier ones. I know all too well that if you have a business or a job that requires it, screen time is part of making a living. However, limit it as best you can to the making a living part and don't let it bleed too far over in to the "engaging in pointless drama on the internet" part. I think I can safely say we all feel like garbage when we've lost twenty minutes or more to scrolling or online drama and none of us has time for that.
SIX: Do nature.
I realize I live in Maine, which is frankly a natural paradise. I have every possible opportunity to get out in to nature year round, but sometimes I go weeks, or worse, months without really getting much more exposure to it than my daily walks with Wyeth. There are numerous studies that confirm the mental and physical benefits to spending time in nature. As with practicing your creativity, make note of how you feel when you make time for getting out in nature vs when you don't.
When I lived in suburbia another lifetime ago, I did nature by planting bulbs, getting to parks, and running outdoors, even if outdoors meant sidewalks instead of trails. It's easier here in Maine, but I believe we can find something of nature almost anywhere.
SEVEN: You're not a victim.
I want to be clear here. Maybe you have been a victim of something terrible in your life. I am absolutely not saying that no one has been a victim. In my younger years I suffered things that no young person should have to experience or endure. So, in the literal sense of the word, yes, some of us have been victims of something at some time. Perhaps you still are, and if you are, please get the help you need in any way possible.
Here's what I am saying, though. Our identities, our worth, who we are at the innermost, spiritual level, can not be defined by victimhood. That is not who we are and it is not what defines us. We have intrinsic value and most of us have at least some choices to make about our lives.
I find it helpful to understand myself in the context of any trauma I have experienced in my life, but not to project a sense of victim-as-identity on to new or daily situations that have nothing to do with those traumas. In understanding that victimhood is not who we are, it is easier to move forward in a way that gives us agency.
EIGHT: Choose your friends wisely.
This one is so basic. Life is literally too short to waste any time at all with people who do not lift you up, respect you, cheer you on toward your goals, listen when you need a listener, or encourage you to grow.
Don't feel guilty if you have to cut ties with anyone who is pejorative, who sabotages your goals, who wants to control you in any way, or who brings unnecessary unhappiness to your life, which includes our next idea...
NINE: Create a no drama zone.
Legitimate drama is a part of the human condition. We and people we love get sick and/or die. Break ups and divorces are sometimes inevitable. Financial crises happen. There is no realistic way to navigate life's real difficulties without some level of painful drama. How we handle that drama depends on our support systems, our spiritual beliefs, our philosophies, and skill sets. All of that is beyond the scope of this post and certainly I don't have all, or even many, of the answers on these very difficult experiences.
Illegitimate drama is another story. Create a wall between it and yourself and do not breach it. Examples of needless drama are gossip, catastrophizing, vengefulness, excessive rumination, online bullying or endless online argument threads. If there is someone continually injecting this kind of drama in to your life, you need to create distance and, in doing so, create room for yourself to breathe and be at peace.
TEN: It's never either/or, black or white, this or that.
A popular tactic in both advertising and political campaigns is the use of the false dichotomy. "If you don't use Product A, this bad thing will happen." "If you don't vote for Candidate B, this bad thing will happen." "This is the only way to fix problem C."
No. Just, no.
Whenever anyone or any company or entity tries to tell you your options are limited, be very skeptical. Any problem will have many multiples of solutions, so do not limit your creative thinking in the face of challenges. Brainstorm. Come up with something new or at least novel when you hit a snag. Ask other trusted people in your life for a variety of perspectives.
In essence, life's too short to limit your possibilities and solutions, especially just because someone or something with an agenda wants you to.
ELEVEN: Keep learning.
Read. Take classes. Listen to podcasts. Try something you think you're bad at. Do something that scares you. Hang out with someone you think is totally different from you. Start a small business, even if it's truly tiny. Teach something you know to someone. Listen to an opinion that makes you mad and try to understand how it even exists. Take care of animals and babies even when you think you've been there/done that. Travel. Learn a new language. Go to a church service that's totally not in your tradition. Eat that thing you thought you'd never eat. You get the idea.
Most of what there is to do on this planet, you'll never have time to do. It's just a logistical fact. Even if you live a maximum lifespan, there's just too much to do and too little time. So do as much as you can and watch your perspective evolve.
TWELVE: It's not enough to look. You have to also see.
I look at things all day. I look at my email. I look at the production work I have to get out the door. I look at my bank account and my Quickbooks file. I check my social media and online shops. I look at the thermometer. I look at what's in the fridge for breakfast.
On the other hand, it's only sometimes that I see. My walks with Wyeth are great for seeing. I see the breathtaking ever-changing weather conditions over the mountains, the subtle changes in the seasons-within-seasons with the plants and wildlife, or the way the snow either crunches in to shards or mushes like mashed potatoes under my boots. More importantly, I truly see when I look in to my sons' eyes during a conversation, or really seek to understand what my dog is trying to tell me with his expression or body language.
It's easy to look, but the more we see the more profound our lives become and the more inspired our art or every day activities can be.
THIRTEEN: If it's not a hell-yes, it's a no.
This is self-explanatory. I have this mantra hanging in a framed graphic in my work studio.
If whatever you're asked for doesn't feel like something you really want, or because of deep moral impetus, need, to do, say "no." Just say "no." There are endless ways to say "no" politely and compassionately, but you must because, to return to our theme, life is too short and you can not possibly say "yes" to everything.
FOURTEEN: What other people think rarely matters.
I think this is honestly the most important thing on this list because it facilitates all the others. Many of the compromises we make on the previous thirteen ideas are based on worrying about what people will think of us. This is a family-friendly blog so I won't use the language that immediately comes to mind regarding worrying about what other people think.
You can't care what other people think most of the time. There are caveats. I care very much what my husband and sons, daughters-in-law, and close friends think. I want their love and respect, of course, and I also want to be a person they can be proud of. I trust them implicitly and if they think something I'm doing is wrong or ill-advised, I'm likely going to pay attention. It is a very small circle of people who have opinions that are truly and deeply significant in my life.
I'm sure that sounds terrible, but I recommend this idea to you even if that means that you don't give a fig what I think either because I am not in your inner circle of closest humans. That's as it should be. And this does not mean that you need to be unkind or unyielding or ignore those who might offer an opinion counter to yours or disapprove of what you want to do. It simply means that you can't care about those things if caring about them compromises what you deeply know are the right choices for you.
FIFTEEN: Don't backslide or compromise on any of these things.
I do this all the time. I'm writing this post for myself as much as for anyone else. I have my lessons learned, my convictions, my best intentions, and then I backslide and allow some unhealthy choices back in to my life. If we all support one another in these things, we can make the peace and space in our lives to free some of our time and creativity. We can treat ourselves with care in ways that bubble baths, manicures, expensive wines (nice as these things are) can not. Self-care is an inside job, but we can all help one another achieve it in meaningful and lasting ways.
I hope this has been helpful. While writing this I have thought of at least five more things I could include, but this is enough and, as I said, none of this is new. We all need reminders sometimes, though, and hopefully this post has served as a reminder to you to protect and promote your own well being.
Happy reflection and happy hooking. - Beth
Resources:
Here are a few resources you might enjoy if you find any of these ideas interesting. Please note that while I also have a library of Christian books and use Christian apps because Roman Catholicism is my personal primary faith tradition, I have not included those here because I am trying to keep the list universal. If you have a faith tradition (or no faith tradition, which is equally legitimate) that supports your well being, add books, podcasts, and apps relevant to that to this list.
Books:
Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark Manson
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau
Awakening Shakti, by Sally Kempton
Any book by Thich Nhat Hanh
Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl
The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron
The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz
10% Happier, by Dan Harris
Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat Zinn
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
Writings of John Muir
Living the Good Life, by Scott and Helen Nearing
Podcasts/Radio Shows:
10% Happier with Dan Harris
How I Built This
The Ted Radio Hour
Becoming Wise
Good Life Project
Apps:
Headspace (meditation training app)
Fitbit (works with your Fitbit device to track health metrics)
My Affirmations (positive re-framing)
StayFree (helps limit social media or other app use)
Keep Notes (list and note maker)
Law of Attraction (meditations, affirmations, vision board maker)
Facebook Feed Eradicator (Chrome plug-in for desktop/laptop - hides feed)
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My husband, Bill, and I took another trip to Nova Scotia in early June, just for a few days to help our son James move up there. His fiancee is Nova Scotian and they are starting their lives together. I'm a wee bit envious that he'll be a permanent resident of Nova Scotia in the near future. I've thought about living there myself for reasons beyond the scope of this post.
Anyone who's seen a Nova Scotian car on the highway knows that the license plate says, "Canada's Ocean Playground." I have a lot of empathy for the people of Nova Scotia who may feel about that similarly to the way a lot of Mainers feel about our plates saying, "Vacationland." There is so much more to Nova Scotia and Maine than our superlative tourist attractions, although we do welcome the income they generate. On this particular trip to Nova Scotia (and let's face it, on many of my trips to Nova Scotia), for me the province seemed like Canada's Rug Hooking Playground.
I was headed for the South Shore, specifically, Mahone Bay and Lunenburg. Most of the fiber art studios and a rug show I visited were there, but to get in to Nova Scotia via the route we generally take from Maine, you have to drive through or past Amherst. Amherst ring a bell for anyone?
We arrived at the Deanne Fitzpatrick studio pretty late in the day, right around 4 PM. I planned to go in, browse, maybe have one of Deanne's famous oatcakes, pick up some alternative fibers for some projects I have in mind for the fall, and be on my way. It didn't quite work out that way.
It turned out that Deanne was hosting one of her amazing rug hooking spa retreats and she and the attendees were in the back area hooking. I told the lovely woman in the shop not to bother them, but she said, "Oh no! Come on back! We have a student here from Maine too." So, I went back to see Deanne and one of my own students was there! It was so fun to see her in this context, learning a whole new approach to hooking in such a wonderful environment.
We proceeded on to our Airbnb in Mahone Bay, which was still a few hours past Amherst, where Wyeth made a new friend.
The next morning we went down to Mahone Bay and got a great breakfast (the first of a couple while we were in NS) at The Biscuit Eater Cafe & Books.
Our next stop was my favorite hooking studio in Nova Scotia, Emcompassing Designs in Mahone Bay, owned by Christine Little, with whom I always love chatting. Her son, Shane, the "Dye Guy" was there as well, working his magic on some more wool, which is conveniently hung on an open roll overhead. In this arrangement the wool can just be rolled down, sliced off in yard increments, and soaked & dyed. This studio is a must see if you are in Nova Scotia on a rug hooking pilgrimage. The quality of everything is exceptional, there is a huge selection (including Christine's beautiful and never ending array of patterns), and there is a wide variety of "extras" and accessories to choose from. It is no wonder that bus loads (literally...bus loads) of fiber tourists stop here on their tours of Nova Scotia.
We went on to a very different studio in Mahone Bay, Spruce Top Rug Hooking Studio owned by an absolute icon in North American rug hooking and fiber art, Carol Harvey Clark. Spruce Top is housed in a classic Nova Scotian antique home. The first floor is filled with not only beautiful rug hooking supplies, including Carol's own patterns, but a dye kitchen and a wide selection of finished rugs created by artisans from the area. Take a foray upstairs, however, and you will find a meticulously curated museum of the history of our art. There is an extensive collection of historical artifacts related to rug hooking, each carefully explained on the display plaques. Especially if you are new to rug hooking, this is an enjoyable education in our heritage. If you are not new to rug hooking, you will love seeing the story again and the artifacts related to it. Carol is so very accomplished and so knowledgeable that I never leave Spruce Top without learning something new.
Next stop was the Heidi Wulfraat Wool Works Studio, also in Mahone Bay, where after years of admiring Heidi's work online, I finally was able to meet her. She was warm and welcoming, as were her dogs! Heidi's shop is a wonderland of fiber supplies. Fiber, tools, and accessories suitable for hooking, weaving, felting, knitting, and more are plentiful all in a bright, modern building that creates a cleanly styled backdrop for all that fibery color. Some of you may recall that Heidi used to be in New Brunswick, but when I saw she'd moved to Mahone Bay I knew her shop was going to be a necessary stop for me. As in the other shops, I picked up some cool things to bring home to Maine for future projects here.
Thus ended our day in Mahone Bay. Our next stop, the following day...my absolute favorite town in Nova Scotia...the one I love to go back to over and over again? Lunenburg.
Lunenburg is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home of the world famous schooner Bluenose II and also happens to be the home town of my son James' fantabulous fiancee, Beth. (Yes, her name is also Beth.) So, our trip to Lunenburg served the purpose of having a nice dinner out with James, Beth, and Beth's parents and also, well...more rug hooking and fiber sites.
We went to the Knaut-Rhuland House Museum, a historic home in Lunenburg that turned out to be a great place for more fiber education. As we were making our way through the house, we encountered Anne Morison, who is a weaver, period costume creator, and fiber artist who I hope to meet again. She was demonstrating weaving at the museum and is there on a regular basis, so if you visit, seek her out. Also, as you explore room to room at the museum, notice the many antique hooked rugs on the floors.
We went next to the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, where I knew there was a rug show going on, organized by the Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia. What I did not know was that the docent for the show that day would be Heather Gordon. I had seen and heard of Heather Gordon's work on line for quite some time, but I did not know her face. Therefore, until she introduced herself I was unaware that I was in the presence of such an accomplished rug hooker! She was incredibly welcoming and we chatted for a very long time. The rug show was wonderful and will be up at the Fisheries Museum through early October. The museum in and of itself is always worth a visit, but the rugs are icing on the cake.
You can see some of the rugs on display in the photo below, but I don't want to spoil the show by showing too many of the rest. If you can get up to Lunenburg to see it, it's so very worth the trip.
One side trip we took was out to Lockeport, to not only look at the community, which is near Shelburne where our son and his fiancee are living, but to visit Becky's Knit & Yarn Shop. This is a very small shop in a tiny seaside town, but it is packed full of beautiful yarns, including some by Briggs & Little in custom colors commissioned by Becky.
The rest of our trip was not rug hooking or fiber art related, but I'll add a few pics here anyway for those of you who might be thinking of visiting Nova Scotia's South Shore. Other places we visited were White Point Beach Resort (where we honeymooned in 1987), Ironworks Distillery (where my husband bought me some blackberry gin...), and the Ovens Natural Park. You will not be disappointed if you go.
I hope you've enjoyed this summary of my brief trip to Nova Scotia. I'll be going back in the fall, and several times a year. Nova Scotia is getting to be a second home for us. Consider a visit! You'll never forget its natural beauty and the hospitality of its people.
Happy travels and happy hooking! - Beth
]]>Stuart Kestenbaum is the current Poet Laureate of Maine. His biography from his website states:
"Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of four collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) and Only Now (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community.
He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. He is currently serving as Maine’s poet laureate and hosts Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical
He was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006."
After listening to Stuart Kestenbaum's poetry and interviews on Maine Public for many years, imagine my delight and surprise in being able to go to a live reading and meet the man himself.
Of course, he did not disappoint. His poetry was personal, moving, and filled with deep references to place that, when interspersed with traditional Universalist hymns, rituals, and readings in a century old rural Maine church created an atmosphere as reverent and holy as any in the world. With so much (deserved) focus on Notre Dame this past month, we would also be well served to remember and honor the smallest places of worship in our very own communities.
Stuart also shared himself generously, offering his own thoughts and experiences, his writing process, and so much more in personal vignettes related to the readings and to us. His work, both in his writing and in his twenty seven years as director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, reflect a deep love for and awareness of the interconnections between nature, making, art, writing, craft, and living as a human on this planet. For this reason, although I was surprised to find our distinguished Poet Laureate at such a tiny venue in such a tiny village in front of, yes, a tiny audience, it also seemed so right.
You see, Universalist churches are a haven for inclusion, and Stuart's poetry and message felt as though it spoke to all of humanity even as it resonated with us, his fellow Mainers. As I approached the church in West Paris I immediately noticed its lawn sign: "Hate has no home here." Next to the front doors, literally permanently fastened to the building, is the rainbow flag, a sign that LGBTQ persons are welcomed and loved in this place of worship. These signs of inclusion are soft and welcoming, yet they are also fierce. They are fierce in their message of unconditional love and acceptance, something every major world religion teaches and yet so few of us, if we're honest, are able to live up to. People of many upbringings and traditions have found home at Universalist churches and for this reason I have always been drawn to them. They are common here in New England where progressive and free thought is both revered and, by some, reviled, and has been for centuries.
For whatever reason, however, I had never been to the First Universalist Church of West Paris. After being warmly welcomed at the door (by Will Chapman, by the way, the full time librarian and archivist for the Bethel Historical Society and part time librarian at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village), I was stunned by two visually overwhelming and beautiful features of this century old church.
First, the stained glass windows in this building are just breathtaking. Anyone who is an ardent admirer of stained glass should visit this church and spend some time awestruck by the craftsmanship and detail they show. Second, and of a very different nature, are two phenomenally hand-crafted works of fiber art at the back of the church. They were made by artists in Peru who used their fiber art as a means of support and were gifted to the church by a congregant. They are extremely detailed scenes of life on earth, filled with plants, animals, humans, scenes of village life, all in vibrant color using a variety of textiles and techniques. It was in the midst of this unexpected beauty and craftsmanship that the next hour of poetry, prayer, and fellowship unfolded, and it went by quickly.
At the end of a Universalist worship service, there is a ritual called the closing circle. All of us stood, held hands, and formed a circle while Stuart offered some closing thoughts. He reminded us that the context of our meeting here included world news of the terrible synagogue shooting this past week at Congregation Chabad in California and the Holy Week terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka and offered encouraging words of love and unity. As I stood there holding hands with people who were, prior to that hour, strangers, people who came from many walks of life and many religious or non-religious traditions, I wondered once again why hate gets the upper hand and creates tragedy all over the world. I don't have the answer to that. I know you don't either. But I can tell you that for one hour or so in West Paris, Maine, in one Universalist Church, with one Poet Laureate and a small group of loving and welcoming individuals, love reigned.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the many meanings of "sustainability." After doing a little binge watching of Marie Kondo's tidying up show on Netflix, I was forced to re-confront the sustainability of owning and maintaining everything I have. In January, I became aware of an online Zero Waste course sponsored by Eco Collective in Seattle, took the course, and pondered more about both waste and a more intentional use of resources in my life. Additionally, I have been reading about the closures of facilities at Woolrich in Pennsylvania and Jagger Brothers yarns here in Maine with sincere dismay. The word used to describe these operations by the decision makers responsible for the closures was, "unsustainable."
Of course, there are sustainability issues in our very own microcosms, our personal and career lives. I have two assistants, one on site and one off site, because even with my tiny business the workload required to continue its growth curve was unsustainable for me alone. I recently had to announce that I'd be stepping away in 2020 from a volunteer position that's near and dear to me because it has become, added to my other upcoming commitments, unsustainable for me. Just this week my husband and I had a heart to heart about the sustainability of my work hours vs rest and family time, because the red flags are everywhere. I attended church with the intention to keep going for the first time in years this past weekend. I have noticed that my mental and spiritual health has reached an unsustainable and yes, unstable, point without a carefully chosen faith community to help remind me that unconditional love is still very much alive in the larger world.
I owe this topic, this integration of what sustainability means in its many contexts, to a post by our friends at Dulse & Rugosa, a beautiful zero waste skin and hair care company based on Gott's Island here in Maine. I had posted the article about the Jagger Brothers yarn mill closing and Dulse & Rugosa was able to broaden that out to the issue of sustainability in general. I had said that when I was a real estate broker and didn't get both sides of a home sale, my father used to say, "Half loaves add up to whole loaves." I'd said that the same held true in supporting - sustaining - the things, businesses, people, organizations, the very planet, that we love. We don't have to give a whole loaf. We don't even have to give half a loaf. We just need to give whatever part of the loaf we can when we can. If we can do that, we can perhaps reduce the number of sad business closures we read about on a regular basis.
Dulse & Rugosa responded by posting this image on their social media pages.
How would our decisions be different if we were planning to stay? While American culture tends to avoid explicit discussions around death, we certainly do behave as though whatever we won't live to see doesn't matter. This implies an awareness of our mortality, perhaps only when that awareness is convenient. But what if we lived as though we "planned to stay?" Because, you know, we do stay, long after our mortal bodies are gone. We stay in impactful ways and those ways can be positive, negative, neutral, or somewhere along a continuum of all three. How would we treat the world, which includes the earth, each other, everything in it, if we planned to stay? Maybe another way of asking is, "What would we do if we acknowledged that what we do matters?"
Sustainability is so often a concept used in the context of environmental policy, and rightly so. However, I want to suggest that we also look at sustainability by asking the following questions. I also want to make clear that I struggle with these as much as anyone else does.
At the top of this post I have a photo of last year's pea harvest. I love fresh, sweet peas, but every year I grow them I think to myself, "That was a lot of time, space, tending, and shelling for such a small return." Is it a small return, though? That's a subjective question. How do I quantify the satisfaction inherent in the process of growing, harvesting, preparing, and then tasting those fresh peas? To borrow from Marie Kondo, they definitely "spark joy." I suppose for me, staking out a row for peas, knowing the return is objectively modest, is worthwhile and it's causing no harm. For someone else, the effort would simply look unsustainable. Everything we do, buy, produce, or spend time on can be subjectively evaluated in the same way unless it is simply crystal clear that whatever we're analyzing is objectively harmful or unsustainable.
I think you get the gist of my musings. In my life there have been several crossroads at which the unsustainability of a single decision or accumulation of decisions has become so unbearable that some kind of disruptive change has been necessary to create a more tenable life situation. What I am learning now is that by looking at sustainability in a holistic, multi-contextual way, I can make better decisions that will work in the direction of ease and responsibility - to myself, to others, and to the planet - instead of accumulating in to an unsustainable morass. These decisions include what I choose to do and have and what I choose not to do and not to have.
Henry David Thoreau distilled this down to its very essence when he wrote, "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." Thoreau lived as though he planned to stay, conducting his life with an economy that is rarely matched in modern day America. In fact, his economy with words is one I apparently can not hope to achieve.
I'd be very interested to know your thoughts on this topic and the contexts in which sustainability has meaning for you. In a country where some of us have too much and yet others have much too little, what are the moral implications of seeking sustainability in a variety of ways as well? Feel free to join the discussion. I know I don't have even a fraction of the answers.
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I recently had a student call the studio and say, "I want to learn to hook, but I want to make my own pattern. Can you teach me to do that all in one lesson?" The answer was, "Of course!"
We will be listing some new regularly scheduled courses for 2019, but maybe you'd like a custom experience too, scheduled at your convenience. At the Parris House in the National Historic District of Paris Hill, Maine, we teach rug hooking (beginner and specialty topics), wool dyeing, needle felted sachet making, cold process soap making, beginner rug hooking design and pattern making, and more. If there's something you'd like to learn, get in touch with us and we'll make it happen. Art, craft, and homesteading classes make great:friends & family activities
holiday gifts
bridal party or groomsmen gathering activities
birthday celebrations
experiences for college and school students of all ages
special self care treats
inter-generational learning opportunities
We can create a custom experience at the two century old historic Parris House just for you or your group where you can leave with a memento of the occasion, be it hand crafted soap, a beautiful sachet pillow, a hooked mug rug, plus a new shared pastime.
To arrange a Parris House learning experience, contact us to get the process started. We look forward to introducing you to something new!
]]>"The Shakers at Mount Lebanon led the largest and most successful utopian communal society in America for 160 years, from 1787 to 1947.
From this central community developed the Shakers’ ideals of equality of labor, gender, and race, as well as communal property, freedom, and pacifism. From Mount Lebanon also grew the now famous Shaker aesthetic of simplicity, expressed in their objects, furniture, buildings, and village planning.