Like several of my friends I got bitten by the TIDY bug and have done my clothes, most of my office and now taking a quick break from the collaboration to do the studio. The most important thing to mention off the top is I do not like clutter so I’ve continually sorted the studio for years. That said, wow have I found a lot of clutter! I annually sort through all my fabric and donate anything that does not ring my bell. Fortunately the last several years I have not bought much commercial fabric but have designed a lot of fabric which has filled in the space.
What I cannot part with are mostly journals. I have at least a dozen half-filled notebooks of various sizes where I took notes in a class, made notes on a trip, wrote daily gratitude for years, made sketches of garments I wanted to sew or knit, sketches of random scenery, quotes I wanted to remember, and just thoughts about life. They do not exactly spark joy and yet my adult life is contained within the pages. So they are simply going to a new shelf to be reunited.
“Louis Feraud’s Fall ’96 collection was “leaves” ad 200 sewing hours later this gown may represent the collections finest hour…” -THREADS April/May 1997
One of the things I found so entertaining though was the progression of the saved articles. Step 1: (30 years ago) for a decade I saved every issue of every sewing & knitting related magazine I received (monthly), with the idea that ‘someday’ I might want to refer back to them. Only after my husband complained about the weight on the shelf did I consider tossing them.
Step 2: (20 years ago) I diligently browsed through a decade of old magazines, pulled the articles that most appealed to me (at that time) and put them on a shelf. I bundled leftover magazines and put out on recycling day. The total amount was 7′ wide!
Step 3: (19 years ago) about a year later I decided to actually file said articles in a binder, so I invested in several boxes of plastic sleeves, sorted the articles into categories: sewing, knitting, design, quilting, etc and filed into a 4″ binder and put it on said shelf. Occasionally in the last decade I have leafed through the huge and heavy binder looking for just that perfect whatever I wanted to make. Most often I was looking for knitting ideas.
Step 4: today. I went through the binder and tossed everything I would never make nor read. When I finished I had a 3″ stack of empty plastic sleeves and just enough articles to put into a 1″ binder…likely to be tossed in another future purge!
unemployed plastic sleeves
What amused me most is how much space, energy and time these old magazines took up in my life. How I never went back to read anything except a few knitting patterns and even then did not knit them. One good thing that came from the great magazine purge of 20 years ago, is every magazine I’ve read since I tore out what I wanted to keep while I was reading and then tossed it into the recycling bin. I found I tore out far less when I actually had to do something with it in the moment.
Fast forward to present time and nearly all articles we once clung to can now be found online, anyway.
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