Fabric/Hummingbird/Thanks

[kate_schaefer]

I've been sorting my late friend Anna's possessions for many months now, hundreds of boxes of stuff. The sorting is essentially done now. I have little piles of things in various places in my house, piles that I'm slowly putting into boxes or envelopes and mailing out, or piles that I'm putting through the shredder. There were some ungodly number of boxes when this process began, a few hundred. I'd call Andy to ask if I could bring him some more boxes of fanzines for TAFF/DUFF/GUFF, just a few more boxes. He'd say sure, and I'd arrive with another ten. Okay, actually another fifteen, but some of them were small. We dealt with the books long ago, most of them, although after I thought all the books were gone I found another four boxes, and maybe there are still boxes lurking somewhere in my basement, in some corner where we stashed things just to get them out of the way, in some corner where they're secretly breeding.

At any rate, yesterday I took two boxes to be mailed to Anna's sister over to Karen's house. Two more boxes out, and very little left. Space reclaimed! Yes!

I returned from Karen's house with 18 boxes of primo fabric from Karen's stash, fabric she needed to get rid of because she doesn't sew any more. Two boxes for 18; such a deal. Damn.

I will get rid of some of Karen's fabric in turn, because although all of it is decent quality, not all of it is to my taste, and there's a limit to how much fabric I'll store just so I can use it as muslin, and especially there's a limit to how many boxes I can fit under the bed in the grandchildren's guest room.

It's raining in Seattle today, steady soaking rain alternating with grey skies and the promise of more rain soon. I looked into my back yard a bit ago and saw a small drab bird hovering by the crocosmia -- hovering! A hummingbird! I watched it flit efficiently from blossom to blossom, then sit for at least a minute on a crocosmia stem, then flit again.

My yard has a lot of flowers that should attract hummingbirds, in part because I want to attract hummingbirds, in part because there were flowers of that sort here when I bought the house, and in part because hummingbirds and I share an attraction to nature's most perfect color, red. We don't see hummingbirds every summer, but often enough to justify the red flowers even if I didn't like them for themselves. A day with a hummingbird in it is almost as good as a day with a great grey heron in it.

Many thanks to brisangemen for the list of those known to be safe after yesterday's tragic bombings in London. I found it reassuring to see the lists get longer, even though for the most part I don't know the names behind the LJ pseudonyms. I realised that if someone in our extended community turned out to be among the victims, that name would have been posted openly, so the more pseudonyms, the better.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

My husband will rightfully kill me make sarcastic noises at me for saying this, but I might be willing and able to ahem help with that fabric overage if you need volunteers. Strictly in the interest of helping your reclaim space, of course.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Saves me having to volunteer to offer a safe haven for it here (with shipping costs of course).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I live to serve.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer. A second sort suggests to me that much of this fabric has been stored for longer than is good for it, or me, or anyone else with any sensitivity to must or mildew. I hope that the more entertaining bits are mildew-free. None of it is horribly mildewed, and someone with an insensitive nose might not notice it at all, but much of the cotton is good only for test garments. I need to make a lot of test garments, but I won't want to store fabric that might spread mildew to other fabric.

Some of the mildew is in the boxes rather than in the fabric itself, but I'll have to wash everything (or everything I hope to keep) before I can tell.

You are welcome to participate in this process, but I'll discourage you from taking anything dubious.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't need to take on anything dubious, of course. FWIW, apparently a lot of the fabricky stuff that goes to Value Village and doesn't make their retail resale cut gets sent off to the modern equivalent of the rag and bone man, and the money from that plowed back, in part, into local charities. I would think mildew damage shouldn't matter for rag stock purposes.

But yes, I'm still interested in participating in the process if we can sort something out -- I'm still a sad magpie for fabric, you know -- against the possibility that there's something usable that you don't want but I do. One never knows.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I found it reassuring to see the lists get longer, even though for the most part I don't know the names behind the LJ pseudonyms.

I started off with the names of people I knew, and advertised the community and list on my journal ... after a while, I realised I was now typing in names of people who had no connection to anyone I knew at all ...that moment when it goes off the radar. I've updated today but everything is going quiet now, which I am deeply, deeply glad about. The best bit has been taking names off the lost file and putting them on the found.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Kudos on that good work, by the bye. I cross-posted some of the information to rasseff, for old times' sake.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Thanks, and thanks for posting the information on along ... it's amazing what we can achieve with the internet.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I love the 21st C. My favorite minor bit of business in the use of technology in response to yesterday's bombings was the organization of the alternative Tun meeting via SMS text messaging and LJ. I also love the fact that the Tun happened anyway, presumably at a much diminished size. Bravo!