design and disruption

Summer is lovely and beautiful and we are extremely blessed to spend it in the old farm house surrounded by the people we love.  Every morning I light the stove (luckily that means just light the gas burner with a match and not actually build up the wood fire from the day before!) and make my morning tea.  This is my morning view.

 You can’t quite see it but out of that flower box clad window is a cellar house and on it is a little bird house where a tiny wren builds a nest every summer. As I make my morning tea, it is usually perched on top of the box singing its happy, sweet, “this is my place” song (and sometimes, more forcefully, fighting off starlings twice its size that somehow think they could get through the tiny little hole to the nest!).  The little wren’s joy (and ferocity) really resonate with me.  We’ve come here every summer for four years now and it is a disruption, a happy disruption, but a disruption.  It comes at a cost of leaving our house and sweet friends to be here; it takes some work on our part to fulfill our responsibilities from here (and on my aunt and uncle’s part who do so much work to give us a home in the farm house each year); I guess it asks a little ferocity of will.  But most mornings I just want to join the little wren and sing from the rooftops my joy at being so blessed to be here.  We do it freely by design and the benefits and rewards far outweigh the disruption.

It all got me thinking about design and disruption. We make plans in our life, think things will work a certain way by our design and then find that the disruptions that occur are potentially more joyful than our plans. I had never anticipated living a life split between two states, but it happened. Design and disruption happen in so many ways in my life, especially my fiber life. How many times have I planned something only to have the plan go wrong and realize that the disruption was actually something better than my design.  Or that by setting out to do a particular task, I’ve disrupted other things that also needed done or were also good but that now have to be put on hold.

Recently, I finished two coverlets for my cousin.  I freely planned to do them and the whole experience has been nothing but wonderful, absolutely wonderful.  It also took me far longer than I had planned and disrupted some other plans for weaving I wanted to do before I left my big looms for the summer.  Oh well! Design and Disruption!! I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Here they are!  I finally found the time amid the disruptions to post a picture of them here.  I can’t wait to give them to her.  And I get to spend the summer dreaming of all the fabric I’ll weave when I return to the big looms in August.  (In the meantime, I’m designing and weaving on the most portable of looms – ME!  As we all know, I’m in love with back-strap weaving.  Again, there have been many disruptions to getting any of that done, but at least I can do it here with no other loom.)

Back strap weaving in the rocker on the porch with the barn and pet horse in the view…pretty hick.

AND, I’m spinning like crazy.  I realized when I began to write this post that while I had designed this to be a blog of my spinning and weaving, I’ve never posted anything about spinning!  Weaving is such a disruption!!

Or maybe, flyer photos just aren’t all that interesting.  Oh, look, a flyer with yarn on it.  woop.

I am actually knitting a project out of some handspun yarn I just finished last week and it is very pretty and much more photogenic, but every time I go to take a picture, I get interrupted by something…maybe when the 38 year old pet horse isn’t asking for his afternoon cookie or my daughter isn’t catching fireflies or my family isn’t getting out the guitars and banjos to play music together…maybe when all these “disruptions” stop I can get a picture…or not:)