As you can see, my magic carpet bag is languishing on the sewing machine. It has clearly not received additional stiffener (several of you offered me great solutions for stiffener that I have not yet investigated . . .) nor has it received a treatment for the bag opening that will make it look more like a classic carpet bag and less like a tote. I have the purse frame I want to try. I have a strategy for shaping the opening to fit the frame. I have some types of stiffener in the studio and I have your great suggestions. And yet the project has stalled. What is going on? Why?
So many reasons. And I will tell you about them so you don’t think I’m a complete slug (at least I hope not). I know many of you also have unfinished projects that you put to the side because other things demanded your attention, so I am confident most of you will understand my frustration with the stasis on the table next to the sewing machine. I, too, have had many demands on my time and attention since the last time I worked on the bag.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF AN EMPTY NEST — As you may have read in previous posts, I went on a wonderful trip to Spain with my son. We returned home on the 26th of August. We got back on a plane on the 27th and I delivered him to his dorm in San Francisco to begin his first semester (as a Sophomore; more on that in a postscript) with the help of a dear friend I have known for 16 years, but hadn’t seen for 4, and who heroically drove up from Los Angeles to fetch Julian and me from the airport and help us get his things into his new dorm apartment – which you can see below.
And there is an amazing roof deck (Julian on the left checking his phone):
After I got home, I lost my assistant and went back to doing everything for the domestic side of JUL myself, just as I did when I first started almost 10 years ago.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE BUSINESS WHEN MOUNTAINS START EXPLODING? — At the end of September, I went on a trip to Toronto to conduct styling parties in two stores that buy JUL from me – The Purple Purl and Spun Fibre Arts. While in Canada, I learned that Mount Agung in Bali, Indonesia – where my Balinese creative partner, Agus, and my wood and metal artisans are – was showing unusual seismic activity, a sign that it was going to erupt. The news of the eruption, which was described as imminent for some months before it actually began, terrified me for two main reasons. First, I feared for my friends and teachers because where I lived and studied during my field research in Bali is right in the exclusion zone at the base of the mountain, which is the dominant feature in the landscape in the eastern part of Bali (Karangasem). Second, I felt afraid not knowing how an eruption would affect JUL and the people in Bali who depend on JUL for their livelihoods. This story is still unfolding as the mountain has begun to erupt and ash covers the landscape in some places, has disrupted air traffic, and is having an impact on the economy resulting from a drop in tourism. Based on location, the impact of Agung on my business is minimal as Agus and my artisans are in the central south of Bali, not the east. But when the airport is closed and commerce shifts to trucks that have to leave Bali and head north to Java before they can put their loads on planes, it affects our ability to ship product with speed.
MOVING — Then in October I began to pack up my studio to move my business into my house! For the months of October and November I worked on selling excess furniture and getting rid of things I no longer needed at work and at home.
I packing up my living room to make way for a cutting table and leather-working space (strangely enough, I never used my living room as a social space anyway, just walked through on my way from the first to the third floor).
I shifted inventory into bins and set up the computer in what had been my son’s bedroom, and before that my study (hence the built in bookcases holding all of my anthropological theory, ethnography, poetry, and art books).
I shrank the physical and financial footprint of the business by shifting to a new way of storing inventory and developing a different workflow and could not be more delighted with the result. Where my studio was huge and noisy – with an illegal left turn on the corner that had people yelling obscenities at one another all day, and a fire station down the road that was engaged in mitigating tragedy and despair all day – my home is intimate and quiet, an old mill-worker house in an historic mill town right on the banks of the Patapsco River. My studio window in the back looks out on woods where all I hear are wrens bickering. My studio windows in the front look out on the river, where sometimes I see herons and bald eagles flying.
This process of moving, compressing, and re-organizing the business has taken a lot of time and energy and is not only a streamlining process for JUL, but represents an opportunity for reinvention as an empty-nester for me.
CREATIVITY AS A LIFESTYLE —
Here is where real honesty and openness is required. I have to confess to you that if I had truly committed to getting the Magic Carpet Bag in the air, it would be farther along by now. I have had another struggle that is harder for me than moving. I am struggling to forge a creative lifestyle. This idea might seem odd. I’m a creative person. Creativity has been part of me since I was a little girl. But the life-configuration I have now, and where creativity is located in it, needs re-assessment.
I have found myself using the word ‘intentional’ lately. Maybe many of you have too. We want to be conscious of the choices we are making when we are making them and not regret an unintended life-arc in retrospect. I have had plenty of unintended life-arcs. JUL is an unintended life-arc! Here I am and I love what I am doing and want to do it better. I want to do more. I want to get the Magic Carpet Bag moving again. I want to write more. I want to be more productive in my design work. I want to work on my leather applique and return to making most of my own clothes.
Intention will only get me so far. I need commitment and that is where I have been weak. I’ve been waiting for something to shape my choices – perhaps the vestiges of being a parent herding a young cat who now doesn’t need my herding. He just needs money for transport, food, and school supplies, a plane ticket home on the holidays, to borrow my car, and most of all acceptance and love and I am up to those tasks. The task that is challenging me is committing to my creative self, giving that self the opportunity, every day, to expand and take up time and space.
So what makes ‘doing more’ a creative lifestyle? My uncle says it’s a matter of routine, working the activity into your daily life so that it feels as natural as getting up at 6, walking at 8, working until 12:30, then breaking for lunch. If you don’t do it something is missing and as a result your body hurts, or your mind hurts, or your heart aches for lack of work.
In college, my poetry workshop leader advised us not to wait for inspiration. He said that if we were only to write poems when we were inspired, there would not be so much poetry around. Poetry is work, he said. You have to set aside time for it everyday. You write no matter what. That is intentional and committed. That is a poetic lifestyle. I have given myself the space. Now I need to give myself the time.
Adventures in Design 
Thank you for sharing.
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