Monday, 31st October 2011
How do I know when a passion that I once lived and breathed that was my everything... how do I know if it is spent? That I will not want to revisit this passion that once gave me so much joy? That I used to spend so much time immersed in at every stage. From inspiration... planning... choosing the fabric... working out the colours like an intricate jigsaw... playing with the possibilities... moving them around... cutting and snipping... sewing and trimming... pressing... sewing... flattening... looking at it from different angles... distance... closeup... in different lighting... early morning... afternoon... midnight...
As I worked, as I lost myself in the creation my mind would already be moving on to the next piece that I wanted to try. What if I tweaked this, tried that... what would happen then?
Suddenly, I stopped...
Did I lose the time? My life changed. I met DH. We got married and bought a house. We decorated it. We planned for other things to happen. I worked two jobs. My patchwork books gradually collected dust. My fabrics were packed into crates in the attic with a dust sheet flung over them. I hung up the few quilts and wall-hangings that I still owned.
Most of them remained at mum's house when I moved out, lining her walls, like colourful ghosts of the past... A remnant of a dream that we once shared. A dream that was kindled on a visit to Vancouver Island and the discovery of a patchwork shop in Victoria... The colours... the fabrics... the quilts... the inspiration... the books... the notions were utterly overwhelming. I squashed book after book, cutting gadgets, even a ruler into my bag. It became more akin to a lead weight than a rucksack... I devoured the books. Read them from cover to cover. Guzzled my way through magazines... even absorbing the advertisements. My mind was intoxicated with the colour... the texture... the pattern... the beauty...
I came back from Canada, unsettled. Unable to settle back into my job in the bank. My old life felt wrong. So I embarked on an immersion into textiles. I had a studied design but technical skills were something that I lacked so in the space of two years I completed City and Guilds courses in Part 1 and Part 2 in Art and Design, Patchwork & Quilting, Embroidery, Fashion and Soft Furnishings... I re-sat my A' Level Art and Design. I was lost in my new world of creativity. I opened a Patchwork shop in the wrong location a rookies mistake but a huge one. Why I chose a place so far from home, I don't know. Now, looking back, I would have been better to have opened in my own neighbourhood but hindsight is a wonderful thing... Initially, all went well, the shop was building up custom, I was tired, I was working 7 days a week, I was teaching patchwork in the evenings, and mum (supportive as ever) tried to come down as many weekends as she could to help me. I couldn't afford to pay someone to help as I had the start up costs, the rent on the shop and the rent on a small flat to pay... I was lonely.
Then as often happens (here anyway)... politics came into play... The first Drumcree blockade happened - only 10 miles down the road... and things became scary. The first night... several shops were burned out... rioting continued for several days... then the boycott started... I had never known the religious persuasion of the customers who came into the shop. Over the next 3 months... I sold one spool of thread... my fledgeling business was failing. I tried (too late) to move the shop to a different place but the bank called in my loans and it was all over.
The debts amassed... they took over my life. Mum hired a van. We emptied the shop and the flat. Returned anything we could to suppliers who would accept them (at less than half the price I had paid). Dismantled the shelving... the desks... and cleared and packed away my dreams and hopes into crates and boxes. It took 5 return trips to move my stock, my belongings, my cat Kizzie and myself back to my mum's house... My stuff moved into her attic.
My niece went into hospital for routine (for her) heart surgery and did not come home. We were heart broken. The stress was building up. Mum had an accident and wrote off her car.
For the next year and a half, I hauled stock from the shop to the patchwork guild and set up a stall to try to sell some of it. Gradually, with no new colours, the fabrics began to look dated, so last season... The sales started to lessen. The fabrics still sit in the attic in crates with cotton covers over them to protect them from light and dust.
My passion for patchwork, my joy in the creation of the quilts and wall-hangings, it also failed me. I suppose I lost my way. I took the first job I could find because I was desperate. I worked for a sadistic tyrant who played mind games with his staff. I had box files filled with the documentation for ex-employees whose lives he continued to try to destroy long after they had left his employment. The references I had to type for them were appalling and scurrilous... yet they would have no idea what he was sending in to the companies they were trying to get a job with. He wouldn't even sign the required forms to allow them to obtain unemployment benefit. Every month, I would have to ask him over and over for the pay cheques. We would be lucky if he signed them by the 3rd of the month and then he would dole them out like it was charity.
I had married and we wanted a family. Money was tight because of the debts so I took a second job in the evenings. Three nights a week, from 6pm to 9pm I taught English as a Foreign Language to the children of the Korean managers at a local factory. My father-in-law's alzheimers became worse and DH started spending several nights a week at his parents house... And instead of children... I started having miscarriages... my health was getting worse and I didn't know what the problem was. I was so tired I could barely function I just forced myself on. After the ectopic pregnancy, when I returned to work, my boss became impossibly difficult. He wouldn't allow me the time to attend hospital appointments. He would arrive with dictaphone tapes wanting everything done that day, but not giving the tapes to me until after 4:30 in the afternoon. I was killing myself trying to get the work done so that I could leave and get to my second job on time. Diabetes was diagnosed.
One Friday, it all came to an end... my boss did something so despicable that I knew I could not return, and on Monday, I stayed at home. Seven years after my business had failed, my job was gone, I had no references, my health was worse than ever and my life felt like it was crumbling around me.
Everytime, I went to visit my in-laws, I was asked when I would get a new job, told I was putting undue pressure on DH, family gatherings became something I would stress about weeks before the event. I was under pressure from everyone except mum and DH, although even they, kept asking me what my plans were. What I wanted to do?
The problem was, of course, that I just didn't know. The other day, while I was working on decluttering the attic, I took off the dust sheet, brushed my hands over the beautiful colours of the hand dyed fabrics in the crates, I flicked through a couple of my more cherished patchwork books, and then I opened a journal (an old school notebook) from this period of time. I read an entry from the middle of the book and realised, that even then, I was writing that I wanted to be a novelist, that I wanted to be a writer. Yet instead of following this path that I so wanted to travel, I put the dream on hold...
I suppose, I was trying to find a way of regaining some autonomy, a way of using some of the fabrics and threads that were in the crates, I discovered Ebay, rediscovered S dolls, and a new passion took over... I was lost in the online world of S collectors and collecting.
I bought dolls. I started designing clothes for them. Began selling my early attempts on ebay and then opened a website to sell my creations. Initially, they were single outfits but gradually I began working in small collections of outfits.
And family stopped harrassing me. But I found myself, back, working long long hours, often finishing at midnight. It takes 4-5 days to make an outfit. The hand knitted components, the accessories, the finishing touches, all take more time than I expect. Always do. They sell. But there are neither hours in the day nor buyers within this small niche market, for me to ever make a living out of this and I am weary. Bone weary.
Then last Autumn, my cat collapsed and died, a few months later my wonderful dog had to be put to sleep, in January, my laptop and PC both crashed irreparably and I lost all of my information and my website had gone. Finally, the worst happened at the end of Springtime, my brother drowned accidentally in his lake on Easter Monday...
After the first weeks of abject grief I tried to keep going. I forced myself to continue making the next two planned collections. I needed the income to help pay for the unexpected expenses that were piling up. I was struggling with the new laptop and software for the new website. I had switched from PC to MacBook Pro and in the end DH stepped in and helped rebuild the website. As I forced myself on... I felt more and more boxed into a corner... I found myself questioning what I wanted out of my life... What did I really want to do with my life?
The answer came to me like a whisper on the wind in my journalling... I want to have the courage to write the novels that I have always dreamed of. The type of fantasy and adventure novels that, as a child, I used to read under the bedclothes using my torch when I should have been sleeping but I couldn't stop reading because I just had to know what happened next...
I mentioned this to a couple of close family members and was told that I would be wasting my time... I'd never find a publisher even if I finished writing it... could I actually write they would enquire politely but dismissively... Had I actually written any stories? I was at this impasse when, as my birthday approached, and I was surfing the web, looking for art journalling as I felt I needed to bring colour and pattern back into my life in some guided way. I found meandpete.com and after looking at Juliana's Etsy shop emailed her to enquire about a couple of her booklets... She suggested her new Book of the Night Online Extreme Art Journalling course, which was about to start, so I signed up.
The Book of the Night and the amazing dynamic people journalling their way through the assignments have been exactly what I needed while I am at this crossroads in my life. I have found the challenging assignments are helping me to find the courage to work out what the right decision will be for me. To discover what I truly want to do with my life.
So is it a passion spent, will I ever return to patchwork, who knows at this juncture, although I do know I am not ready to let go of all my patchwork paraphernalia, materials and books.
It is definitely a new awakening because I can sense the confusion in my mind and know that I just need to continue this inner exploration to find out what I want to do next. What I do know, from past experience, is that when I do have the courage to take this leap of faith into the next passionate undertaking, I will give it my all, because, well, I always do...
