A Time to Let Go

 

As the years progressed, I collected a lot of...stuff.

As a weaver, teacher, writer, I accumulated information.  The craft of weaving is huge, and sometimes source material was difficult to find so I would keep things.

At first it was weaving records of my own designs, then I participated in sample exchanges, found resources for research I was doing on common or more esoteric aspects of the creation of cloth (i.e. seamless shirts - not just a fairy tale!), photographs, slides, publications (newsletters, magazines), yarn samples...the list goes on.  And on.  And....on...

Forty plus years of this accumulation, with periodic culling still meant an entire wall of binders, books and publications in one room, another shelving unit in my office.  

The time had come to finally start doing a once and for all culling.

So the past week I have been dragging binders off the shelves, opening them up, going nope, don't need that anymore, and either tossing the contents or reserving them to pass on to a younger weaver(s).

I'm nearly done the studio.  I have a pile of binders at the other end of the room that need emptying, but all those binders in the photo?  Empty.

Some of them need to be tossed (recycled) but some are still nearly new and we'll see if there are any kids headed back to school that might need them.  I'll sit and paw through the rest of the binders today and empty the ones that are not being kept.  I've been removing staples and ancient Scotch tape and tossing those (and the samples they held to the pages) and then putting the paper into the recycle bin.  The plastic pocket pages will be kept to be reused, or tossed if they are too beat up to keep.

Some things I can't manage to toss yet, so I am keeping some of the things.  But out of all those binders?  Some had not been opened in 20 years.  It was long past time to get rid of them.  One way or another.

Since I don't have kids I can dump this mess onto, I feel I must do it myself.  And now seemed like as good a time as any, with shelves stuffed so full I couldn't shelve all the books I DO use on a fairly regular basis.  

Someone suggested I offer my 'papers' to the local university to archive.  Thing is, I worked in a library and I know how much work such an archive takes - and therefore how much money they would need.  And for what?  My scratchy notes that even I can't decipher any longer?  Degraded photographs/slides with people I can no longer identify?

I feel my best 'archive' is my books.  The information is organized, neat, tidy, documented.

Time to let the rest go.