Cool and Interesting

I’ve decided to call the room I used as my WFH office from 2012-2025 my “studio” now, to reflect the more creative work, rather than corporate work, I’m focusing on.

This provides a guideline to clean up the mouldering old projects in the cupboards in my studio.

For example:

The bags have been haunting me for more than a decade. I made four bags for when we canoed down the Loire river ten years ago in two canoes, a spectacular voyage, camping on the sandy beaches.

They were supposed to provide safe, easy-access waterproof storage under the canoe seat for items needed while canoeing, leveraging the scaffolding of the canoe seat to keep the bag off the inevitably wet bottom of the canoe. But the bags were too floppy, the zippers too short, they were not really waterproof and thus when they sagged down onto the bottom of the canoe, the stuff inside got wet. This was the opposite of what they were meant for. Fortunately we had no rain, so the bag failure wasn’t a big deal. But I’m always thinking about the worst-case scenario as I quickly get miserable when cold and wet.

So I’ve been meaning to “fix” them. But we won’t be going canoeing anytime soon, and if we do paddle down the Ticino River, I would just take a waterproof backpack with me instead of a single-purpose under-the-seat bag. I’ve decided that no more active brain cycles or guilt feelings will be consumed or induced by this project. It was a novel idea, with good intentions, but not worth spending more time to “fix”. Not cool and interesting enough.

Therefore they will be relegated to the “raw material” shelf.

One New Year’s Resolution candidate less. One step closer to having a creative rather than guilt-inducing studio.

On the bottom right, light blue raw silk brought back from Thailand by my grandfather in the 1960’s, passed on to haunt each generation.

On the top left, wonderfully-light grey fleece that kept us warm in cold airbnb apartments … Until I decided to make an unfashionable sweater out of it.

Bottom left, blue jeans-colored fleece intended for another sweater but haunted by the failure of the grey fleece sweater.

Closing the zipper keeps the ghosts of projects past contained until I’m ready to deal with them.