I have various “past creative lives” I have gathered every conceivable gadget, tool and resource for my projects only to discover that the project led mes to a completely different obsession!
I have knit all my life, and kept all those scraps of yarn; knowing that someday I may knit something that will need one of those scraps and they will no longer be available. Do you know how tangled and matted yarn gets after 40 years of digging through for that perfect bit.
So I got a knitting machine to get rid of the scraps. I loved it! Do you know how much “stuff” it takes for a knitting machine. I dreamed knitting machine. I would wake up knowing how to do something and it would work.
I knit a dress for a watercolor teacher, she gave me a lesson. I loved it! It’s amazing how much “stuff” you need for painting. So I started Claudia’s Arts & Crafts, Inc.
That store took so much time that I had to stop painting but I still have the “stuff” in case I go back to it. The best thing was that the store had a storage room and I could now have a normal house.
So down came the Arts & Crafts sign and up goes the Claudia’s Custom Knitting & Yarn, Inc. sign.
I knitted hundreds of dresses for people. Everyone that came into the shop wanted to do what I was doing; so I sold a lot of knitting machines. I was so busy, I didn’t even know there was a contest going on but I won a trip to Paradise Island for selling the most knitting machines in the USA.
Don’t be too impressed; everyone else on the trip was selling sewing machines and didn’t have an interest in the dusty knitting machine in the corner. Someone on that trip convinced me to sell sewing machines.
I put a motor on one of the knitting machines and let it knit yards of fabric to sew on my machines.
Down came the Arts & Crafts sign & up went the Sewing machine sign. Those were really good years. The shop won trips all over the world for selling sewing machines. Besides that, the new building we needed, had a really big storage room.
I never know when I may take up knitting again so I have three machines, two motors and 17 forty pound boxes of cone yarn. Are you starting to get an idea what the storage room is like?
I got a little camera to take on the trips and Wow! I liked taking pictures--so I started gathering all my new “stuff” around me to take pictures. Besides my camera equipment we needed a 40 ft motorhome with two computers, two printers, 3 TV’s, Washer & Dryer, Central Vacuum, 2 lazyboys. If there’s one thing I learned over the years--it’s to have everything you need for your hobby!
We planned trips around conventions and would close the store for three months to travel & take pictures. But eventually, we discovered that working was interfering with our traveling. So we rented out our building and ended up moving an enormous amount of “stuff” to the house. After 26 years, It was easy to give up the business, but not the storage room.
We moved everything into a guest room. It was packed up to the ceiling with boxes of STUFF! Our three car garage only held one car! My husband was not a happy camper.
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