I'm a fiber artist. When the company I worked for "strongly suggested" I take permanent medical leave, I tried to fight it, but it didn't work with the pain being so bad that all I could do was throw up, so I left. Not that I wasn't angry seeing how hard they fought to keep the AIDS and Cancer patients working, but they were afraid of a lawsuit seeing the company I worked for was a state university hospital and I had my surgery at the same place. Risk management was having a field day working about whether I was going to sue or not. They put a lot of pressure on the people I worked with to get rid of me, os they did...it was either take permanent medical leave OR get fired (which wasn't said, but was implied) and then where would I be without insurance for me and my young 8 yo daughter. Nice people, aren't they? What the hey! If it hadn't happened, I'd never realized my avocation as a fiber artist. WHen one door closes, another opens...and I firmly believe that to be true.
[Note: On top of all the pain, I also have Fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, and PMDD. Life has never been easy for me, but I worked hard to not let it get me down most of the time.]
It's been hard to be consistent in writing due to severe head pain, but I had outpatient brain surgery twice in the last 16 months. Nope...that's no misnomer...outpatient and brain surgery in the same sentence. The first time was in Sept. 2007 and the surgery reduced my head pain from 90-100% (which calculates to a head pain level of 9-10) down to 15-20% head pain or level 15-20. Not too shabby. Unfortunately in March, which was aproximately 6 months after the surgery, I caught the influenza (the last of the season for everyone else) and was brining some laundry down t he stairs and slipped, but caught myself. That was enough to jar the electrodes out of place and the pain was back with a vengeance. Can you even imagine waht it was like to have lost 80% of the head pain and then have it come back all at once? I thought I was going to die what with that flu hitting me from both ends and the pain driving me crazy. I was not a happy camper.
The second time was February 9. I was so happy to have it done and they got me into surgery 3 days after my insurance okayed it. Yahoooo!!! So, they called me on Wednesday. Thursday, they called me back. The schedule called me back on Friday with days and times, and the 9th was my surgery which was the first opening they had after they called me on Friday the 6th. Yes, the pain was so bad, I was practically bed ridden, but I was ecstatic that they got me in so quickly.
The surgeon didn't want to do the surgery until he was positive it was going to be in t he right spot, adn I don't blame him...who wants to go through all the surgeries I've been in and then to have it not be in the right space. At any rate, it worked, although not as good as the first time around. 70-75% less pain is not as good as 80-85% less, but I had a lot more post surgery head pain because when they put in the new wiring (Look Mom, I'm bionic again) for the electrodes in, they had to go through all the scar tissue from the first surgery from my cheek (the Trigeminal nerve's second branch) over my right ear, around the ear, down the back of my neck, over my right shoulder, and then down to my upper chest. Just the fact that it worked, even if they weren't sure, was plain miraculous. I want to send thanks to all my friends and relatives who sent out positive thoughts and prayers to me during that whole day as well!
They had put me totally under, then I had nightmares from the second anesthetic that they used to put me all the way under. I felt the pain from the scar tissue being moved and cut, (even now, I have times when the back right side of my head is numb or in intense pain, but it's becoming normalized--whatever that is for me), then the nightmares. Because I was the last person in recovery, they let my husband in to sit with me to keep me calm (andn I think it must have worked). All I can remember is fighting to wake up. We finally got out of the hospital at a little after 11 pm on Friday night. Then for the 4.5 hour drive back to Walla Walla. We finally pulled into the drive at a little after 3 AM.
So, with the last two brain surgeries, it brings the count up to 7 surgeries and 15 years of bad head pain (not counting the 6 +/- months at level 15-20 pain from Sept. 2007-March 2008)--Mega-migrainee, super-nuclear head pain like you couldn't even imagine. Some successful, some not, some were and then the nerves grew back so quickly I barely had enough time to realize that the pain had come back. One of the surgeries helped a lot as I was able to read for long periods of time again without throwing up (I could only read before that for 10-15 minutes before I'd toss my cookies), but after I healed, I realize I'd lost my chef level cooking skills. But with the good things, you get some bad also. And no, I'm not addicted to having surgeries, I'm fighting to have some kind of life...Just in case you were thinking I was...
I was also able to help other patients with similar head pain and we'd talk on the phone about the surgeries, meds, trying to cope and how we coped...some I'm still in contact with, but most disappeared into their pain. This last time, was the first time I knew what they were talking about...I could feel myself wanting so badly to give up, but I decided that it wasn't worth it because I wanted some semblance of a life back. I'm just not sure who I am any more. Lance never knew me before the pain, so it's not an issue for him. He loved me before and will love me despite the pain is less.
Each day, I've been exercising and doing things around the house, preparing for the day when I felt well enough to drive again and do things outside my home like plant my garden and things like that. I have to shear my two yearling Icelandic ewes and 3 alpacas, then brush out my dog, Bud, a dwarf Great Pyrenees who's 4 years old. I save his fiber as well as the sheep and alpacas to spin in to yarn. I get about 8 ounces of fiber a year from him, especially in the spring. The lamb in the picture is a beautiful grey Icelandic ewe, who's now a yearling. Her sister is a beautiful white Icelandic with moorit spots. One of the things I do is to with the Icelandic wool is to hand card their fiber after washing, then spin it a lock at a time. I get the most beautiful self-stripping yarn, and though it takes a while to do sometimes, I had the time to do it. It was lovely. I'm finishing a sweater for Lance in a silver grey Icelandic from Moe, who's now gone. I still have one or two more fleeces from him, so will have plenty left if I run out of the first fleece. I get two crops of fleece from my Icelandics. Their fiber grows 8-14 inches long, so I shear in the spring, then again in September. It's a constant source of amazement as well as a constant source of fiber to work with. And I do love all my babies. I only shear the alpacas once a year in the spring. At that time, we cut their hooves, shear, then give shots so they stay healthy. There's not much selenium in the soil in the West, so you have to supplement them to keep them from getting white muscle disease.
I'm almost healed now, but still tender on the incisions and the back of my head is still either numb or painful, so it will take a bit loonger for that area to heal all the way, but for the most part, I'm very happy. After all, how many people do you know who are "truly bionic?" Right? I now belong to an exclusive club that maybe a few thousand people belong to--the bionics who have electrodes implanted into them to stop some type of pain, whether head pain or spinal pain. However, I'm sure there will be more and more of them as time goes by. I wish all of them the best of luck and I hope it works out well for them also.
So, what is a fiber artist anyway? I've worked with fiber since I was a child. I learned to embroider when I was only 4 yo. I embroided one of those self-stamped bibs for my baby sister who hadn't arrived yet...her name was Christie Marie. She died when she was 6 weeks old. I'm the eldest of 4 girls. If you count my step-parents kids, my sisters and brothers now amount to 2 more sisters and three more brothers, though 1 brother died when I was 18. I was still the eldest, though Karen is 10 months younger than I was, so she's almost the eldest.
I used to go to the plush toy factory which was two blocks from my house and I would scavenge in their barrels for stuff they'd throw out...fabric, eyes, stuffing, etc. My Barbie had Cher-styled jackets and Ken had Sonny styled jackets too. They had animal print pants, and tops, even overcoats. I found washers and bolts and things and made bracelets, rings, and all sorts of things. A few blocks from there was a company that dealt with electrical stuff, so that's where I picked up the nuts, bolts, colored wire, and other stuff you can only find there. My Barbie and Ken were the best dressed hippies and musicians you could ever hope to see. Then I started in on the furniture and cars. I did toy models of Frankenstein, batman, Superman, etc. I used the glues, paints and brushes to paint my furniture and things, so not only did they have the hippest clothes, hats, shoes, and jewelry, but they had beautiful beds, dressers, tables/chairs, and anything else we had in our house, they had in theirs. I made them from the boxes, jar covers, popsickle sticks and other things to create them...my lamps even had cloth lampshades though I never went so far as to make sure they lit up. Electricity wasn't my strong suit. LOL But they also had a car...a nice convertible that I made from a Quaker Oats box...the round ones. It turned out pretty well--at least I thought so.
When I got to be about 5, my mom started teaching me how to sew on her sewing machine. I'd help her make clothes for Barbie, Ken, and Skipper (yup, the family was growing) from patterns and old clothes. My mom was an artist with the sewing machine. She used to make outfits for me and my sister, Debbie, out of the old clothes she didn't wear any more. I felt the whole world open up for me. I didn't realize that the clothes I was sewing to help her with the Christmas gifts for us girls, would be partly for me also. I guess you could say I had a vested interest in helping her. Unfortunately, when I turned 13, my mom gave them to my baby sister, Linda, and she stripped them down, and cover them with magic marker and cut their hair. I was so upset, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I'd have liked to give them to my daughter with all the stuff I'd made for them.
When my Dad whent on strike at the mill, my mom also went to work so he could picket. She really didn't have time to do the sewing and stuff and we had sitters a lot of the time. It was nice though because I learned to knit (garter stitch and casting on) when I was 6 yo from Diane Guraliski, and then a friend of my Aunt Laverne taught me how to crochet (I learned to make the loop and then make chains) when I was 8 yo. I taught myself everything else I know since then, except when someone, usually friends or co-workers, would help me by showing me shortcuts and stuff. I then went on to learn how to frame knit, Tunisian knit, filet crochet, crocheted lace, and such, but the yarn was really limited when I was a kid. I loved watching the shows about hippies and hearing about the back to the land movement and being self-sufficient. I'm still in love with those ideas and I'm 55 yo now.
I'm still young enough to be able to do the things I want to do...raise my own foods, raise animals for fiber and food, etc. It's all part of that whole ideal. I thought about moving to a commune, but some of the ideas I couldn't grasp and didn't think I wasnted to, so never did that, but I did buy all the commune cookbooks that I could find. I even worked in a food co-operative for a few years before I moved out west.
I have a small garden each year, and we're still talking about building a self-sufficient home with solar, active and passive power. I want a solarium in the house so that I can grow pomegranites, limes, figs, and lemons, and maybe some mangos or papayas to supplement what we might not be able to afford or grow here. The heat will be warm enough in the solarium to be able to justify having a place for them there. I've still got my back-to-the-land ideas and they'll never go away.
Well, I got sidetracked again... Because the variety of yarn was very small, I decided that someday I was going to learn to spin so I could make my own yarns. Now only make them, but dye them and create them so that what I made from my yarn would be creative and unique and no one else would be able to make one of a kind clothing. I didn't start spinning until I was in my mid-40's although it seems I've been doing it much longer than that, but I started spinning with a vengeance. I spun every minute I could, either with a drop spindle or my wheel. I met Lance before I ever bought my first wheel. and he was the one who found it in a second hand store in Citrus Heights, CA, 3 years after we got married. We had just moved there because we'd bought 16 acres of land a couple hours away in Nevada City, CA. He'd gone into a Chinese restaurant and walked outside to see what else there was to see while they got our dinner ready, and went into that second hand shop. There was a wheel sitting there and he talked with the owner.
When he came back with the Chinese food, he was glowing--telling me he'd found a wheel for me, but wanted me to check it out before we bought it. I went with him the next morning before we drove to our new house in Orangevale (20 minutes from where we were at the Holiday Inn), so we walked over. There was that soon-to-be-mine Ashford Traditional take-off (no imprints on it anywhere, so I think it might not be an Ashford, but it looks like ALL the Ashfords I've ever seen), with most of the parts there. It didn't have a drive band, or the leather tie for the single treadle. It had 3 spools, and a drop spindle (although they usually don't come with a drop spindle), and some other things I had no idea what they were, but one of the spool had some homespun on it. So, we told the owner we wanted it, and in addition to the 20% for the weekend that they had advertised, he gave us an additonal 10% off because it had been in his store for more than 2 years and I was the first person who could see the value in it (even though he had no idea what he had). I bought my Ashford look alike for $135 with tax.
Most weekends after Lance got done working, we drove up to our property and worked on cleaning up brush and shrubs that the lumber people left behind. We camped and we met all our new neighbors. It was so wonderful with the clean air, the stream at one corner of the property just making it's music. We even went to an alpacas show at the Nevada County Fair and I was going to look up a lady in town that had alpacas that I'd been emailing for about 3 months, so I was walking around and stopped by this woman who was spinning. I was talking about buying alpacas for when we got our home built on our property there and told her I'd been emailing this woman about alpacas for a while. She asked what her name was and I told her Sands Bellizzi, and it was her. Everything was falling into place... I was meeting people in town and making connections for when we moved there. We lived in the area for about 3 years before we moved up to Walla Walla, another grande adventure.
After months of checking on what kind of sheep I wanted on the Oklahoma State University Veterinary site (www.ansi,okstate.edu/breeds/sheep/), I started talking with different people about their sheep. So, in addition to Sands, I also was talking with another woman about Icelandic sheep, Laurie Ball Gisch of the Lavander Fleece farm, a married mom of 3. She shared tons of information about sheep, and I bought a fleece from her, which I scoured (washing in spinning-ese) the fleece, then hand carded it. I finally started spinning it.
After the wheel had sat for about 6 months, I decided to take lessons and there was a yarn and fiber store in Sacramento called Rumplestiltskins. The instructor was a French woman who taught spinning, so I signed up for her class. I also bought a drop spindle and about a pound of merino roving in pink. It was fun looking and I knew I didn't have my fleece ready yet. I couldn't believe how much fun it was, so I just spun and spun and spun, then I started dyeing the yarn too.
About a month after I took the spinning class, Lance told me that I should enter my yarn in Dixon, CA, at the Lambtown Sheep and Wool Festival, which I did. I do not believe I would have done it if he hadn't been so insistent on it because he thought I had a really good product based on what he'd seen at the yarn stores. So, not only did I enter two skeins of yarn (one Icelandic and one Alpaca), but I volunteered to help Dana Foss who was just starting as the Fiber Arts director that year (I believe it was 2000). I won a first place for my alpaca yarn and a third place for my Icelandic for my skeins. I was ecstatic. I'd never won anything in my life except for a Barbie case when I was 7 years old from a movie theatre. I proceeded to volunteer and enter my items into the Lambtown Sheep and Wool Festival for the next 3 years. I even drove down to Lambtown the year we moved to Walla Walla, but that was a bit much for me doing it alone. I was so tired when I got back that I slept for 3 straight days.
That same year, I learned how to use a knitting loom, which was fun also. When I was going to the Technical Institute when I was in my late teens, I was taking secretarial classes for an AA in secretarial science, but then I got interested in the Fashion Merchandising degree they had, so I took many of the classes there also. I found my horizons being expanded quite a bit in different parts of Fashion, which also was part of what I'd been doing most of my life until that point. I learned how to cross stitch, do needle point, I learned crewel embroidery which was way different than regular embroidery, and I learned rug making from scratch. I knew I could buy the canvas backign for the rug I was making for class, but I decided to make it totally from scratch. I crocheted a filet backing for my rug out of black rug yarn. I bought a bag of seconds yarn from the Zwicker's knitting mill not too far from where I lived. There were thousands of yards of yarn, some useable because it wasn't all knotted up, but some was fine and could be balled up. So I separated out the useable from the unuseable, then separated it into colors so I could figure out the color scheme for the rug. It was about 2 ft. x 2.5 ft. and had all the colors fo a forest in the fall. The brown trunks, greens, reds, yellows, oranges, and browns. I decided to make it into a wall hanging instead of a rug, so I bought a nice heavy dowel, and some cord so I could look it around the dowels and through a notch I cut into each end, then strung it up. I was so pleased with it.
My life has always been full of fiber, textiles and creativity. Even when I was married the first time, my former spouse and I went on a vacation adn went through Yellowstone park. We were walking along the roadside and found a clump of fiber, we thought bear fiber, so I scarfed it and brought it home with me. I still have that fiber because even 20 years ago, I was planning on learning how to spin and moving to the country. It just took quite a while to meet the right person who like what I wanted to do and wanted to do it himself. You cannot talk anyone into doing something they really don't want to do, no matter what they lead you to believe. However, I finally found the right person for me.
So, since I've been in Walla Walla, I've taught dozens of people how to spin, to knit and to crochet. I won a first place at the Black Sheep Gathering two years ago for a skeing of alpaca yarn, and second place for a skein of Icelandic. I won first place for a hand spun, hand knitted ski cap at the Walla Walla County Fair. I enter fiber contests about once every 2-3 years so that I can make sure that my fiber is up the quality I want it to be to sell to other people. You can get lazy when you do something for a while and the quzality may go down, so impartial judges will let you know whether or not you are keeping up with your past standards. So, if you are a spinner, weaver, or other fiber artist and you plan on selling what you make, make sure you enter a contest now and again to make sure your product is up to the current standard. That way, you'll always have students and always have clients.
Hugs to you all!
Jet
