Lopez ReMakery

The school year is over, and I'm spending the summer on Lopez Island in a tiny house barely big enough to hold me let alone the thousands of projects I tend to trail with me. I set up an ecoprinting station outside the kitchen, where I hope to learn how to do it. I took some boxes of fabric and supplies down from the laundry room attic and cracked my knuckles. I stared at the printouts of several novels that have yet to have their final edit. My son-in-law pointed to the tens of cords of wood that should be split into firewood to sell. What to do first? A whole summer stretched ahead of me.

The high-energy woman who does training and outreach at Lopez Solid Waste (aka The Dump) snagged me one day and said, "You'd be perfect for the July Artist in Residence." Which I would be, since I stand solidly behind the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle, upcycle. Especially now that recycling options have closed down, and transportation is more difficult, the dump is dealing with thousands of pounds of perfectly good things that they don't have storage space for. Books, clothes, furniture, kitchen supplies, and the like. Part of my job this July is to take as much stuff as possible out of the trash stream and into use again. 

I don't yet have a clear idea of what I want to do. I have several first-draft ecoprint strips of fabric. Use them somehow? But what does "somehow" mean?

I made a lined cloth bag from fabric scraps, based on a Japanese design. Took longer than I expected (which is the nature of such projects), but maybe make some of these.

I fished about twenty obsolete science reference books out of the Mixed Paper dumpster and made a Coptic stitch book out of a couple of them. Hmm. Takes a long time, and I'm not an expert, but still. It's a possibility.

The clock is ticking. By this time next week I should have some overarching idea and be well into it. Right?