Forget Me Not - 1: The Studio

I'm alternatively excited and overawed by the idea of packing up the studio for the move.

Mrs Fox's boxes presently spill into the garage and garden as I try to pack craft materials, party products, vintage books toys and dolls, a pre-loved fabric collection begun in my 20's, stationary, sewing machines, and my favourite/inspiring pictures, talismans and knick knacks.
But how lucky am I that I will still have my own space in this new abode of ours.  There is a room at the front of the house that the present owners (The Finn's) use as a dinning room.  We don't need a dinning room so Mrs Fox's gets the room.  It has a huge bay window and a half derelict yellow tile fire place.  80's-stylie "floral country" wallpaper with *horror* a floral border below the picture rail.  It's been flood damaged so the Finn's have ripped up the laminate floor they put down to reveal a damaged Victorian black & white tile floor.

Oh yes, did I mention the floods?  The reason we can afford our new home is because it flooded in the spring with the torrential downpours that we had.  Apparently caused by a wall collapsing into a open culvert nearby.  The wall was built (illegally) by someone who had decided that a culvert was too ugly for them to view from their garden.  Not the village's favourite resident these days I would guess, as it was not only our house that flooded.

Life for both sexes—and I look at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion that we are, it calls for confidence in oneself.

Virginia Woolf
A Room of Ones Own

The studio is the one part of this house that I will really miss.  It means more to me than the sum total of the parts inside it.  I had it built and paid for it; it housed my creative life; I loved working in there; drinking coffee in there; making things in there.  It was indeed that essential "a room of ones own." The studio is a space that was mine when so much of my life is (mostly willingly) not entirely mine.

All the most important things in my life are coming with me to Ash cottage, all but the studio.  But the room that I will have in our new house is more integrated into the family space.  The studio being at the end of the garden, while great for my head space was not so practical with 2 young children in the house.  I'm looking forward to my new work-room, but I will miss the studio.

 Here is an ode in pictures to my darling studio, the first of many I guess.