Wabi-Sabi for the Recovering Shopaholic
My name is Cat and I am a shopaholic. So what could I possibly have to say about Wabi-Sabi, the
classical Japanese philosophy/aesthetic that values the natural, the worn, the flawed,
the incomplete?
Isn't the classic shopaholic forever in search of new stuff? That
perfect car, lamp, lipstick or
pair of shoes that's supposed to magically move the purchaser farther down the road
towards a happier Tomorrow? Isn't Wabi Sabi about appreciating what is right in front of
you right now? As in Today?
Every shopper has had the experience of walking through the mall or surfing the 'net and
happening across That Very Special Something That is Calling My Name.
Wabi-Sabi also allows for that kind of synchronicity, especially when the item has something
about it that others would consider a flaw but you consider beautiful. Now if I were to be
brutally honest, I would have to admit that my house is not filled with purchases of this
caliber. But I have bought some true treasures, like the boots
that were re-soled twice before the uppers totally fell apart or
the dress with fabric so gorgeous (to me) that I've refashioned it 3 times in the more than 10 years
I've owned it and it seems to get better with each incarnation. What these treasures have in common is that they totally suit me. My attraction to them
has nothing to do with whether or not they're "in style."
I am sooo tired of ad executives, makeover show hosts,
fashion magazine editors and retail buyers trying to hypnotize the rest of us into accepting
their everchanging rules of "what's hot and what's not." In order for them to make the Big Money they have
to convince us that what we already own is defective, outdated or just plain ugly. Their solution of
course is for us to buy new stuff and lots of it. And we'd also better pick up some
anti-wrinkle cream, complexion brightener, cellulite smoother and diet pills because according to these
self-proclaimed experts, our bodies are probably defective, outdated and ugly too!
But true style is a personal thing so why walk around expressing
somebody else's idea of what's beautiful, cool, or otherwise desirable and running up a ton of credit card debt in the process?
I'm not an expert on Wabi-Sabi but I know it's something I want more of in my life. From what I've been able to figure out so far,
it is the marriage of two concepts: wabi, meaning humble or simple,
and sabi,
which connotes the kind of beauty that comes with natural processes like aging or weathering.
Wabi denotes simplicity and quietude, and also incorporates rustic beauty. It includes both
that which is made by nature, and that which is made by people. It also can mean an accidental
or happenstance element or small flaw which gives elegance and uniqueness
to the whole, such as the pattern made by a flowing glaze on a ceramic vase.
Sabi refers to things whose beauty stems from age. It refers to the patina of age, the concept
that
changes due to use may make an object more beautiful and valuable. This also incorporates an
appreciation of the cycles of life and careful, artful mending of damage.
Together, the phrase invites us to set
aside our pursuit of perfection and learn to appreciate the simple, unaffected beauty of things
as they are. Wabi-sabi can be found in the deep cracks of a weathering pine table, the rips in a
well-worn pair of jeans, or the irregularities in a hand-dyed fabric. Wabi-sabi is seeing the beauty
in a nose with a bump on it, eyes with a few laugh lines around them, legs that are sturdy but not
fashion-model sleek or a belly
that's soft and comfortable but nowhere near the rock hard abs of a pop star.
Not that there's anything wrong with self improvement, if the desire to change comes
from within. But too often we humans judge ourselves more by society's standards than our own especially
in the media-driven West. We could learn something from the Eastern Wabi Sabi philosophy.
Now the shopoholic in me still seeks that "rush" that comes with buying, wearing or using something "new and absolutely fabulous". And every once in a while a very special dress, necklace or gadget crosses my path, I buy it and we do live happily together for quite a long time. But looking back on all the stuff I've bought in my lifetime, probably 5% is in that Very Special category. The rest is just stuff, usually overpriced and mostly pretty ordinary. I don't know who was the first person to come up with the idea of deconstructing used garments and reconstructing them into clever new ones but lots of us seem to be doing it lately. And what a great idea! If I must have something new, why not make it something really new... something that isn't for sale in hundreds of stores? If this seems like a good idea to you too, here are some books that can help you become your own fashion designer. Scroll down further and you'll find books on the wabi-sabi philosophy, art and crafting/decorating with used or found materials. Most of these books are 10%-35% off retail, and many are available even cheaper in used condition through the same links.
Books on Sewing, Altering, Reconstructing and Vintage Clothing Rescue
Old Clothes, New Looks: Second-Hand Fashionby Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark, editors
This book not only shows how important used clothing has become but also what role it plays in culture and history. The Japanese, for example, traditionally salvage sections of kimonos, while in India garments are inexhaustibly recycled. This cross-cultural and historical perspective fills a major gap by offering fresh insights into the innovative use of secondhand dress and age-old traditions of recycling fashion.
After a Fashion: How to Reproduce, Restore, and Wear Vintage Styles
by Frances Grimble, Deborah Kuhn
Though this was probably written mainly for historical reenactors, vintage clothing collectors and costume designers, the author's techniques for mending and altering vintage clothing can be used on modern day garments too. And this book is also great for eccentric eclectics like me to who like to combine period, modern and fantasy pieces. . Excellent info on repairing and caring for various fabrics too, including old and/or delicate ones so it's perfect for the clothing "rescuer" :-)
Cheap Frills: Fabulous Facelifts for Your Clothes
by Jennifer Knapp
A book for the young and young-at-heart With over forty simple ideas that use ribbons, beads, sequins, and other easy-to-find trimmings, the projects in Cheap Frills will have readers converting their humdrum garments into one-of-a-kind fun fashion statements. From the I Dream of Genie Top accented with sparkly sequins to a Snow Bunny sweater trimmed with soft faux sheepskin, these great do-it-yourself couture ideas range from sophisticated to whimsical. A practical resource guide offers a host of good ideas for where to get the materials used in the book, and an illustrated techniques section makes it a snap to learn all the basic stitches. Illustrated throughout with colorful photographs and drawings.
Secondhand Chic
Finding Fabulous Fashion at Consignment, Vintage, and Thrift Shops
by Christa Weil
How to spot quality, understand labels, and find your size when labels are missing. She knows which flaws are easily fixed (or best left alone), how to organize your wardrobe, how to care for older clothing and accessory treasures, and even how to make money on your unwanted clothes. For anyone who likes to dress well and get an incredible bargain in the process (and who doesn't?), this is an indispensable guide. Weil's light, conversational writing style and her numerous hilarious asides (like "Why Socks Disappear in the Wash") make this an entertaining and lively book to read or browse.
Books on Wabi Sabi & Eco-friendly Living
Wabi Sabi SimpleCreate beauty. Value imperfection. Live deeply.
by Richard R. Powell
Find value in the imperfect, the handmade, the uncomplicated. Wabi sabi is an ancient Japanese aesthetic that emphasizes the value of simple things as a path to harmony. In Wabi Sabi Simple, author Richard R. Powell explains this intriguing Eastern philosophy in easy-to-understand terms to help you find peace and truth throughout nature and apply it to all facets of your life-at work, at home, and in your relationships.
Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
by Leonard Koren
From the book: "Get rid of all that is unnecessary. Wabi-sabi means treading lightly on the planet and knowing how to appreciate whatever is encountered, no matter how trifling, whenever it is encountered. Wabi-sabi tells us to stop our preoccupation with success — wealth, status, power and luxury — and enjoy the unencumbered life...Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional... Wabi-sabi is a nature-based aesthetic paradigm that restores a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living."
The Wabi-Sabi House : The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty
by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Intimately tied to Zen Buddhism, wabi-sabi is an aesthetic that welcomes comfort and a subtle spiritual component into the home. It is not a decorating style, per se, but a mind-set. To create a true wabi-sabi environment, one must slowly strip away excess and learn to be satisfied living in the moment. The Wabi-Sabi House recounts the rich history of this emerging trend in home design and reveals countless ways to introduce wabi-sabi elements into contemporary living spaces, including tips for gracefully decorating with salvaged materials and vintage furnishings, advice on how to rediscover the lost joy of hand-crafting household items, and simple solutions for clearing clutter and blocking noise. With heart and a sense of humor, author Robyn Griggs Lawrence encourages people from all walks of life to slow down, recognize beauty in what may seem ordinary and transform their homes into nurturing retreats from a hectic world.
Living Wabi Sabi: The True Beauty of Your Life
by Taro Gold
Wabi Sabi celebrates the basic, the unique, and the imperfect parts of our lives. Wabi Sabi is the comfortable joy you felt as a child, happily singing off key, creatively coloring outside the lines, and mispronouncing words with gusto. On a deeper level, Wabi Sabi is the profound awareness of our oneness with all life and the environment. It includes a deep awareness of the choices we make each day, the power we have to accept or reject each moment of our lives, and to find value in every experience. Illustrated with stunning yet simple watercolor art, Living Wabi Sabi is a beautiful keepsake that is sure to become a beloved resource for wisdom in the joy of living.
Conscious Style Home : Eco-Friendly Living for the 21st Century
by Danny Seo
As a leading environmentalist, Seo believes it doesn't take much time, effort or money to make a difference in the world. It's the small choices we make everyday-from what we wear to what we furnish our homes with-that have a tremendous impact. In this gorgeously illustrated book, Seo describes hundreds of unique, readily available products and easy projects to help you create a comfortable, elegant living space without harming the planet. Whether you're planning to paint a wall, re-decorate a cluttered office, plant a garden, re-do the kitchen, or buy a new comforter, Conscious Style Home is an invaluable resource packed with easy projects, creative ideas and suggestions for enhancing your living space, indoors and out.
Organizing for the Spirit
Making the Details of Your Life Meaningful and Manageable
by Sunny Schlenger
Organizing expert Sunny Schlenger demonstrates how the “stuff” of our lives—the objects that fill our homes and offices, as well as how we manage our time (whether we are productive or procrastinating)—offers clues to what we really value in life. With simple and practical exercises, Sunny guides you through a step-by-step process to take stock of your life, clearly identify what really matters, and then use that clarity about values and priorities as a guide to organize both your physical environment and your time. The result is a life of meaning and harmony—in the office, the studio, the home, and beyond. Organizing for the Spirit is nothing less than a revolutionary guidebook for creating the life you were meant to live.
Rescue From House Gorgeous
by Dan Ho
A gorgeous home with a 3-acre garden in a precious lakefront community. An enviable career in Chicago's competitive restaurant scene. At a time when these are some of the ultimate symbols of happiness and success, why would anyone want to give them up? Rescue from House Gorgeous is the brutally honest and wickedly hilarious tale of just that. Within it is The 4-Step Rescue, a no-nosense way to separate decor crap from the style of real life. Dan Ho, author and founder/editor of award-winning Rescue Magazine, is the avatar of No: No to excess, No to perfection, No to designer obsession. Your dream home, he says, far from fulfilling you, is probably sucking the life out of you. Ho is for personal style and against expensive makeovers with a therapeutic alternative which he calls "smalling your way to a larger life." Says Ho, "Style is knowing what matters."
The Simple Living Guide
by Janet Luhrs
Janet Luhrs provides a thoughtful and practical guide to simplifying our busy lives. Luhrs stresses that living simply is not about being frugal, living on a tight budget, or a modest income. Rather, living simply is being fully aware of what you're doing and why you're doing it. Luhrs demonstrates through many real-life examples how you can redesign your life and learn to savor every moment.
Your Money or Your Life
Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence
by Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin
There's a big difference between "making a living" and making a life. Do you spend more than you earn? Does making a living feel more like making a dying? Do you dislike your job but can't afford to leave it? Is money fragmenting your time, your relationships with family and friends? If so, Your Money or Your Life is for you. From this inspiring book, learn how to get out of debt and develop savings, reorder material priorities and live well for less, resolve inner conflicts between values and lifestyles, convert problems into opportunities to learn new skills, attain a wholeness of livelihood and lifestyle and help save the planet while saving money.
Wabi Sabi Art
Ansel Adams at 100by John Szarkowski and Ansel Adams
"Known for his black and white masterpieces, Adams was a powerful advocate for the preservation of wilderness and nature. His ability to see wabi sabi and capture it with the camera is unrivaled." ~ Richard R. Powell
"Ansel Adams at 100 celebrates the centenary of one of America's best-loved photographers. This superlative catalog of an exhibition organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents the most dramatic and the most delicate of Adams's formal compositions, from spectacular mountainscapes to grasses on a pond, all reflecting his avowedly religious relationship to nature. Previously unpublished examples of Adams's early images show how he worked through the day, using changing light and different vantage points to interpret a subject. Each black-and-white image is a tritone, meaning that it was printed from three different plates corresponding to different parts of the original photograph's gray scale, resulting in an extremely rich chromatic range. Light really does appear to glisten off a wet rock, and white aspens to glow. The images have been very carefully chosen, each page of a double spread complementing the other. The book's paper is custom-made, it is bound in linen and presented in a linen slipcase, and a complimentary facsimile of one of Adams's icons is included. The whole adds up to a most unusual and pleasing artifact: Ansel Adams at 100 consciously sets out to be the definitive study of a master, and it succeeds." ~ John Stevenson
Books on Crafting & Decorating with Recycled Materials
The Salvage Sisters Guide to Finding Style in the Street and Inspiration in the Atticby Kathleen Hackett and Mary Ann Young
Inspired by everyday objects, the Salvage Sisters rescue more than fifty common castoffs and cleverly transform them into style statements loaded with ingenuity, wit, and humor. Join intrepid hunters and gatherers Kathleen Hackett and MaryAnn Young in this step-by-step illustrated guide as they travel the country—down alleyways and side streets, to flea markets and yard sales, through the local garden store and their own closets—and learn how to transform a battered curbside couch into a fabulous and functional piece of furniture; raise discarded Sunday comics into an art form; customize a cookie-cutter set of drawers into an instant heirloom. The Salvage Sisters show how to cleverly incorporate the tired but treasured family china, torn lampshades, and everything else tucked away in the attic into our modern life. The simplest utilitarian objects are all ingeniously reinvented in these real-life sisters’ hands. Dozens of resourceful projects plus helpful tips, alternative project ideas, and more than 125 detailed color photographs, make this a book for anyone yearning to inject beauty and whimsy into his or her life.
Easy Flea Market Style: Creative Ideas & Fabulous Fix-Ups
by Alan Caudleby editor
Creative home decor is easier and cheaper than you may think. This book has lots of clever projects that you can do using the easy to follow step by step instructions or just use as inspiration for your own ideas.
Crafting With Flea Market Fabrics
by Deborah Harding
Lots of innovative ideas on recycling beautiful fabrics, including those that are "damaged", with easy-to-follow instructions and excellent illustrations. This book is also a guide to finding high quality vintage tablecloths, quilts, bedspreads, embroidered towels and pillowcases without spending a fortune.
Zen Brushwork: Focusing the Mind With Calligraphy and Painting
by Tanchu Terayama
After introducing the basics, Terayama presents a unique meditative warm-up to establish the proper mental attitude needed to release one's creative energies. Next, the power of the brushed line is explained and demonstrated. What makes a good line or a bad one, an expressive effort or an unfocused one? Lessons on brushing symbolic Japanese characters follow and the painting section shows readers how to draw the spare yet elegant pictorial themes of this classic art. There is also a section on classic works from renowned priests and other historical figures, including Miyamoto Musashi (the celebrated swordsman and author of The Book of Five Rings), Morihei Ueshiba (the founder of aikido), Jigoro Kano (the father of judo), and Zen priest Hakuin. Each masterpiece is accompanied by penetrating commentary on the strengths and salient features of the work. Rarely has Zen calligraphy been demonstrated and discussed with such candor and insight. Illuminating yet another side of Zen, Zen Brushwork will be an invaluable source to those interested in meditation, Zen, Buddhism, the martial arts, and Oriental traditions in general.
The Papermaker's Companion The Ultimate Guide to Making And Using Handmade Paper
by Helen Heibert
This valuable reference covers everything, from the basics to more advanced techniques like shaped sheets, embossing, laminating, and watermarking. Included are extensive step-by-step instructions on processing pulp, building papermaking equipment, and making paper-based projects like cards, lamp shades, and sculpture.
Crafting Personal Shrines
Using Photos, Mementos & Treasures to Create Artful Displays
by Carol Owen
Creating a personal shrine is a meaningful way to commemorate special moments and people, and an artistically satisfying project, too. Carol Owen, a shrinemaker for more than 20 years, offers easy instructions and inspiring photographs that will guide anyone through the process. The work begins simply, with a basic frame for mounting treasured mementos. Then, learn how to create doors, shelves, drawers, and other architectural features. There are suggestions on embellishments to personalize the shrine, and even ideas for possible objects to include. In addition to the author, 8 renowned shrine artists provide hands-on information about how they created their distinctive structures, and another two dozen experts offer insights into their creative practices. The vibrant gallery of work will spark anyone's imagination.
- Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There's a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
- ~ Leonard Cohen, Anthem from
The Essential Leonard Cohen
I think all women go through periods where we hate this about ourselves, we don't like that. It's great to get to a place where you dismiss anything you're worried about. I find flaws attractive. I find scars attractive.
- ~Angelina Jolie
You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out.
- ~ Martha Graham
Watching The Wheels
by John LennonPeople say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin
When I say that I'm o.k. well they look at me kind of strange
Surely you're not happy now you no longer play the game
People say I'm lazy dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall
Don't you miss the big time boy you're no longer on the ball
I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
Ah, people asking questions lost in confusion
Well I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I've lost my mind
I tell them there's no hurry
I'm just sitting here doing time
I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
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