- Share This Post
- submit
- 12
-
Sparkle (0)
One of the simultaneously scary and exciting things about moving and purging is the opportunity it creates for personal reinvention. What can feel like the ground falling away beneath you can actually be space opening up around you for your transformation to take place. While I dream about reinventing my life I'm reading inspiring stories of women who are doing just that.
The New York Times recently shared stories of two famous designing women who each lost her business and are bouncing back fabulously anew. First, Eric Wilson told us about how Sigrid Olsen was coping with "forced retirement" when the restructuring of Liz Claiborne led to the shuttering of her eponymous fashion business. And then Sara Rimer shared stories from Olsen's post-retirement life:
Talk about working at home. Ms. Olsen is living in her gallery here at the Rocky Neck art colony in Gloucester with her husband, Curtis Sanders. Her new gallery and home are merged in the small but airy color-splashed, renovated bungalow that used to be their summer place and is now their year-round residence, and the incubator for Ms. Olsen’s post-Liz Claiborne reinvention of herself as an artist and entrepreneur....
After she lost her job, and her business, she decided it was time for radical change. At 54, she moved into the summer bungalow and began painting ceramics, cards and watercolors, returning to being the artist she was in her 20s, when she was living in a $60-a-month, 600-square-foot cabin with no indoor plumbing in Rockport, Mass. Living in her studio, and working in her home, got Ms. Olsen and Mr. Sanders thinking about selling their 3,600-square-foot house, in Hamilton, Mass., a 20-minute drive away. All that space and luxury — two decks for entertaining, four bedrooms, a separate apartment for visitors — no longer made sense. The taxes alone were about $12,000 a year. Then there was the constant hiring of people to paint the house, mow the lawn, and do repairs....
Continue reading "From the Fast Lane to the Bike Lane"
The second newly re-minted designer is Rachel Ashwell of Shabby Chic fame who is bringing shabby back. Again:
So when Shabby Chic filed for bankruptcy last January after nearly 20 years in business, its creator, Rachel Ashwell, felt both anguish and humiliation, not to mention flat-out exhaustion.
Ms. Ashwell, who had just turned 50 and had already been blown sideways by the recent death of her mother, was soon presiding over the liquidation of 15 stores and the dismissal of her hand-picked teams of upholsterers and sewers, designers and salespeople. Afterward, she imagined she would be taking a well-deserved, if not exactly planned-for, rest. But it was not to be....
And so it was that last month she found herself hurtling between New York, her home in Santa Monica and London, stocking three new stores with the chipped white furniture and blowsy upholstered pieces that had long been her trademark.
"Making Shabby Chic, Again" by Penelope Green
Well-known designers are not the only ones picking themselves up, dusting themselves off and starting all over again. Blogger and writer Jane Devin for example. Jane is spending a year traveling across the United States and blogging stories from the road:
In Davenport, it was writer Jane who listened to a woman named Angie talk about how confused she was by her sister’s recent decision to go on the road in a van and sell her art. Angie told me that hearing the story of my journey made her wonder if she should be more supportive and less skeptical of her sister’s dreams. I encouraged her to do so, because whether a dream lasts for a week or a year – and even when the end is unpredictable – living out one dream allows others to be created. I’m not going to spend my year on the road wondering or worrying what will happen when the last person has been met and the last state visited. I’m determined, instead, to use every day to its fullest potential.
"Avon Ladies, Imperfect Teeth, Rosie, and the Essential Kindness of Women in Iowa" at Finding My America
In a post before before her trip and new blog launched, Jane wrote about a conversation with a friend:
She told me that, despite her fear, she was enrolling in a Masters program for teaching. I told her about my upcoming cross-country journey. We then laughed at ourselves and pumped each other full of warm encouragement. Two forty-something, empty-nest women who were waking up to changed lives and new possibilities.
