I think I'm finally coming to the end of the mass reorganization.

I hope.

The aforementioned junk box has been cleared of its junk. Entirely. I'm currently storing some empty jars in the box, as a matter of fact.

(Side note: Is there a market for one more person to make votive candles using baby food jars? Because there's a limit to how many I need for storage, and with a small ravenous child in the house... But I just can't bear to throw them away, knowing full well that it would probably cost the same to purchase the same little jars whether they're filled with baby food or not.)

The last thing I need to do is sort out my silver, figuring out what stuff I can realistically reuse and what's going in the scrap pile. But even that's almost done; I picked up a little box yesterday for the teeny silver beads that kept sliding under the dividers in my larger box.

And it goes further than all that. My straight knitting needles are organized in two zippered cases. The circular needles are stashed in a PVC pyramid we constructed out of 1/2" pipe just for that purpose. The yarn is all safely in its drawers in the closet, organized by color and fiber. Even the scrapbooking paper is in a 12" file box now.

Which makes me wonder: can I get back to just making some jewelry now?

The organization thing is a blessing, a curse and a compulsion. Once I get started, it can't stop at just "Oh, I have all the beads in boxes now, that's good." It has to continue until I'm at "OK, I've organized the gemstone beads by shape and size, the pearls are in three separate boxes, and the hematite and mother-of-pearl have their own box because they don't go in the other categories..."

It's kind of like what would happen if Monk was a little less germaphobic and a little more creative. I get this feeling like if I start making anything new, it'll be that much more difficult to maintain this organizational scheme.

Damn. I knew I shouldn't have bought that last bead box.

Labels: art, beads, craft, jewelry, organization

Perhaps my single largest goal over the summer is to completely organize my studio. Now, over the past couple of weeks I had made at least a small amount of progress; the tops of my work tables are actually visible now, for one thing. There is one thing, though, that has eluded me ever since my studio even came into existence: the junk box.

The junk box is a large hexagonal papier-mache box that I painted metallic purple. I had actually forgotten what was decoupaged to the lid, it's been so long since the box was actually closed. (For the record, it's a fractal print that was done so long ago, it was when the trial version of Ultra Fractal didn't put those annoying watermarks on everything.) This box has been steadily accumulating junk in it since before I moved to my current house.

By "junk", I mean "pieces of jewelry that haven't sold and are worth more broken down into their component parts". It's a "What the heck was I thinking?" box. It's a "Wow, I've come a long way since I made that!" box. It's a "Hey, didn't I have another one of those earrings somewhere?" box. Incidentally, "junk" also encompasses "I took this apart at one point but never bothered to put the beads away".

Now, I'm not saying all of this so I can boast that I finally sorted through the entire junk box, because I haven't. It's still sitting on the table, its contents mocking me. Only now, the contents are somewhat more sparse.

I can finally see the bottom of the box. Which, in my world, is another little bit of progress.

Labels: art, design, jewelry, organization