As the beginning of school nears (two days!), I'm immersed in preparing to teach calculus and AP chemistry. Meanwhile, I'm trying to move my studio off the dining room table and back upstairs. That would erase the last vestige of the downstairs infirmary and return my public rooms back to normal status. Of course, the fact that the upstairs studio is basically stripped bare in spots makes it just too tempting to do a thorough clean out and reorganization. It's better to start fresh than try to work any more in this crazy mess!
Even the floor under the dining table is littered with stuff, boxes of class supplies from Bead & Button that still haven't returned to a proper home.
I'm taking the approach of removing every item from a shelf or surface and really thinking about what I want or need there.
Magazines were occupying far too much space and spilling over everywhere, so I've been madly ripping out images, articles and tutorials. How many times does anybody really sit down and browse through old issues??? The images will fill my Books of Attractions, which I've found I actually use a lot.
It's very energizing to flip through a book filled with work that I love. Whenever I need a kick in the behind to get moving, I work on these. If you need to thin your paper, I previously blogged about my method here and here. The artist profiles and tutorials will be organized into binders, which I unfortunately don't really utilize often, meaning that I don't have this scheme refined well yet. Three grocery bags full of magazine carcasses have gone out to the recycling so far, reduced to a stack of loose pages a few inches high. Some quiet evening, I'll sit and cut out the pertinent images and glue them in with annotations.
Rather than the haphazardly stored beads and artwork that I've been consciously collecting, I have serious notions of displaying the work on walls and tabletops. It's a shame to have beads tucked away in boxes and bags, when they would be so lovely catching the light. It was actually a shock to photograph the stack of goodies piled on a table and see all the birds. Hmmm, do I have a theme here?
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