Studio Notes: Clutter vs. Accessibility

Most Recent Dilemma:  It is difficult to maintain a gently untidy studio and negotiate my way through it on a walker.  My style of creativity doesn't thrive in pristine settings, yet the clutter that I find so inspiring doesn't allow me to get around very easily.  We are now at a point of impasse.

I have been combining things that were separately housed, and this took some real thought.  I was one of those children who never let the carrots touch the green beans on her plate, and if the gravy from the meat ran into the peas, I was physically unable to look at it until my plate was sorted out for me by my impatient mother.  Eventually I learned to eat mixes of things, and that is the type of thing I'm trying to do in the studio (hyperbolically speaking).  Perhaps all those carefully-sorted buttons (by color, and tones of color) in a divided box could be moved into an attractive glass or ceramic jar and sat with the mother-of-perles.  Picking through all those cheery colors for just the right button could be a nice experience one day.  And there is always my little studio helpers to be considered:  Ethan loves to arrange the spools of threads in the acrylic thread drawers; Bethy is my button girl.  A fun task for her as well as a way to use an old kitchen canister.

But there are boxes and boxes of knit/crochet yarn that need to be moved from near the entrance.  And despite my serious and continuing search, I cannot find the right place for them.  The answer might be to simply sit down and crochet the whole lot, but I would be crocheting for a long, long time.  Really.

The twelve boxes of picture frames were moved to the basement storage in the house.  My husband has not been the same since then.  The studio is much improved, though.

I made a solemn promise to myself to sort through all the woolens and keep only what will fit in a 50s-style cupboard at the front of the studio.  This decision involves an overflowing box of men's wear suiting samples that I do not use very often.  This extra box will go to the Freestyle November Embellishing Day, and we can play and sample ideas without feeling too guilty about the waste of wool.  I discovered them embedded in a large lot of quilting scraps my sister shared with me last year (over-sized bins filling the entire bed of a pick-up truck went for $20!).  And I  have a good bit of white wool for Kool-Aid dyeing . . .

My worst clutter-ful habit is that I defer returning bobbins of thread to their proper drawers after a project is done, and they stare up at me from little piles that range up and down the embroidery table.  I solved this by devoting a large wooden salad bowl to that clean-up process, and on a day when the muse has excused herself, I pull out the bowl and put all these things back in place.  The muse, suddenly aware that I am quite content without her, will return almost immediately.  The truth is that handling the threads and opening drawers to all the blues or greens or yellows stored there sets the juices to flowing, and I'm back to searching for linen and starting up the next round of projects.

One day I will have a wholesome and organized studio.  At least, that is what I tell myself when I see something that needs to be somewhere else.  I am a firm believer in telling yourself things over and over until you believe them enough to eventually make them happen!