Keeping track of creative ideas

This week’s Flam­ing Hot Tips Tues­day topic is keep­ing a jour­nal of your lam­p­work­ing tri­als and ideas. I don’t exactly do that, not like Jen­nifer describes. What I have is note­books. Gazil­lions and kaboo­dles of notebooks.

For starters, I’ll find and print out tuto­ri­als and the like from the web, and put them in an appro­pri­ate ring binder, along with var­i­ous ran­dom instruc­tion sheets. I must have a cou­ple of dozen of these ring binders, on every­thing from soft glass lam­p­work to boro to jour­nal­ing to book­bind­ing to Linux and PHP and Wordpress.

Then I have a raft of Mole­sk­ine Cahier note­books, the biggest ones. I started using these for hand­writ­ten notes after I started doing lam­p­work. Two of them so far are notes from classes and demo days (yep, I filled one and had to start another). Oth­ers are for “research find­ings.” Some of the infor­ma­tion is gleaned from the var­i­ous forums, oth­ers are my own notes and dis­cov­er­ies. I have one note­book so far for the COE104 glasses, mostly with just var­i­ous how-​tos copied down.

Another, the most valu­able so far, is my Boro Note­book, focus­ing on color behav­iors and reac­tions. If I read some­thing about a par­tic­u­lar color, or fam­ily of col­ors, or how to get a cer­tain color, I write it down. If I make a par­tic­u­lar base glass + frit bead, or a twistie cane, and want to remem­ber what col­ors I used (I usu­ally do), I write them down. Then if the combo is par­tic­u­larly stun­ning (GA Per­sian Blue/​Amazon Bronze/​Amazon Canyon twistie, for exam­ple), or a PITA to work with (e.g. the GA Pur­ple Luster/​Persimmon Strike twistie that wouldn’t bloody strike), or just plain butt-​ugly (can’t think of an exam­ple here!), I can add those notes after stuff is out of the kiln.

I try very hard to not just write down what works, but what doesn’t work as well — that’s even more impor­tant IMO!