Observations From Cleaning the Studio

When there’s no room to work in the stu­dio except around the torch, it’s time to do some clean­ing! With the Good Mews Spring Flea Mar­ket com­ing up, it’s easy to get moti­vated because there’s a good place to take the useful-​but-​no-​longer-​wanted crap. So far there have been four boxes of stuff (not huge ones, but decent sized) exca­vated and removed, and a sec­ond giant garbage bag full of true trash is almost full. Along the way, I dis­cov­ered a few things:

• the miss­ing box of craft wire, hid­den behind some other stuff.
• three half-​finished blank books, need­ing just to be stitched.
• a whole bunch of foam brushes, sep­a­rated from the rest of the brush herd.

I also observed a few things:

• It is quite pos­si­ble to have more shoe­boxes than one needs for storage.
• Watch­maker tins are cute, but they really do suck for stor­ing jump rings.
• Paints do dry out after twenty years, even well sealed up.
• One person’s ephemera is another person’s trash.
• One person’s per­fect stor­age sys­tem is another person’s stor­age nightmare.
• The aver­age lifes­pan of a gel pen is some­thing less than five years, even if unused.
• Work­ta­bles are much eas­ier to work on when not cov­ered with ten lay­ers of crap.

Finally, I con­firmed that a good label­maker is your best friend when you’re try­ing to orga­nize a studio!