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Observations From Cleaning the Studio

April 11, 2009 in Arty Stuff, Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

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!

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My studio is…

November 15, 2007 in Flaming Hot, Lampworking & Glass, Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

(This week’s Flam­ing Hot Blog It!)

…an appalling mess to look at, but in all that mess is a haven of cre­ativ­ity and seren­ity. It’s almost always that way, so it must work for me some­how.? I always have a small space for a stu­dio, and try to cram an insane amount of cre­ative para­pher­na­lia into it. That is bound to lead to clut­ter, but I do try to orga­nize it as much as I can.

In my starter mar­riage, I used the din­ing room as my stu­dio.? We removed the din­ing room table and I packed two floor looms, two book­cases, two floor-to-ceiling Skan­dia shelv­ing units filled with yarn and note­books, a desk made from two fil­ing cab­i­nets with a desk­top, a spin­ning wheel, a straight chair, and var­i­ous and sundry other mis­cel­lanea.? Basi­cally there was a nar­row path you could walk through to get from the kitchen door to the foyer (which had no door so I hung a cur­tain).? It was always a dis­as­ter but it was still my soli­tary, everyone-keep-out refuge and safe haven from the rest of my less-than-happy life.

Now I’m in the small­est bed­room of our condo, with about the same square footage.? The Skan­dia shelv­ing is still there, and even expanded, but now it con­tains book­bind­ing and col­lage mate­ri­als,? busi­ness sup­plies, and beads and jew­elry com­po­nents, along with note­books and still a wee amount of yarn.? The looms have been replaced by my lam­p­work­ing area, one table with my torch and one with my kiln and pri­mary glass stor­age.? Another small table tucks in a nook for the paper crafts. Now, though, I have a com­fort­able chair and read­ing lamp in one cor­ner so Mr. Frosty can keep me com­pany when he chooses.

At the moment my stu­dio is in worse shape than usual thanks to two spare oxy­gen con­cen­tra­tors and a map rack with glass tub­ing and other stuff sit­ting wher­ever there is space, since I haven’t found per­ma­nent homes for those three items yet.? Once I do (soon!)? I can do a lit­tle more tweak­ing and declut­ter­ing to get it to exactly the way it should be…the home of my cre­ative muse, my own play space.

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Putting the past into storage

November 9, 2007 in Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

In the past week we finally moved my two floor looms over to our stor­age unit up the street.? The big Schacht high-castle loom had been sit­ting in the liv­ing room backed up against DH’s piano ever since he moved in, com­pletely untouched.? That’s been nearly four years now.? The Baby Wolf has moved around a bit, but has been folded up in the cor­ner of my stu­dio ever since I con­verted it from weav­ing to lampworking.

In a way those looms were my san­ity for many years — weav­ing was my escape from heartache and depres­sion and just plain annoy­ance dur­ing my first mar­riage.? Yet that meant that once I left the mar­riage, weav­ing held such neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions that it became emo­tion­ally impos­si­ble for me to do.? And THAT, my friends, is what made me quit the pro­gram at Geor­gia State in the end.? I had gone in as a weaver, but I could not con­tinue as one.

We’ve done a lot of clear­ing out and toss­ing, declut­ter­ing and rear­rang­ing, in the time we’ve been together, but it has been very hard to let go of the looms even to this point. Weav­ing and tex­tiles meant a huge amount to me for quite a long time; in fact in some way they were my iden­tity for almost fif­teen years.? Even get­ting them out of the condo and into stor­age feels like I’m putting part of myself in stor­age.? But should that part of me be in stor­age, or is it actu­ally gone and I should just admit that?

Truth­fully, I am wish­ing there were some sim­ple way to get the looms per­ma­nently and com­pletely out of my life right now but still get some final value out of them.? I’ve made a half-hearted attempt to adver­tise the big loom before, but nothing’s come of it to date.? The Baby Wolf I’ve been reluc­tant to do even that, just in case I ever wanted to go back to weav­ing.? At this point, though, I finally just don’t see that hap­pen­ing.? If I ever give up lam­p­work­ing it will likely be because I phys­i­cally can’t do it any more, and at that point I prob­a­bly couldn’t weave any more either.

I guess I’ll try to adver­tise them once again, but more seri­ously this time.? If that doesn’t pan out, it will be time to con­tact Pam and see if the Folk School wants two more looms, and just take one hell of a tax deduc­tion next year.

No one said let­ting go of the past is easy.? Once you can do it, though, it does make you feel freer and lighter.? That’s a good feel­ing despite the nos­tal­gia for what is gone.

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Creating Color Combinations

October 17, 2007 in Arty Stuff, Flaming Hot, Lampworking & Glass by Julia | No comments

This week’s Flam­ing Hot Tips Tues­day asks how we come up with color com­bi­na­tions when work­ing with glass. Some­times I’ll have a color com­bi­na­tion in mind based on some­thing I’ve seen lately; some­times I’ll just use col­ors that “feel” right for the cur­rent sea­son. As an exam­ple, I’ve been doing a lot lately with autumn-type oranges, rusts, greens, and browns that I nor­mally don’t do much with.

Some­times, though, I’ll decide to make a boro cane or twisty by start­ing with a rod of clear, and then just grab­bing what­ever rod of color my hand hap­pens to fall on (whether that rod is on my table or in my bucket) and smoosh­ing a stripe of it onto the clear. When I do that, I don’t even think about what color I’m grab­bing; I just grab and go. I did that a cou­ple of weeks ago at Hot Time in the Moun­tains on Sun­day morn­ing when I was get­ting ready to pack up. I finally used that twisty a few days ago for some beads, and they are amaz­ingly bright and vibrant, just because I grabbed col­ors that, if I had actu­ally THOUGHT about it, I never would have put together.

Pic­ture will fol­low shortly.

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More purging

January 3, 2007 in Work-Related by Julia | No comments

I must be on a roll. I got bored this after­noon after doing most of my web site updates for spring semes­ter, so I started clean­ing and purg­ing in the office. I must have thrown out a hun­dred or so used floppy disks, got­ten rid of a bunch of con­fer­ence office sup­plies from the meet­ings of two and three years ago, and filled both my trash can and recy­cle bin. Now if I could just do some­thing about these two old print­ers in here, that would be two cor­ners that would be finally emp­tied out!

I have another day and a half here, with not that much actual work to do unless a huge horde of stu­dents comes by, so who knows what I will man­age to do the rest of the week!

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