Here’s your latest “Best of” list from the Lampworking Blogosphere!!

Some COLORFUL posts this time:

• Dogmaw’s been experimenting with Glass Alchemy’s Jamboree lately.
• Karolen’s playing with Double Helix’s new Pandora.
• Kandice finds plenty to love in new and old Creation is Messy colors.

We have two artist interviews:

• Lori Greenberg chats with Jill Symons, and
• Melissa Lee speaks with Sarah Moran.

In the miscellaneous category:

• Lisa Liddy compares her current studio and her ideal studio at Collective Creatives.
• Lori Greenberg’s bead designs continue to evolve at Watch Me Create.
• Luann Udell identifies her legacy in the midst of cleaning her attic.
• Finally an anonymous Etsy Bitch Auxiliary member shares a different perspective on Etsy’s “Quit Your Day Job” series.

Since I occasionally make handbound books, I have a LOT of paper around here.  You don’t realize what a pain it is to store paper until you have to do it — you want to keep it unwrinkled and unfolded and unrolled as much as possible, and keep it from getting torn up (not easy when you live with cats with sharp claws).  For years I had my large sheets of paper stored in a portfolio under my bed.  That was less than optimal, because the portfolios aren’t very sturdy and keep getting torn up, plus some of the paper just didn’t fit into it.  Plus with cats that love to get under the bed and spend time, the paper wasn’t that safe.

Then I decided to hang the paper in our office closet.  I bought a bunch of skirt hangers, the ones with good sturdy clips, and hung a small stack of paper from each one.  Well, that was also a bust, because the clips wouldn’t hold the paper that securely.  If a hanger got jostled, chances were the paper was going to slip out.  The hangers themselves took up a LOT of room in the closet as well.  The cats were a factor again — the office closet is one of Donovan’s favorite places to hide, especially when company comes over.

We’d been talking about “Elfa-betizing” the office closet for a couple of years, since we did the master bedroom and it worked out so well.  Last weekend we did it — put in one of the new free-standing Elfa systems, with seven six-foot long shelves, reaching from floor to ceiling (which leaves just enough room for the Iris carts at one end).  We chose 20″ wide shelves for the bottom four to use the maximum depth of the closet, and 16″ wide for the top three.  They now occupy the former paper-hanging area.  The paper, well, it’s now lying flat on one of the 20″ shelves in one roughly four-inch-high stack.  I did my best, but some of it just wasn’t going to fit in the area…so I either cut the sheet in two, or folded it down the middle, to make it fit.

The paper is here to be used, not to just take up space and be in the way.  If a little of it here and there gets wrinkled, it can be ironed (!).  If it gets a couple of tears or holes, so what?  I can work around those, or find another paper for that project.  I need to make the paper work for me, not worry about what I’m doing for it (if that makes any sense).  So now it’s taking up much less space, is in as safe a place as it will be here, and I have tons more room in that closet for all the OTHER stuff that needs a home.

During Christmas break I kind of got on an organizing kick, and so far it’s working out well.  I cleaned off both desks (home and office) and so far they are pretty much staying clean.  Rather than papers piled EVERYWHERE, they are corralled in the paper trays.  I set up Google Calendar in conjunction with Remember the Milk for an online calendar/to-do list and they are working quite well, especially once I started compulsively putting ALL the to-dos in RtM.  Sure, I don’t necessarily do everything when I say I’ll do it, but then it sits there and nags me to do it until I do so.

I even put “scoop the litterbox” and “write blog entry” in there as recurring events, so I get an every-other-day reminder on the litterbox (which keeps it from getting so stinky I then go into avoidance mode), and a three-times-a-week reminder on the blog so that SOMETHING gets written every week.

Little steps, little steps, keep at it and make things habits.

Best lampworking-related blog entries for the week ending 1/6/2008:

• Charlene Anderson’s New Year’s Resolutions, received from a friend, are worth considering.
• Luann Udell does some year-end musing about organization, plans, and goals.
• Joanna Mueller reminds us we can find “pure elegance in the simplest details.”
• Kendra Sanders describes how color changes her life and her beadmaking for Collective Creatives.
• Etsy’s The Storque newsletter shares a downloadable inventory worksheet for artists.
• Lori Greenberg blogs about bead designs as personal expression for Watch Me Create.
• Also on Watch Me Create, AngelinaBeadalina’s rusty goodies have returned.
• Finally, if you feel like you just aren’t making a dent in the glass stash, Cindy Gimbrone’s inventory report will tell you that you’re not alone.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to save all the little snippets of stuff I find on the web — pictures, quotes, links to articles, and so on.  ReadItLater is a way to save links to web pages I don’t have time to read right now, but I don’t have it synchronized across my multiple computers.  Also, it only handles the links.  Google Notebook is another option I’m using but it’s better for more detailed stuff, or when I need to add comments to pages and such.

A blog would work as well, but I don’t want to clutter up Art of the Firebird with miscellaneous uncategorized stuff that probably is meaningful only to me. I could create a sidebar, but that still leaves me using the WordPress interface, which is overkill for this sort of thing.

What I need is an application that lets me create what Skellie calls a “swipe file,” accessible anywhere I have access to the web. So on her recommendation (and a few others) I decided to try Tumblr.  I can quickly store all my snippets there, feed a few into my sidebar here, and we’ll see how it works.  I’ll report once I’ve used it for a couple of weeks.

Check it out — Art of the Firebird’s Tumblelog.