I walked into my studio the other day and found these guys on the floor, nicely arranged in a this perfect little lobster diorama. Maybe they got bored in the middle of the night and jumped down from their perch where I had stored them to party with each other.
Why do I have plastic lobsters in my studio? I have no idea. They were at a garage sale and they clearly needed a new home so they came to live with me. Why did I save the tree branch? ??????
I picked them all up and stashed them in their new temporary storage place until I figure out what to do with them.
The entire studio is always in a state of entropy. Here and there, are little pockets of organization, but, generally, there are far more areas of chaos. We are always undergoing some massive re-organization, or are involved in some major project. Or, we are just too busy to clean up, as was the case this week.
Organized or not, though, everyone who comes to visit our studio is always fascinated, because there is always a lot of interesting stuff to look at.
Maybe in lieu of an introduction, I will give take you on a little tour of my studio in the next few posts. All my stuff says a lot about who I am.
I think these lobsters are saying…clean up and find us a new home.
All is not lost, there is an end in sight. Today I made some progress in getting my studio back together and it doesn’t feel nearly as hopeless as it did yesterday.
Behold, today’s photo.
Progress
All the uncharacteristic relaxing over the past couple of days must have gone straight to my head. For when I returned to the studio today, I got a bug up my ass to rearrange my space.
I wanted to figure out a way to do some woodworking where I could use a flexible shaft to power sand and carve some boards, without getting wood dust all over my jewelry bench and tools. So I figured by simply switching a cabinet and an extra jeweler’s bench I had, I’d be able to easily set up a separate area for the woodworking and other messy tasks.
Well, that’s how it worked out in my head, but reality is never that simple. It required removing all sorts of stuff from drawers and shelves to make things light enough to move around. And then I realized I’d have to reorder just about everything for efficiency. The final straw was that my perception of size failed me completely, and the pieces that needed to be moved turned out to be larger than they actually appeared based on my eyeballing the situation. Measure first, you say? Me? Uh, uh.
We carried on anyhow and finally had to face the fact that I needed to get rid of a desk entirely in order to fit everything into place. Of course, that desk was filled with stuff I needed, and I had to find a way of redistributing all that stuff to fit it in somewhere else within the designated space.
I wandered from one area to another, and from one piece of furniture to another, trying to figure out where to start to make some headway so I could proceed with the rearranging. But, by then the task had become so complex and overwhelming that I had a complete meltdown, right down to the point of collapsing in a chair and sobbing that it was all just too much and I couldn’t deal with all this crap anymore and that I’d just have to just throw it all out. That may sound stupid and childish but I was truly devastated and totally at a loss as to how I could possibly ever get things back in order.
To his credit, C. came to my rescue and instead of getting mad at me, he helped me look at the space in a different way and helped me see where to begin, and started moving things around for me. Once he got started, I could see that a solution might be possible, if not immediately attainable. So I calmed down and started to move stuff. We actually got the desk free and moved it out into the alley, and by the time we left things started to look better, but the job is still overwhelming.
This shows just one view, from one angle. In this small picture it doesn’t look nearly as daunting as it does large as life. I am so not looking forward to going in tomorrow to face what awaits me.
Studio Mess
