Studio Space...

... but studio for what? Typing? Jewellery-making? Collectibles storage and pricing? Drawing?

Remember this back in December?

It became this a couple of weeks ago. I added a second shelf to the table.

It turned into this yesterday. The mess of weird items are destined for the antique mall later today when they've been priced.

Trust me, the front room was packed -- and I mean jam-packed -- and stacked halfway up the walls with dusty boxes spilling their contents, untouched since I moved here mid-December 2013. There was barely a path down the middle wide enough to walk, and still I had to step over boxes and bags.

The front room mostly cleared out.

Where did all the boxes and bags go? Here:

Already it's looking better:

Now this. I walk in and breathe.

I'm afraid to start doing anything in here because it WILL turn back into a giant mess again.

All that mess in the living room above now looks like this:

The next goal is to get all the assorted beads and findings sorted into those labelled bins on the shelf in the front room and take that table down. The bin system has been in operation and working well since Lynn M and Nancy Mac helped me sort beads over two years ago. I can't remember how many carloads of recycling, donations and consignment store items they hauled away for me, but it was quite a few!

So, yes -- grab a friend to help. Huge thanks this time to Brenda. Having someone who isn't emotionally involved in making toss/keep decisions or getting lost in, "Oh, look, a 5-year old magazine! I must read it right now," is absolutely critical, and makes it so much easier and faster to sort/toss/give away.

Yes, it's gonna hurt. Yes, it's a shock to the system realising just how much money I wasted over the years. Yes, it's profoundly embarrassing to realise how many empty bins and containers I have and how I keep buying more and bigger/better storage systems. We all have our little secrets. But it's got to be done.

As all the decluttering sites advise, completely clear out the room/closet first. Then have a designated garbage bag (bags plural in my case -- FIVE of 'em went out to the highway this morning), recycling bags/bins, eWaste bin, charity bin, consignment bin ready. You need only make one decision for each item: keep it, and you now have a magically clear space for it, or toss it into the appropriate bin/bag.

Hey! I'm done!!!!

Well... not so fast. There's also the bedroom... and those boxes and boxes of books under the bed.

Rules for "Furniture Arranging", Decluttering -- Yeah, ME! -- & Some New Copper Chain Components...

I put "furniture arranging" in quotes because people who know me know that I belong to the "it lives where it drops" school of interior design. This applies to the room, the table or shelf of stuff, the clothes, the jewellery, everything in my life: for me, it's all one undifferentiated messpile. Constantly reading decluttering websites 'til the cows come home just doesn't do it for me.

However. Now that I am a one-third proprietor of a booth at the One of a Kind Antique Mall where the goal is to make OUR hundreds of tiny items leap out from the mind-numbing millions of items in the whole 80,000 square foot mall, thereby capturing the eye, mind and heart of their future owners in the three seconds or so allotted to us as they walk by our booth, I'm being forced to learn valuable lessons, if not about interior design or our taste in acquiring gotta-have-this items, then at the very least about how to turn mind-numbing clutter and junk into semi-organised collections -- not chaos -- that will result in constant sales and turnover. (And that is one brain-numbing long sentence. At least, I think it was a sentence. Sorry about that.)

Prior to this, as Lynn and Nancy Mac valiantly attempted to organise thousands of beads, as well as my market table, for me over the past two or three years, I wondered how on earth people did it: make a pile of junky and/or disparate things look clear and ordered. At what point does sick-making clutter of anything veer off the hoarding track onto an "Oh, wow! Look at that!" collection of reeeally cool stuff track?

Here are my short and sweet rules for the store/booth, where the rule is more is way merrier:

1. Gather together like items by picking a theme: colour, era, purpose...
2. Pick the focal piece for that particular vignette
3. Group like vignettes into a larger, overarching theme
4. Can't tell if it's working or not? Photograph your vignette, then step back and photograph the area it occupies: what's not working will leap out at you (this works for anything)

At home, where the rule is less and less is more:
1. Ruthlessly cull or regift (consignment or friends, thrift store, dump) then cull the cull: if you're weak-willed/lazy (I'm both), ask your friends to take everything away immediately for you. Boxes of stuff sitting in a corner are still STUFF IN YOUR HOUSE.
2. Enforce the rule: if something comes in, something goes out (furniture, junque, clothes...)

To the "at home" advice, I finally found out where the recycling depot hides here: I'm talking boxes and boxes of papers to get rid of that would fry any shredder's circuits: outdated and often unread magazines, old computer printouts, university papers that after 20 years I. will. never. look. at. again. Then there are the boxes and boxes of art books hiding out of sight, out of mind under my bed, about 20 of those at last count -- that's boxes, not books.

I think I'm finally starting to get the idea: despite adding a largish side table/magazine table and a box more of stuff to the booth yesterday, after we were finished moving stuff around Nancy Mac said in gobsmacked wonder, "Look at all the room we have!"

June 30

July 6

July 9

It may well be my imagination, but the booth really does feel roomier in the July 9th picture. Even though we've added more items and increased the space the island in the middle occupies, turning the display table 90 degrees really helped with that. The wrought iron screen gives us a see-through wall halfway along the length of that display table and things can pile up and against it on both sides. Overall, there's still plenty of room in behind for people to walk. The new deep green table against the blue seems to calm that whole wall down and rests the eye: there's not that bouncing between the teal blue wall and green as there was with the lighter wooden cart that can be seen in the July 6th picture. The lighter-coloured and lower cart being in the left corner also guides the eye down from the right corner to the left, yet you can still take everything in. 

Yes, there is an estate sale happening this weekend with our name on it!

Meanwhile, after roaming Pinterest and scouring it for ideas, I finally settled down to watch Hannibal on Netflix and bend copper wire. Tonight: hammering. 

These are the tools I use to make these items. I buy all my copper wire by the pound from The Ring Lord. I think this is 16 gauge. I use memory wire cutters on the heavier gauge wire, because it cuts it more easily, and gives a good squared off cut rather than the angled and picky/burred cut that the regular flush cutters give, the ends of which must be filed. For what I'm doing here, a single loop and little to no wrapping, I don't want an angled cut anyway. I want that blunt cut end to butt right into the wire it's looped around to.

I used the barrel of the orange highlighter pen to make the larger loop of the figure-8 pieces at the top (about 15mm diameter), and then the largest part of the round nose to make the smaller loop.

Next step will be a marathon of hammering and then, after a good swish in ketchup to make everything shiny, assembling them into bracelets, earrings and necklaces. One of these days I'll have to play with liver of sulphur to patina my chains, but so far people here seem to prefer the look of shiny copper.

Thanks for looking!