More Cleaning Up, Organisation & Storage -- & LAPIS!

Lynn McLean came again yesterday morning to organise me and help me with cleaning. I should have taken before shots, but oooooh, boy, nasty. The kitchen table was piled a foot deep with the detritus of pricing and restringing beads for the show -- gee, a week and a half ago. I was and still am typing like a mad fiend since and hadn't touched the table. Here are pictures of my (temporarily, I assure you) tidier place.

Yeah, yeah, a plug for Royal Canin -- Max developed massive hair loss all over his back and sides in an extremely bizarre pattern in the spring, and instead of plunking down several hundred more dollars for a second round of blood tests, the vet suggested changing his food first. Now, I had noticed that my previous dog food company had changed their bag designs, deleting the particular dog food version entirely that I had been buying and feeding Max with no problems for, oh, ten years maybe? After the bag change, he started losing his hair. Maybe they also changed the formulation, d'ya think? I shudder to think where the ingredients came from and I wonder if Max was the only one to suffer this type of hair loss. In the meantime, I had had him shaved for the summer so it was very easy to see that within a few weeks of starting him on the Royal Canin his hair was starting to grow in and now there is only one tiny half-baldish spot remaining. I am amazed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my almost pristine table at 5:42 a.m. this morning...

Doesn't take long, does it? 8:15 a.m. after photographing lapis beads...

My somewhat cleaned up bedroom. No before picture. It was grotty to the Max... Poor Max, gets blamed for everything. Silly I guess to have a white duvet with a mostly black dog living in the country, no paving, just mud as far as the eye can see. The little staircase I'd bought at a flea market, and were stairs for the owner's late dog to get up onto their bed. Alas, Max is too gimped up for them, so I keep my mattress on the floor and now the stairs make for even better bedside storage, far more useful than the table I had there previously.

Now we're back to normal. This table had been almost completely clear about three weeks ago.

But this is still pretty tidy and working well for me. Note there are ever-more bins...

Oh, all right, just a couple of lapis pictures. This is pretty much the true colour of all the lapis here in this first picture. As with my turquoise pictures, I'm finding it almost impossible to get the blue right. It is a true dark ultramarine with plenty of pyrite.

And Max again, just 'cause he's so beautiful...

Thanks for looking!

Organisation progress & turquoise nuggets bluer than the sky...

As of 9:04 a.m. today I'm at 9,998 page views! I'm so thrilled that people are reading me and looking at my pictures. Thank you, all!

As I've mentioned, I've been typing like a mad fiend for months now -- sometimes I wish it would stop, especially yesterday when I got in my breathlessly awaited for turquoise order AND I got all my bins labelled and sorted. Here are a few pictures of both events... sigh heaved on both counts. My way of living is to have all manner of projects going at the same time, but unfortunately that is always at the expense of cleaning up as I go (honestly, does anyone really do that???) which means I finally reach the critical tipping point of finding myself living in... a tip. Is that the etymology behind the Brits calling a dumpster a tip? Mebbeeeee.

Just needs a good sweep and then the mop. I do have one... somewhere.

Stacked and labelled...

La Maestra (aka Lynn, Visual Merchandising and Cleaner Upper/Organiser Extraordinaire) at work...

This is what that corner used to look like...

The next corner to tackle -- note my still unused Foredom drill hanging precariously from a brass lamp. I had/have great plans for that Foredom.

I know it's self-evident to many, but for us packrats learning to stack like items with like is a huge step. We can still have our junk -- I mean, important papers -- out in plain view because for us "outta sight" means we go shopping for more of exactly the same thing. Do you know how many packages of 4mm crystal AB bicones I have now? I have to write down "bring list" on my list...

But here... oh, here... here are the beauties I've been waiting for.

Somewhere between the following three pictures lies the true colour -- I cannot for the life of me capture the perfect blue of these nuggets. No matter what camera setting, it always just misses. They are gorgeous, like holding the sky in your hands. Chicken Little must have lived in Arizona.

Stay tuned. Email me if you're interested in any of these. They will be priced by weight and I will post more pictures sooooon. (Nagging me via email to post pictures also works.) Come and see me and all my turquoise at the Grand River Bead Society Show in Guelph, 27-28 October.

Thanks for looking!

Cleaning up my workspace & bead organisation...

Yes, a long silence -- many apologies. I have been typing like a mad fiend for months, and every week I think just get to the end of this week and I'll have time to breathe... then more files come flying over the virtual transom. I'm swamped now until next Wednesday.

However, in the meantime, in preparation for a massive sort and pricing of the huge turquoise order on its way that I'll be offering at the Grand River Bead Society show (Guelph, October 27th & 28th), as well as another large bead order from Nelson Gemstones, I have been cleaning up the front room where I do all of my work. Note that this means my junk room out back is filling up even more, so I'm not so very virtuous. Years ago I discovered the worth of having a dedicated junk room -- but with decent functional shelving so things are more or less accessible and off the floor.

Remember the 5-Minute Manager concept from... the late '80s or early '90s? I learned one thing: handle everything once. Then there was a cleaning/clutter-busting tip from somewhere: keep stuff off the floors and rooms will automatically appear much tidier. Now if I could just STOP covering every flat surface with a foot of all that stuff from the floors... and PAPER. I hate paper. Whatever happened to that old saw that computers would do away with paper? Phhht. What I can't figure out how to deal with is the out-of-sight, out-of-mind conundrum. I'm forever putting things in "logical" places, but then they are lost forever as my logic defies... everything.

My pal Lynn (who will very shortly be offering her organisation services to all of you virtually via Skype and I'm the guinea pig) helped me do a massive cleaning yesterday (all 1/4 of my front room, whoo hoo, but progress nonetheless) -- she likes to clean and she ordered me to keep going, telling me that when she gets started she can't stop (very weird, I know). I did all the moving stuff around, the sweeping and mopping: we were a cleaning machine. Then we went to the dollar store and I got some more shallow semi-see-through bins.

This organising by shallow bin seems to be the way to go for me. I tried doing the hanging-beads-in-order-of-colour-on-a-grid next to my table the way many of my online pals do and who post pictures of their studios and working methods, but I've found I can't work that way. It may be that the bin method I've come up with will become bead soup (this truly was the breakthrough for me) writ large and yet be physically somewhat organised: I figured out that to make something I have to see what I have jumbled up and see random patterns and colour, rather than see the strings all laid out, essentially fixed to the wall, thence to deliberately put colours together in my mind. I need serendipity. It may be that with all my strings in bins sorted by colour only, showing multiple textures and graduations of that colour, that I can then I can put bins of complementary and split complementary side by side and fine tune after that.

If nothing else, I finally can see all the beads I have and stop buying duplicates. Slowly, slowly, progress is being made:

Phht... who has time to watch television anyway?

The contents of this grid shelf ended up on the floor (gack) in the bedroom closet. I was thinking that I could hang some strings from the front of the shelves, as well...

How do you work?

Big show coming up, if you're anywhere close by: the annual Ancaster Gem Show is this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday, September 28, 29 and 30th. I'm not sure -- check before you drive out, but I believe the Friday is for school groups. Lots of fossils and dinosaur bones and raw crystal formations along with beads galore and finished jewellery.

Thanks for looking.