Making your own: a cautionary tale

I'm still fiddling with making the workshop beautiful without sacrificing either storage space or light, which is a tall order and also not something I work on full time, because I'd rather be making than decorating. In particular I want the corner where I do beadwork and resin work (no, not simultaneously; I'm not that crazy) to feel like a cool green underwater retreat. Which, if your starting point is Central Texas, is not really possible unless I spend way more money than I want to and block some light. Replacing the (large) window with a stained glass undersea scene would probably do it but I expect that would be prohibitively expensive, so I'm going for half measures. The windowsill is now loaded with things like jars of sea glass and iridescent desert glass, an acrylic carved castle I bought back in the Dark Ages, and my entire, way-too-large collection of freshwater pearls spilling out of a shell-shaped dish. I'll post a snapshot of that when the light permits; right now the afternoon sun is streaming through the window and sneering at my attempts to make anything look cool and green and watery. So, on to another bright idea: during the reorganization I found some boxes of beads that I hardly ever use, because they're too round and fat and heavy for bead embroidery and I'm really not that interested in stringing necklaces. What we will laughingly refer to as my thought process ran something like this: I could pull out all the transparent green and blue beads, which is more than half the collection, and hang them up in the window somehow... I'll put a cup hook at the top of the window on each side, string the beads randomly, and that way I can also use these chandelier crystals... That's going to be way too heavy, and I've got more than enough beads; better just use the lightweight acrylic beads on this wire... I do not have more than enough plastic beads... At this point your person of normal intelligence would either strengthen the supports or go to Hobby Lobby and buy them out of transparent plastic beads in ocean colors. Me, I decided to make my own. Fabric beads are nice and lightweight, and I've always wanted to make some with wire and tiny beads wrapped around them. You will probably not be astonished to learn that I have an extensive collection of blue and green sheer fabrics. Even restricted to the synthetics (because I want to melt the beads into shape with a heat gun) I found quite enough variety.

So here I am in the sewing room, cutting strips of sheer fabric. Next bright idea: let's run shese strips through the needle felter to make them nice and puffy.

Finally, back to the new heatproof surface in the workroom(3 big ceramic tiles set very close to each other) with my ruffly strips, some 28 gauge silver-colored wire, and a mix of tiny clear/blue/green beads for embellishment. I use a fat aluminum knitting needle for a mandrel. Wrap a fabric strip around the knitting needle, remember that you should have threaded beads onto the wire first. Ok, drop fabric and knitting needle and string a dozen little beads onto the wire. As you were, only this time I have the wire ready to wrap and hold the fabric around the mandrel until I heat-gun it into shape. Anchor the wire with a twist, shove a bead up next to the fabric strip, pull the wire a quarter-turn around to hold the bead snugly, repeat until out of beads. Then attack the whole thing with a heat gun, watching closely to hit that sweet spot between Not Melted Enough To Keep Shape and its reverse, So Melted The Fabric Is All Gone. I did get some pretty fabric beads.

But after making this handful of beads I discovered that I do not actually find wrapping wire and seed beads around a strip of fabric all that fulfilling. It might be fun if I were trying to make huge, over-the-top,multiply embellished beads. But making beads whose only purpose is to be lightweight filler? Boring. And they don't even work for that;when I hold them up to the light, I don't see the colors of the fabric, I only see the tangled twists of wire. But it's not time to go to Hobby Lobby yet; I've got another idea to try out. And if anybody would like a handful of fabric beads wrapped with wire and little beads,send me your address and I'll be happy to stick them into a padded envelope. Use the gmail address: margaretballseven at gmail.com, substituting an Arabic numeral for the seven and that symbol for the at.

Happiness is having a place to store all your flex shaft bits

I've always been a fan of the slogan, "A neat desk is a sign of a sick mind," but eventually creative disorganization becomes dysfunctional. This summer I discovered that my wonderful concrete-floored workroom with built-in sink had reached that point. Not only had I reduced my usable work area to a couple of 12" squares, but I didn't want to go into the workroom at all because it was such a hodgepodge of things I don't know what to do with, and dust, and plastic containers too pitted to ever become truly clean, and grime, and dusty bottles of stuff that probably dried up during the Clinton administration...Well. Part of the problem is that I really have too many interests, so the workroom has to serve too many purposes. It's where I cut and fuse glass, sinter metal clay, dye and discharge fabrics, drill holes in stuff, sand interestingly twisted juniper roots, pour resin, paint papers, make collages, sketch designs, heat-torture Tyvek and synthetic fabrics, patina metal...there are probably a few activities I've left out of the list, but you get the idea.

Okay. I can sweep and scrub and clean, but that's the easy part. Figuring out where to put tools and supplies so that I can find what I want quickly is the hard part. The Rational Mind said, "You have too many interests and you should give up some of them and focus on one or two things that you really care about."

I pointed out to the Rational Mind that one of the things I really care about is trying new stuff, and anyway, I already gave up lampworking, knitting, playing chamber music, and polishing the silver.

Fortunately, I have a daughter who is a genius at organization. A daughter who, last month, was hot, bored at home, and too pregnant to do most of the things she enjoys. So I enlisted The Organizer's help. She was in no condition to do any heavy lifting, but that's what husbands(hers and mine) are for. What she could do was place the entire contents of one overcrowded shelf in front of me and insist that I throw away dried-up glues and unidentified liquids and tell her what each remaining object was and what it was for. Then she classified and organized until, instead of three shelves jammed full of mystery bottles, I had this:

And instead of two deep drawers full of hand-painted and exotic papers whose entire contents I used to strew across the table when I wanted to make a collage or a card, I had this:

She even figured out how to wedge a 20-odd-drawer parts bin in between shelf supports on the counter next to the table where I sit to use my flex shaft!

And it's taken three rounds of recycling pickup to get rid of most of the unusable plastic.

Now that I have all these beautiful vinyl-covered work surfaces, and can actually find most of the things I'm looking for, I've started to get ambitious. Clean and neat is nice, but can I go farther and make it beautiful? A room that not only makes it physically easier to make art, but that also inspires art? Can I put out postcards and embroideries and ethnic jewelry and stuff I just like - smooth stones and driftwood and sea glass?

This idea has led me down some strange and twisty pathways, some of which might be worth writing about as I get stuff in place. (Discovering that cleaning up the workroom only tempted me to start yet more projects, the Rational Mind has retired to the fainting couch.)