Getting Organized, Thinking Differently

Here's a photo I took this afternoon of one of the golden rain trees, like the ones outside my studio. This one is beginning to turn yellow. Its leaves will turn yellow quickly, and then in a day or two they will be gone, the branches bare. The trees outside my studio haven't started to turn yet, but they will soon, I'm sure.

I spent today working on organizing my studio. It seems to be a never ending task. However, I do feel as though I made some major progress, changing some things around. I got some metal baskets to put things in, to consolidate them on the shelves. The problem I have is that if I pile a whole lot of stuff on top of other things, when I want something underneath, everything comes down. So I thought that if I could put all the stuff in the pile into a basket, at least it wouldn't all cascade down onto the floor.

Now I need to make a place to store my copper and my etching plates. I've tried stacking all the plates together, but I still come across more of them as I search through my things. And now I have a great deal of copper in different weights that I've bought recently. I can always use it for etchings, jewelry or sculpture, but I can't just leave it in piles on the floor of my studio. I think I can fit it in one of the boxes under my display table. Or I might put it in my filing cabinet. I did have my plates stored that way at one point. I thought I could store them in there with my etchings. Once my class is finished next week, I'll take them out of my portfolio that I keep carrying back and forth to school and put them in the cabinet. That will work well.

My other major problem is a whole series of unfinished jewelry projects. I guess I just need to get busy and either put the strands of beads back in my stock pile or finish the projects. Otherwise, I'm going to go on having big caches of beads all over the place. There are probably some strands of beads that I might use for other projects.

And then my immediate task for this weekend is to gather together my jewelry making supplies so I can work at my outside worktable and hope it doesn't rain while I'm out there. Although I think I have more than enough beads, I did buy a half strand yesterday when I was getting copper. I wanted to make it into a choker this afternoon, but I couldn't come up with all the tools and findings I would have needed. It seemed like too much effort. So on one level, I'd say I'm less organized than I think I am. But tomorrow it will all come together. I'll turn my mind that direction.

Today I was working on an assemblage that I started last week. I have various metal hardware and some little circuit boards that I can piece together into an interesting whole. So I tried a variety of different pieces together until I came up with five different pieces that seem to make sense. I glued several of them together and left them for tomorrow. They all fit snuggly together, but I want them to stay if the piece is picked up and examined. I also spent time on a small copper sculpture. I want to make three-dimensional copper pieces that I can enamel, and I think I need to start thinking in terms of ways to create three-dimensional pieces, things besides just baskets, and baskets themselves that are more imaginative.