Category: organizing

Photo for Friday on Saturday of Stuff

Yes, I know, I missed Friday. Too busy, too many things going on, too much to catch up with this week. The house, the errands, the food shopping, the cooking, the eating, you know the drill.

And what about the painting? Well, painting is on the top of the list, remember? Don’t worry, I made it to the studio for some time with the latest work. I’m not ready to post it just yet.

At the last minute I decided to take the next online art business class by Alyson Stanfield, Go! Get Organized. This is going to be a rough one to tackle.

We’re going to learn how to organized our stuff, and boy do most of us have plenty of stuff! Between the rest of the house, the art studio and the office space are full of some kind of stuff. Where does all the stuff come from? And every time I clean it out, donate, throw away, there’s still stuff.

So yeah, trying to get organized. I read somewhere that you cannot organize clutter, it has to go out.
But some clutter is stuff we need, it just doesn’t have a home to live. That’s what my aim is, to find certain stuff a home. Ugh.

In this early lesson, Alyson said to take a photograph of our office space. Hopefully it’s not in the art studio and she suggests we find a separate space for the business stuff.

Here is mine, messy as it is.

It’s not in the art studio, thankfully, or I’d never get any painting done. Talk about distractions! It’s not an organized mess either. I don’t know what that stuff is until I get a look at it. Folders, paid bills, junk needing shredding, and what ever. My computer also has stuff that needs ditching.

I wasn’t going to take this course so soon after finishing up the other two, but man, I need some direction over here.

The weekend will be busy. Too busy to catch up, which leads me to Monday. Ah, Monday. My day of rest, sort of.

Painting, Process is #1

The relative lull of the after dinner hour has been holding some powerful stuff lately. What is it about this time of my day that I’ve been able to do some good work? Forget about the product. The process seems to have great momentum in this evening hour.

Let me just say up front, I am a morning person. I am wide eyed awake at 6AM most mornings, but that doesn’t mean I can work on painting at that time. Nope, the early morning is for coffee, the newspaper, and the Morning Pages, in that order too.

I plan my day after these things are finished. First thing on my list is painting. Again, that doesn’t mean painting happens first. It’s listed first and it usually happens later, after the house is in order and any running around I might need to do is done.

Yes, painting is on the list, baby. Every single day.

Okay, so I get to it after lunch, so what? I am grateful to the muse who makes me list it #1, because if that didn’t happen, painting might not happen at all.

So life must be in order for the muse to visit me in my studio that day. Just like a Virgo, right?

Green Pepper ©2012 Dora Sislian Themelis
9×12 Watercolor, Arches cold press paper

I cropped another section of a larger photograph to make this painting. If I have any idea of getting some quick work done, it’s going to have to be a smaller piece. For right now this is working for me. It’s not twenty minutes, but rather almost an hour’s worth of work. Even possibly an hour. When I start working I lose track of the time unless I’ve set my timer. An hour sounds right this time.

The different colors next to each other are very interesting to me. I love the tumble of shapes. Okay, so they’re vegetables and fruits, there’s color, dark against light, everything I feel good working with.

The paper is great, the paints are delicious, and I’m painting. What else is there?

Process, baby. Just the process!

Negativity and Non-productivity

All this snow and the cold weather is wearing me down.  Not to mention the dopey things people do, how they act, and that I have a reaction to it all is just annoying.  The jealousy of other people and the hate that comes with it is tiring. What’s wrong with people?  It wears away my motivation to work on anything and there’s alot of stalled works in progress at the moment.  I’m busy thinking what I’m going to say to these people when I see them later this week.  If I could focus on my jown stuff and not on this junk it would be wonderful.  At least the energy it takes to react to negativity could be channeled in a positive way.  But no.  Now I’m stuck.  Again.

Rather than work at doing, I decided to take inventory.  Taking stock was a good distraction.  I took a look at the bead jewelry I’ve already made, lined them up to evaluate what worked and what didn’t.  The newest order of semi-precious stones arrived a couple of days ago and I sorted through them.  Ideas came to me as to what I want to make with the agate stones.  Blue, purple and pink agate free form stones are really stunning all strung together.  I put them away in an organized manner.

After the stones I looked through my knitting patterns and books. There were patterns I know I’m not going to use so they went out.  Yarn for all kinds of projects were sorted through as well as my needle collection.  I separated the heavier yarns from the sock yarns, the double pointed needles from the straights, and the connected kind for large projects. 

While sifting through the patterns I noticed a pattern some knit bloggers were working on.  It’s a dainty knitted doily from the 1940’s I guess, but a blogger knit it in heavy yarn on circular needles as a lap blanket or a throw.  I rummaged through my yarn stash and found enough yarn to try it out along with the right needles.  This pattern is worked from a chart part of the way and I’d never used a chart before.  So I casted on and kept going.  I’ll see how far I go until I get crazy.  So far, so good.

It just goes to show that a little cleaning up can reap some rewards.  I needed the distraction to help me get out of my head for a while.