As someone who loves to create in a variety of different mediums, I find myself constantly on the lookout for potentially useful materials. Whether it’s wandering through an old-fashioned hardware store, strolling down the beach, or investigating the stalls at a fiber or wood-working show, at the end of the day I usually discover I’ve accumulated some sort of cache of materials. Some of these I give to other crafters, some I put to use immediately, and some I keep for a rainy day. This last, is where I run into problems.
I once read that you should have nothing in your house that is not beautiful or useful. However, when you find beauty in the light from the lamp, and potential use in the shell on the beach, it becomes much more difficult to ever let anything slip through your fingers. You can easily see the day when you will need exactly that thing, and instead of having to go find it, you’ll already have it! Great! At a certain point though, all that stored potential gets a little overwhelming, both in physical mass, and in possibilities. When I look at my collection and see that even living under a waterfall for the rest of my life would not create sufficient rainy days to make possible the use of what I have, I try to turn off my sentimentality, and spend a day or two sorting and de-stashing.
Enter the next hurdle: the endless shifting around of piles. My guy and I are both pile-ers. We very neatly and succinctly organize ourselves vertically and then laterally; in that order. Combined into one household, our rooms exude something akin to an 1800’s curiosity cabinet, only without all the neatly partitioned little trays.
So when I sort through my stash of materials, usually what I end up with is more piles, even if I get rid of a lot of what I had. This can be a little frustrating.
In a lot of creative blogs, I see beautiful photos of very Zen-like, modern studios, with tools and materials spaciously laid out on mostly empty shelves, dozens of project swatches all in the same color family, and small, neatly organized workspaces that remind me of a spa. In project photos from these studios, it looks as if the gently used, softly coiled tape measure was only just, carefully, removed from it’s very own drawer.
These photos, beautiful as they are, always make me panic. I can only hope that a lot of time is spent impeccably staging them for their intended audience, like a window display. I can’t help but imagine the rest of the shelf contents piled in the unseen corner of the room, until after the photo is taken! Because when I need to measure something, I’m lucky if I can even find my measuring tape, i.e. remember when I last used it, and where I set it down.
This week, while sorting and de-stashing, I found some priceless personal relics of years gone by, mixed in with all the paint and beads and wool. I immediately got sidetracked. Family photos that I didn’t know I had, of long gone loved ones; earrings and pins and antique bags with sentimental value from previous generations; a single sheet torn from a college notebook with a birthday note from a good friend – and more. I laughed; I cried; I smiled; I sighed. It took me hours to go through what I found. Yes, I put a lot of these relics into the “it goes” pile. But, despite the still unorganized mess surrounding me, I decided that holding on to those few belongings that had meaning for me, that made me smile, was okay; even if that was their only use. As for all the useful “it goes” things that are now finding other homes – around the bend is always something else. This year, I’m trying to recalibrate how I view my stash – not as what I keep and have at hand immediately, but what I find inspiration in at the moment, and what I imagine I can make of what I find.