KonMari and the Sockless

Where ARE my socks?

Earlier this year, at the end of last winter, I decided to go all KonMari on my clothing. I thought that maybe if I organized my clothes, like the sweet little book promised, I'd soon find my studio extra tidy. I sorted and pondered and cleared out so many things. I reorganized and cleared and tidied. I was brutal with sweaters, shirts and skirts that did not 'spark joy in my heart.' I had a nice long chat with so many of my clothing items.

It took a week and then my closet was neat and easier to use. I was also left with a sock drawer that, to be very honest, has given me more than one shiver of joy over the summer months. Neat, folded, tidy socks. Two rows. As 'rainbowed' as you could make a drawer of (mostly) brown and black socks.

The KonMari method is a Japanese house-keeping method of tidying and neatening your home. You start with the clothing. You commune with each piece before keeping (neatly folded!) or giving away the item of clothing. As I said, this took me a week of evenings. I was agressive and got rid of anything that did not 'spark joy' as the book suggested. I was thorough. So, I'm sure I communed with each of my warm socks before I put them...where? They did not go in the sock drawer. Nope.

It was May.

It may have been kinda hot outside. 

Oh, pleasepleaseplease tell me I did not donate them? Please?

(and by the way, the studio is a mess...)

Win some studio organization help-

Is your studio perfect? Does it have sweet little touches like this? Mine has some sweet touches, but it also has those yucky plastic bins with lids, way, WAAAYY too many supplies and a lack of great lighting. I've been dreaming of a big, day-long studio clean-out and tidy for a long time.

So far, it hasn't happened.

If you want a bit of help getting your studio organized, come to our Handmade Holiday party on Friday night. We'll have a drawing from Raleigh's Green Gables; Organize Your Life. You could win a 3 hour studio organization. This is a $225 value. Actually, when I think of how nice it would be to have my studio organized I think it might be priceless.


that picture was nicked from this blog, one of my favorites-go follow her now!

more Handmade Holiday party info can be found here

(yes, you must come to the party to enter the drawing, we'll draw at around 8:30, you don't need to be present to win!)

Jewelry Storage Ideas...around the home

I love this image I saw on the Art Bead Scene blog. That is EXACTLY what my house looks like. Okay, well, I do have a frame with necklaces pinned up in it. Okay, the frame is just a cork bulletin board (not pretty picture frames with nice cloth)  and it's 3x4 feet wide (not dainty and artfully arranged)  and it has at least 150 necklaces on it (not just a few, elegantly edited) but other than that it is the EXACT same...

I do get a lot of questions about how I store all my jewelry. My other blog, 365necklaces means I can't display them in this artful way as I have to sort them into Worn and Pending.* I love the idea of putting jewelry out there where you can see it as the art it is.

Go read the post here on the Art Bead Scene for some other good storage ideas that put the jewelry on display.

*I am wearing a different necklace every day for a year. I post a daily picture. At least, I take a daily picture, I post them when I get around to it.

Give Your Stuff Away Day

Do you have too much crafty stuff of one kind or another? I know I do. I'm not thinking about beads and metal; I have a lot of those but I will use them. I am thinking about those Dream Supplies; the things I purchase that I dream I will use but somehow never actually do use. I am not a knitter, but somehow I find myself buying yarn. Lots of it. Last year I gave a bunch of it away to a friend who makes blankets for the Linus Project and it felt sooooo good to see it go off to a place where it would get used.

Here at Ornamentea we have a box in the staff break room that all the folks here put their Dream Supplies into and we each take things from it, too. This box allows us to share those supplies with folks we know will use them. Perhaps you have a friend you share supplies with, perhaps you just have a few big baskets of yarn waiting for someone to use them.

May 14th is National Give Your Stuff Away Day. It's a day to de-clutter, to clear out and, maybe, to get something really cool for free. Yeah, that might just be the BEST part!

If you have crafty materials of any kind that you want to give away you can bring them to Ornamentea for our first ever Craft Stuff Give Away. We'll have tents and tables set up in the parking lot from 10:00-1:00 and you can leave goodies on the tables and come get some goodies, too. We'll take all the supplies left at the end of the day and deliver them to the Scrap Exchange in Durham where we KNOW someone will love them.

Don't have anything to share? That's okay, come anyway and maybe you'll find just the right thing...

Come early if you can and we'll have some home-baked goodies and coffee on hand. You don't need to register and there are no fees to pay. Just clean out your craft room and join us.

I'll see you then!



*because of the nature of Give Your Stuff Away Day this isn't a swap or a flea market; please don't ask for money for your stuff

Keep your jeweler's files neat!

The best way to organize your tools...

Okay, that post title is kind of a tease. There is no one, best way to organize tools. However, I do like this nice portable tool organizer we have just gotten in for our class room tool kits. The organizers are smooth black leather with elastic straps that hold the kit closed. They feel like a really nice motorcycle jacket on the outside and on the inside have four pockets for your favorite beading and wire-working tools. We spruced them up with riveted brass number tags made right in the classroom. Ours are numbered 1-12, but the brass discs could fit a name or jewelry line name on them if needed.

Oh, we do sell the tool holders but you'll have to do your own tags! Click here to see the tool holders. Click here for the letter and number stamps. Click here for the metal discs we used, and here for the eyelets.

And yes, I said motorcycle jacket. I know I am the queen of Walking to Work but who doesn't like a black motorcycle jacket, maybe over a flowery dress with some chunky black shoes, silver hoop earrings and wrist of hand-hammered bangles? Very Austin, TX, circa 1990. Oops, I am showing my age!

Thrifty&Swifty Gifties

Hello and welcome to a new blog feature. Every Wednesday I will share an inexpensive gift idea that somehow doesn't make you look cheap. No one likes to look cheap. I am going to focus on the useful gifts. Yes, earrings are lovely and inexpensive and can look very spendy all wrapped in a pretty box with corresponding ribbons but that's too obvious. Cheap and useful, that's harder.

This week I want to share a great post from a blog I'd love to hate but just can't. Cathie Filian is one of the big names, TV show, lotsa books, the whole package but she also does blog posts for things like Barbie couches. Eat that, Martha!

So, go visit Cathie's blog and you can read how to make these tricky silver storage bags. She's advocating them for your silverware and tea sets but we crafty beadfreaks and metalfreaks know that a nice silver storage bag to keep coils of wire in would be sooo swanky to break out at the next craft night. Imagine having different bags for each gauge of wire. Imagine the look on your craft pal's face when you whip up a few for her, embroidered or silk-screened or just stamped with her fav gauges.

cathie filian: make your own silver storage bags

The bags pictured are from Cathie's blog.

The tote bag dilemma

Hello my name is Cynthia and I am addicted to tote bags.

There, I said it. But really, I can't help it. I love to throw way too much stuff in a bag and just have it there with me. I am not now and have never been a tiny purse kind of woman. In high school I carried this giant neon pink bag with a huge buckle on the side one year and the next year I had a newspaper carriers bag that I dyed purple (it was the 80's.) Both bags were probably half the size of my body and would fit my disc camera, a swim suit and cap and goggles and a huge bag of hair care products. Did I say it was the 80's? I was going through an Andy Warhol phase and took pictures of everyone and everything with my disc camera and I was on the swim team. Hair care products? Again, it was the 80's.

So now I have a stable of tote bags that I can cycle through but I am always adding new ones. My husband doesn't understand why I need a new one, and when I think about it too long I could agree with him if the totes weren't so darn useful. They end up getting used as storage, not just as purses. I have one packed with my wool roving. It hangs on a hook in the studio and looks pretty and if I need to evacuate the roving in a hurry, I am set. I keep another tote filled with magazine clippings that inspired me when I saw them. It sits on a shelf in the bedroom and looks prettier than a pile of magazine clippings. Somehow keeping related crafting supplies in a tote makes me think that I will do some crafting en plein air* someday soon.

My newest addition to the tote bag stable is pictured above. We have a few more at the stores. I love the pastiche of flowers for a bit of late summer color and it was made by the very funny and socially conscious folks at Blue Q. It can hold bins filled with beads and my Rhodia pad filled with all the info on the new book...plus a bunch of hair care products if that ever becomes necessary.



*en plein air is painting outside...sounds nice, huh?

The Desk is Clean! Let's get to work!

Voila! Here it is, the cleaned off desk. I found homes for all the bits and parts I had been just tossing on the desk and rolled up all the ribbon and filed all the paper sheets in their appropriate spot based on color or my whim. I even found a few goodies that I purchased on etsy from Blissful Provisions ages ago...so then I decided to search out Beth Quinn from Blissful Provisions and I see she teaches at the Blissful Living Studio in Arizona. Wowee. Those folks are new e-friends of mine! It is a small, small crafty world, especially when you finally clean up your studio...

Now I have to figure out what I am going to make with those mix-matched doll parts I got from Beth...Cleo has already nicked a few of the vintage alphabet cards for using in our vacation journal. She was pretty helpful today during the Great American Studio Clean Out...she wound wool roving, sorted beads and made several cups of lemon tea with her tea set. The amount of tea in those teeny cups really leaves one a bit parched.























We are off for our week long vacation on Monday. I will do the last bit of packing tomorrow. We are not minimalists when we travel like this. I aspire to be a bit Victorian and drag my creature comforts with me on a trip. We rent this sweet little rustic cabin with wood paneling and windows all around. The kitchen is tiny and there is a bathroom that reminds me of my parent's Coachmen motorhome, a la 1977. We bring a giant kilim rug, tablecloths, a lamp, a million baskets of shoes and swimming suits and the aforementioned craft supplies (it might rain! we also craft in the woods!)and all sorts of treats. We don't bring furniture-we just tough it out with the antique This End Up/State University Dorm Room sofa and beds that come with the place, but don't you think that I don't spend a good bit of time thinking how nice the place would look if I could just get a few truck loads of flea-market furniture in there for a cabin makeover. My husband reminds me that if the cabin looked that nice, we wouldn't be able to rent it!

So do go visit Beth and see her fabulous work and read her blog. She has great bits and pieces on etsy, too, if you need a left arm and a right leg and a bigger right leg with a shoe, but not from the same doll.

(and a big raspberry to all of you, including Kiona, who think I NEED a messy desk to work!)

book projects getting finalized...

The saga of the book continues. The projects are almost all completed and I have to admit, they look pretty good. I made many new designs and updated many 'old' designs from my Bedizen Ornaments days. It was getting confusing as we had a few different names for several of the projects and I couldn't tell if I had 52 or 29 projects (are earrings and a necklace one project or two?) So finally I made a spreadsheet to get all the projects for the book organized. I am not really a spreadsheet type, but sometimes it is helpful to get it all typed out. Plus an excel file is way more impressive to an editor than a sheet from your Rhodia pad, no matter how many different colors of pen you use to write on the graph paper.

This is a detail of one of the projects. We will have this filigree in the stores really soon, it's one of my favorite shapes and very versatile. I will be up late tonight finishing up a project that is new to the book; copper with a verdigris finish on the metal. It is rainy and I am anticipating a bit of late night crafting on the porch, listening to the rain. Nice.

make your life nicer...

You want to do that, right? Well, I have a tip for you. About two or so years ago some friends invited us to join them in a supper club of sorts and it has made our lives richer, more fun and (really) easier. We have dinner together, our four families, one night a week. One family hosts each week. The hosts cook, set up and clean up for a group of eight adults and nine children under the age of seven. Now, hold on there. It's really nice. Yeah, I know you are thinking 'cripes, seventeen people for dinner? how is that making your life easier?' Well, once a month you do host and that can be crazy (but it really is fun!) but the other three weeks you go to dinner with friends, sit and chat with the adults while your child plays with good friends. The children all know each other's homes and back yards and pets and look forward to the night. The parents get to have adult conversation, eat delicious food, share new beers or a recipe for vegan cupcakes that is amazing or just vent about a current political situation. It is divine.

My house is tiny. We can't seat seven, much less seventeen, but folks sit where they can and we all enjoy the time together. I clean up beforehand or don't. I make home made everything or I hit the farmer's market and make frozen biscuits. I don't dress up. I don't polish the silver. I don't worry about anything. It is sooo nice.

So call your bestest friend and invite two other families you might like to get to know better. Decide on a format (we do Tuesdays at 5:30, vegetarian, byob) and get cooking.

new items headed to the platers

We have to have a lot of the fabulous items we sell plated before we sell them. They arrive mostly made of brass and we like to spruce them up by plating them with copper or gunmetal or just antiquing and sealing the brass...so here we are sorting the plating out in the various bins per finish. We do it by the pound and pay per full pound.

So I never want to send 12.2 lbs. and pay for 13.

These fabulous Swarovski crystal rhinestone balls will be plated and back soon, I love these and put them in just about anything I can. Hmm, maybe I should use some in a project for the book?

This business of getting a plating order ready is kind of fiddly, but I enjoy it. If I get to do it I often will throw a few things in for fun that we don't usually get plated in a certain finish. This drives the other folks at work nuts, I think. They want to know will we always have the item in that finish (maybe) and if the price is the same as the usual price (sometimes) and do they need a special code (nah) or will it be stocked with the unplated version (huh?)

I love to make 'em crazy.

busy week

Not a lot of posts lately. It's been busy here. We had a bead show this last weekend (Jane's Mercantile) and other than the lady who yells "TIME TO GO" at the end of the day it was a good show. We got set up quickly on Friday, we had a good crowd on Saturday and on Sunday I got to walk around the show and look at all the pretties.

I have also been focusing, or trying to focus, on the book. I am in the writing up all the directions and making all the samples part of the book-writing-process. It's time consuming and frankly, not as much fun as the making up all the projects part of the process. I am really going to hit it hard this week and next, staying up late every night to get the stuff made and the photos taken and the directions written. I need to get it done. I have to concentrate on my other job, the stores. If I worked for me, I would fire me right now. Lucky for me, I don't.

Heh heh.

a quote I like a lot right now

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

AA Milne


(thanks to Jane!)

Doin' the Store Shuffle

We did a bit of re-arranging at both of the stores this week. Well, in the case of Panopolie I am using the Royal We. Tracey (the store manager) did all the work. I just got to come in and say "oh, I love it!" At Ornamentea I got to actually hold a drill. That was nice.
I love to rearrange things in general. Before I had a store to play with my poor husband would come home and find that I had moved our entire house around while he was out. I did things like move the couches from room to room, switch the bedroom around, switch our kitchen table and chairs with the table and chairs from our porch. It helps that we basically have the same color scheme and decorating theme in every room in our house. I call it Flea Market, but a decorator friend told me once to call it a 'collected look' which makes it seem like I have a plan of some sort. Which, believe me, I do not. What I do have is a bunch of old, chipped and pre-loved furniture, way too many chairs and lots of old rugs.
Anyway, today we moved the Green Girl beads at Ornamentea from the wall where they have been to the other side of the store. I think that the space where they were got too much traffic, actually, and so we moved them. We were going to wait until we got a shipment in from the Green Girls but they have been so busy with travel and shows that we weren't sure when that would be. We moved the display this morning even though it was half empty and TA-DA we got a nice fat package from Asheville! Yipee! We still have more on the way and can hardly wait -Cynthia and Greg, not that I am begging!- but the display looks so much better already. We didn't get the fairy in the photo, but that is on the way.
Oh, are you confused as to why I said the space got 'too much traffic' ? Well, the old spot was right next to a door that we used to get from our back classroom to the store. It didn't get used all the time, but often you would see someone get interrupted while they were looking at the Green Girl beads. I think customers maybe didn't always spend enough time there. In the new spot, there is lots of space to enjoy the beads and relax. Plus there is room for more special fancy pendants like the ones I ordered at the last show. Again, that's not a hint, Greg and Cynthia, just letting you know!

jewelry ideas for the book

Here is a project that I am working on for the book. It is one of the last projects, in order, but not one of the last I am making. It will be an elaborate necklace with different beading or stones all the way around.
Making all this jewelry has been fun. I am really enjoying this. For the first time in years I am spending time just creating new jewelry, beading and playing with wire and color and shapes. I am waking up in the middle of the night and rushing into the studio to jot something down on my Rhodia pad (I splurged for the book and got the big one with the grid...oh, it's nice!)
Because I wasn't designing to sell my jewelry for the last few years I have been really stingy with myself. I realized I would make a pair of earrings and a bracelet and then think 'gee, that's enough new jewelry for you, get back to your regular work now.' Now I am staying up REALLY late just making new pieces and playing with fitting shapes and colors together. I think of beading as three-dimensional collage and love trying to get the combinations just right.
My studio is a HUGE mess, however, as every day I bring home more and more parts to try out in the projects. We gotta do something about that soon or I will get buried in headpins and beads and spools of chain. That is a major perk of being the queen bee. I just got six big spools of my favorite chains today. It feels so luxurious!

Sprucing up the delivery van

We got a new plate for the mini-van, which functions (often) as the delivery van for the stores. We use it to get merch from Ornamentea to Panopolie and vice-versa.





beadfreak, in case you are confused

family dinner

We had family dinner tonight. Our weekly family dinner group is composed of four families with young children (eight children under six and one more on the way) who get together weekly for dinner and play and conversation. We have been doing this for, um, let's see, just about two years. At first it was intimidating; think about having a dinner party for eight adults let alone eight adults and their children! But then when you realize that you get to skip making dinner on Tuesdays for three weeks as payment for your one night of recipe quadrupling-wahoo! It's a vegetarian meal and we all try to make something the kiddos will eat, so there's lots of edemame, and bread and butter, and cut up fruit and then we also try to make something the adults will eat up. I make soups a lot. One family does planned out meals with lots of involved crock pot cooking. We eat sitting on the floor, around tables in dining rooms and on porches. We have matching plates and fancy silverware or mis-matched cups and tye-dyed napkins.

We have a great time. I wish every night was Tuesday.

Yes, you should try this yourself.

creating a space

Creating a retail store is like making a special type of environment. It is one part theater, one part home and one part utility. Or at least ours is. We have all the fancy displays that are held up with cello tape and fishing line but look amazing (that's the theater) and we have all the comforts of nice soap in the bathroom and comfy chairs in the classroom and we know your name (that's the home) and then we have the utility. The slatwall, the pegs, the spinner racks of books and magazines, the full color lighting, the POS system. The utility is very important, as that is where all the stuff is or at least how you get to all of the stuff. We try to minimize it as much as possible. We have made custom displays that don't look like we got them from a department store. We have distressed and wallpapered and trimmed department store displays so they don't look like we got them from a department store. We go for a Shabby Chic/Flea Market look as that is our budget and, frankly, also my taste. We still have slatwall, which I hate aesthetically but love 'cause it holds so much stuff.

messy pile update

Well, I tackled the pile and now have six smaller piles, one to go to recycling, one to go to others at work, one for my hubby (yikes, I had an insurance form in that giant pile!), one for my daughter Cleo (she likes to open junk mail and fill out the forms and reply envelopes), one pile of magazines I need to go through and one pile of stuff I must attend to this week. Pretty good. I found three messages from folks I didn't want to call back anyway. No, thanks, I don't want to advertise with a commercial on the WB network! Now my giant pile has been divided and conquered. Pretty good for a day of working at home.