Studio Saturday - micro-sorting leads to discoveries

The day started out with a little sorting, to find some silky bits for urgent repairs to the lining of a venerable (favourite) jacket -

It's looking a bit chaotic! 

and immediately spread to sorting through a few little bags that had found their way into the scrap drawer - a drawer that is currently just half full. Or, is now half empty. (I'm trying to keep only those that "spark joy", rather than used it to dump all leftovers into.) (And many of the tiny scraps do act as "sparks" either to inspire or to add visual fizz.)

The bags yielded some tiny grey scraps which cried out to be laid out and maybe stitched down, and also the lovely ikats that Mags Ramsay sent last year, or maybe the year before?, to be used as book covers for the woodblock prints I was doing then. It's especially good to come across them at this moment, as I'm laying aside the "water" woodblock for a while and would like a different subject ...

... why not ikat ....

One thing led to another and before I knew it the search for a little bag of pieces of bondawebbed silk turned into a "hmm what's on this high shelf" sorting/chucking experience. Many encounters with old work, drawings from various courses that have been kept for years, for instance. Some people would advise getting rid of them - their value was in the doing and the initial reflection on them - but I find it helpful to come across old work and look again. Who knows, it may be vital in sparking a new project...

From that high shelf, some byproducts of the Colour Dictionary project - 

To fit the loose pages into a folder I had to trim them down and this brought on thoughts along the lines of "if it's worth keeping it's worth keeping it nice", which takes us back to "why not throw it out right away and save all that bother", and to more thoughts of how our storage needs, indeed our need to hang on to things, changes over the years. Many people have told me, "I got ride of lots of things and haven't missed any of them" - and I'm sure they're right. Having to remember what's in the cupboards is an art in itself: less is more, yet again. It seems that so many of us struggle with this - and those books about decluttering are simply not applicable to tools and materials we use to make art or craft.

The original painting of the pages of the dictionary was finished in 2013, but there were spinoffs in 2015. I loved having this project to work on every day, "doing my dictionary stint" every morning, and before long it was done and then the thinking had to start again!

Not much thought went into this big (A3) sketchbook also found on the shelf -

... just random blobs of colour, any old marks, a bit of thread stitched on some pages...

The series of cutouts, page after page, looked great in someone else's sketchbook, but she already had a proper subject and the cutouts enhanced that. Just goes to show how important it is to know what you're doing, ie, having a clear intention.

 It did yield some ideas on the "Ikat" theme -

 Also found: a bag of book-making ingredients for taking along on a long train journey (sometime...). The little stitched books were great fun back in 2011 but aren't really where I'm at, at the moment. And - dare I say - probably are not something I'll go back to. But never say never... I do like to keep the options open, to keep hope alive ...

Also rediscovered, the directions for Single Boards Binding, as demonstrated by Anna Yevtukh-Squire, and a postcard with an image by Vanessa Godfrey which stirs up a few ideas for other woodblock subjects (thanks, Mags). 

All that by 9am. After breakfast, the tidy-up led out of the studio and to the drawer full of greetings cards and letters received over the decades. Sometimes they get weeded out and in making a bit of space I found one letter dated 2002. The weeding is not systematic, and the very thought of doing the whole drawer in one go is overwhelming.

 In that drawer was the little notebook I used for making countless lists when packing up the house in Halifax NS in 1982 before returning to England. This little drawing ("North West Arm") brings back a lot of memories of the two years living there -

 On another page are some things my 6 year old son wanted to know:
- are there poisonous spiders in England
- how do nettles sting you
- what is donkey's poo called
- how do trees grow
(Answers on a postcard please.)

Somewhere I have a (small) collection of "historic" paper bags, which will bite the dust when it surfaces - this one from the drawer is gone already -

Faced with the prospect of spending all day on various sorts of sorting in different parts of the studio, without obvious outcome, I focused on the "dump corner" of the workbench, the area near the door where things end up (every home has one). That heap of papers has been resisting decimation for months now -

 Some mark-making hit the bin -

 ... and some usefully empty bags emerged from the other side of the room, but that heap of papers is still only reduced by half. The shoebox is collection all my pens and pencils and is on the list for sorting "someday soon" -

Which leaves a couple of tasks for today and tomorrow - glueing a few broken bowls etc -

and the fun of making a little stuffed toy from a pattern (more of a shape than a pattern) found in that heap of papers. It's a sort of giraffe with a loopy mane, and I'm giving it four legs rather than two

Not that the grandbaby needs any more toys -