Managing and Mastering Mayhem

I love the holidays but the aftermath can be a bit of downer.  By the end of December, my studio was a complete wreck.  This image doesn't even show the half of it... the fourth of it!   I was starting to have anxiety attacks just thinking about the cardboard boxes in the floor, the paper scraps in the carpet, the bottles of paint sitting next to bottles of glue and glitter.

When you create, sell, and ship paintings, cards, jewelry, bookmarks, music, crocheted items, wine glasses, and assorted trinkets, the real challenge is organization, storage, and disposal.  Oh, I also sew and I have an embarrassing fabric collection.  I try to recycle paper and I reuse paper grocery bags and cardboard boxes as much as possible.  In fact, I go overboard.  I keep more cardboard boxes than I will ever use and I tend to keep small pieces of paper bags that should honestly be tossed.  I will never use all of the yarn that I have piled up in my stash and I have paintings I would not put up for display or sale, ironically stored next to the mountains of yarn.  I have clutter.  

I have checked out a few books for removing clutter, wasted precious time on Pinterest looking at organizational ideas, and crocheted countless grocery bags with the excess yarn in my stash to thin it out.  Realistically, I know that it is my nature to collect things that could have a useful purpose and as long as the clutter situation is kept in a sanitary state, is it really a problem?  Chaos is natural, it exists in the weather, geological formations, ecological phenomena...  I embrace chaos.  

After some focused cleanup with a little help from my husband, it's now clean chaos!  Sort of.  I still have a lot of work to do but I would rather spend my time permanently splattering my workspace with paint and finding a use for my obscure assortment of fabrics. 

a path!