In waiting of work to be finished

It's almost ironic how not so long ago I wrote about the art making process and how I usually work on one thing at a time. See, now that I am having several work stations I have been trying out the other approach of working on more than one thing and I am liking it very much, but...I have so little to show for it yet.

I am working on four mixed media canvasses around my little houses. I am working on two journal spreads, which will be the last in my heart journal which is practically full. And I have just recently joined iHanna's postcards swap which is putting me in the direction of trying sewn postcards, which means, yes, I have started using my brand new sewing room. I am having a wonderful time doing all these things and I am working really hard at them, but nothing is finished yet.

The only thing I did finish last week is the following journal page:

It's an altered magazine photo on a background of neocolor. It was a little something to pass the time while waiting for something else. Just like this blogpost!



Studio make over and the making of a sewing room

Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long post!

Not so long ago I showed you how I turned my dining table into an art journaling station. I am still pretty pleased about that, but of course once you get going with things like this the mind starts to ponder even more possibilities to change things around. I blame Ricë, I blame Lynne Perella's wonderful book on studio spaces, I blame the flickr group The Everyday Studio, I blame anybody who ever posted a video tour of their studio on youtube, I blame myself. But hey, I'm not accusing anybody ;-) Whoever is to to blame, I have been thinking about my studio. A. Lot.

First, let me say there is/was nothing wrong with my studio. I know I am pretty fortunate to have one at all and I am even more fortunate that it's a reasonable size for what I do (15 m2) and that my stuff mostly fits in there. I know there are people who have to work from their kitchen table and clear the stuff away when it's dinner time and I know that some of you are happy to just have a shelf to yourself. So I am quite spoiled already.

But I have been thinking about how I am even more fortunate than I realize and have not taken enough advantage of it. I live alone in a regular row house with three bedrooms and until recently I basicly used only one room to make art. Why? I guess I was blinded by the fact that I had a studio in the first place, I don't know... Making the art journaling station was a big step forward. Now it's time to move on to even bigger things.

So..yesterday I took a day off for a little (big?) makeover project in my house. The goal: to rearrange some things in my studio and (the best part) to make an actual sewing room! I thought this might take me two days, but I finished it all in one (be it a long one).

Let me do it the way the professionals do it and show you some before pictures:

One is already shown above and shows my studio about a week ago while I was working on a set of mixed media paintings/collages. More about those later in life, they are not finished yet, but you can see some sneak peeks here and there ;-) Here's the things I wanted to change:

First of all this little piece of furniture stored a sewing maching, an old one I never used anymore. I wanted to make that cabinet suitable for my new sewing machine and leave it open so I always have acces to my sewing machine when I want to. But that wouldn't work in my studio, so it had to move to somewhere else.

The second thing was the presence of all these blue boxes that I got once when I temporarily lived in an apartment with very little space. There was still some stuff in there from ten years ago! They needed clearing out. They needed a new purpose.

And finally there was the case of the overflowing shelf with journals! I swear not one more journal would have fitted in. They needed a new home. Of course I connected this problem with the soon to be empty boxes and ideas formed...





Now here's the uprofessional thing: I forgot to take pictures of the before situation in my soon to be sewing room! I totally meant to take them, but I was so busy clearing things out and moving stuff about that by the time I remembered, the room was already half empty. Let me just say it is a smal room that held a comfy chair and a book case and I dubbed it my reading room, but....I never ever sat there!

So to work I went and that meant going through a lot of stuff. Most stuff was in the boxes of course, even though during the years I had taken many things out. Whenever you do a project like this things always have to get worse before they get better. Soon my studio looked like this:

(I have no idea what that white thing in the bottom is!)

Let me tell you that that was not the only garbage bag that got filled! I tossed so many things, some were easy (ten year old porcelain paint anyone?), some were hard (handmade cards, old paintings). But it felt good to get rid of stuff and see more and more empty boxes around me. The stuff I wanted to keep I put in a big plastic crate to find a home for  later on.

When the boxes were empty it was time to go through all my journals. So I started sorting them chronologically.

I didn't count them at the time, but looking at the picture I counted over fifty books already and that's not even all of them! They span about fifteen years of writing and art journaling. It was tempting to go look through all of them, but I resisted the urge in order to save time. But it sure made me happy to see all those books!

Well, I worked and worked and cleared out and rearranged and moved furniture about and at the end of the day I had my very first real sewing room and here it is:

It's a little hard to take good pictures of it, because it's such a small room, but as you can see I moved the little cabinet from the studio into this room, opened it up and removed the old sewing machine and replaced it with my new one. I also had the brilliant idea to put my ironing bord and iron ready to use in this room, because nothing is more annoying than having to go downstairs and get all that stuff ready just to iron out one little thing you sewed together. As you can also see there is a chandelier hanging there. I let it hang, because I love it so, but I fear my head is in for some very traumatic experiences ;-)

That's the right side of the room. You can see by the ironing board how narrow it really is. The only thing I kept the same in this room are the bookshelves. I had no other place to put them and oh well, books look good everywhere don't they? You can also see that I moved the blue boxes into this room. They now store all my journals and some art materials that I could not let go off, but don't need to have on hand either. One and half box is still empty for future journals.

In the corner next to the door I placed some furniture to hold trinkets and fabrics. There's another little cabinet on the right of the sewing machine. I had tons and tons of fabrics still lying unused and now they are more in the open and ready for art making or any other purpose I think of. And yes, that's my ROD journal lying there with some photo's I want to put in it.

Here's that corner in a little more detail:

I put some books on sewing and fabric in there and the old spice rack I want to fill with beads and other little bits and bobs to decorate fabrics with. The little wicker thingy will be used for more decorative pieces of fabric and small swatches. By the way, most of my furniture consists of hand me downs and thrift store buys. I love hand me downs!

I can't tell you how please I am to finally have a real sewing room!

Now there was of course still the matter of the studio, that was in chaos after all this redecorating. The boxes gone, the little sewing machine cabinet gone, lots of junk lying around. Let's see how that all worked out:

It worked out just fine! There you have it, a whole new outlook on the left wall of my studio. And I am pretty pleased with myself I tell you. See, I a made some wishes come true for myself in here too.

First of all: I now have a comfy chair in this room! Something that I have always wanted but thought was impossible to incorporate. Turns out it wasn't ;-)

Yes, this is the comfy chair from the reading room turned sewing room! Is that cool or what?

If you look closely you can see another little wish of mine coming true:

Yay, I now have a little spot to make tea! Now this is the only thing that I bought in this entire make over process: a second water heater! I have one in my kitchen of course, but now I don't have to drag up and down with cups and pots and stuff. I can just make tea as I work. It's such a little thing really, but it's so big for me at the same time. Yes, I am a little silly, I know!

Well, now I'm at it I might as well show you the rest of the studio the way it is now even though not everything was changed.

Here's my computer desk with my wonderful blue IKEA bookshelves. I love the bold blue color of this furniture. It still makes me happy everytime I look at it, as do the books in it of course ;-)

I moved some things around in the studio as well. Most is invisible to the eye because it's done behind the doors of cabinets, but this chair is in the open:

I know, you can hardly see it's a chair. It now stands where the blue boxes were before. Stacked on top of it are a bunch of old clothes that I wear when I paint. I don't know how some people can paint with just an apron on. I smear that stuff everywhere so I need old clothes that I can just wipe my hand off on if need be (and it need be sometimes, yes). On top of the pile is a left over pillow and a stuffed animal my mother made many years ago. You can also see that after I did all this makeover stuff I put postcards on the wall to liven them up a little.

Now to the other side of the room:

That's a storage cabinet and my old work table which I always thought was way too small, but now is ideal to let things dry or just put something away for a short while to use later. The stuff that was left over from the blue boxes was put in the white boxes you see here. I left them open. I have learned through practice that open boxes invite use way more than closed ones. Dust be damned ;-)

The inside of the cabinet had a little make over too. In here were the journals and the fabrics and they both moved to the other room, so I could rearrange things a little.

The top shelf now holds my photography stuff. I threw away two old compact camera's (with a little pain in my heart I admit) which I never used anymore. The middle is now filled with the magazines I use for collage (these used to be on top of the sewing machine cabinet). The bottom (which you can't see) was filled with fabrics and is now filled with portfolio's, empty photo albums and half done books and stuff like that. You know, work in progress  or stuff to use for another day.

Well, that's all folks. It was a hard working day and it was well worth it. I still have some details to sort out (like how many paint brushes does a person really need?), but the grand scheme of things is done to my liking. I am really happy with this and I hope you enjoyed my little tour.

Tree love

Why am I so fascinated by trees in winter? I like trees with leafs on them too, but not as much as I like them without. There's something so beautifully desolate about them that I just can't resist.

When I encounter a beautiful leafless tree I just have to take a picture of it:

Sometimes even the shadow of it's branches is enough to get me all swept away:

And if there's a bonus of black birds, well, that's just enough to make my day:

But I'm not too choosy, branches without birds will do fine as well:

And as if the outside world does not offer enough barren trees, I need to make some of my own too:



Conclusion: a life can never have too many trees! ;-)



Not so extreme home make over

A short while ago the wonderfully outspoken Ricë Freeman Zachery (her blog Notes from the Voodoo Cafe is in my blog roll) and a friend of hers started a flickr group on real life studio's called The Everyday Studio. If you don't know about it yet, check it out here and if you want to: join and upload your own studio pictures. I don't know about you, but I love to look at other people's studio's.

The group is meant to be a response to all those too good to be true studio's you see in magazines and books that look really good and exceptionally pretty, but you wonder how anybody can get any work done with them being so neat and clean and tidy. It just does not seem realistic.

Of course I put up photos of my studio on this group too, even though some of them are a little outdated. I plan to do a post on my studio some time in the future and take new photographs then, but if you want to see the older pictures just go to my flickr set here.

All this looking at other people's houses and studio's got me to thinking about mine of course. Especially the way Ricë herself seems to have dedicated her entire house to her art and writing was really inspiring to me. In my house there are signs of my artsyness just about everywhere, but when it comes to the actual work I usually keep to my studio. I love my studio, no doubt about it, but sometimes even this luxury does not seem luxurious enough. I notice this mostly when doing my (art) journaling. I usually write downstairs and do the rest in my studio upstairs (my studio is originally the master bedroom of my house).

The funny thing is that I have art supplies downstairs for art journaling. I just never use them. And I have been thinking why that is. The answer can be found in the next photograph.

This is my dining table (on which I never dine by the way). It is in the kitchen. The art supplies are right there. But can you see them? No, neither can I. The wonderful thing about my studio is that everything is in the open. If it's stuck in boxes somewhere I don't use it unless I plan ahead. So on the above picture you can see, if you look very closely, one tin of watercolor. My journal is lying closed on the table (bottom left corner) with my tote of pens and stuff on top of it. So I can write and I can draw a little, but when it comes to pasting things and cutting up papers and stuff I need to go through a lot of trouble (or what feels like a lot of trouble). See, all the rest of the supplies are in the blue boxes. The boxes are closed and I never take them out, because I always feel that when I have done so I need to clean all the stuff up again after I'm done and put the boxes back in their neat little pile.

Looking at Ricës house made me wonder how I could learn a little from her. I mean, I never use this table for entertaining. I hardly ever sit at it myself except to write in my journal in the morning. It's mostly just standing there. On the rare occasion I have visitors we never sit at it and I even eat dinner in the living room (yes, I'm one of those eat-on-the-couch people). I live alone, so why not make a little more effort to even more adapt the house to my own preferences (and it's pretty adapted already, trust me, haha).

So I decided to start up a second workstation, next to the one upstairs in my studio and dedicate it to art journaling alone. That way I don't have to alternate between my seperate pieces and the art journal at my main work table and I can just leave the journal open and have everything I need at hand. So, after some rearranging and moving some stuff away from the dining table and other stuff on to it, it now looks like this:

Now, let me first tell you that this didn't take any money, except five euro's for the table cloth, because I wanted to keep the wood safe from acrylic paints. But other than that it was cost free. I just hauled some stuff from upstairs, I opened the boxes and use the lids now as boxes too and I got the smaller sets of watercolor pencils, crayons, etc. from upstairs to play with downstairs. I also got some of the cheaper papers and some ephemera and some decorative tapes from upstairs and of course some magazines to cut up.

Because the picture was just taken after I finished this little make over it still looks really tidy, but the idea is that I can leave the journal there while working on it and so can easily get to it in between chores or other stuff without having to clean up or go through any trouble opening boxes and closets.

This may be the first step into turning my entire house into an art studio! I already have ideas in my head for a real little sewing room upstairs! ;-)

Art supply loot

Yesterday I had to go to the hospital on the main land for some blood testing. Nothing serious, just a regular check up. I don't like needles and I don't like to get my blood drawn, mostly because apparently I have some sort of invisible vein that makes it hard for the attending nurse to find any blood at all and sometimes has people searching with a needle in a way I would not want to recommend to anyone. Luckily I had a nurse who knew her limits and didn't start poking around in case she might get lucky. She immediately went and got a more experienced colleague and that made all the difference. I was done in no time.

After that I deserved a treat and wouldn't you know there's a very cheap store near the hospital that my Dutch readers will know called Action. They sell all sorts of stuff, but I always go there for the papers and crafting supplies. So I went in and threw one thing after another in my basket. Here's my loot:

I bought many many paper pads. Several of each, because this is the kind of store where if you go the next time what you saw last time has vanished into thin air. So if you see something you really like you have to buy more of it. Luckily the prices are such that this is no problem.  Next to all that paper I bought some rub ons, some transfer paper, a glue roller, lots of decorative tape with lace designs on it, some black duct tape and yes, a mini paint roller which I thought would be fun to use for background painting. 

To give you an idea of the prices: the square paper pads are 15x15 cm (6x6 inches). In a scrapbook store here in the Netherlands such a pad would set you back about 5 to 7 euro's. Truth be told the paper in the more expensive pads is usually of somewhat thicker quality (not always), but since I use pretty papers mostly for collage the thinner paper is actually easier to handle and it's not like it's really flimsy or anything. Anyway. One of those pads costs 69 eurocents. So ten of these will set you back just as much as one pad in an expensive store! I think that's so cool that I could do a happy dance! 

In the end I came home with a big bag full of art supplies and some other none artsy stuff that's not even in the picture. The receipt was very long, but the total amount I had to pay was only 25 euro's. Knowing I got so much for so little just made my day. Yes, sometimes it's the really mundaine stuff that makes me really happy ;-)