What I did on vacation

Normal people go somewhere on vacation. I am not one of those normal people. I unfortunately work a contract job which requires that I work a whole year until I can get a whopping 1 week of vacation time. This is still hard to take after being laid off from a job where I had 3wks vacation, personal days, sick time (not that I took any) and a much more flexible (though I worked many,many more hours than 40wk) schedule.



I spent the first days of my vacation on a mission to get new curtains for my living room after giving up on making them. My windows are not a normal size and I really need at least 95" curtains - times 3 windows makes for pretty pricey and hard to find window "treatments". I got gorgeous brown velvet ones that will require some altering (for length). Why 2 days? The ones I bought said "curtains" when there really was only 1 panel....and the store was out of any more brown, so I had to go to the one in Syracuse. Bored with this tale yet? I am - which is why no alterations have been done yet.

Wednesday I cleaned out my studio. Somewhat. For a house as huge as mine, it's very old and laid out horribly. My studio is the smallest room in the house and packed with stuff. I should count how many fake tupperware containers I got and organized - and it's still not enough, but it is a start. Now for a label maker ! There are piles of papers, vintage photos, and other goodies.... some sorted, some not so much. I can at least see my floor. I can't create if I can't *see* something. This makes no sense to anyone who isn't creative.

I have a terrible habit of stacking everything on the desk and working on my lap instead. Perhaps this should be a new resolution - stop that !

Still a bit more organizing to do with the papers. You could see the counter top at one point. I don't know why I buy them - I would much rather create a painted background 90% of the time. Some are just too gorgeous to pass up. They are (except the ones on the counter) all sorted by color and type. I had to stop attempting to organize them when I couldn't figure out what to do with a bunch of them....sorting by color doesn't work when there are multiple colors. I do have all of my cabinet cards sorted by type as well - that is something!

I may just make a box of "miscellaneous" and sort through it later. The clean countertop was much nicer.

And now it's Friday and I'm all out of "let's clean up this studio" motivation. I did get some things actually created - I'll be posting those next.