You can tell how close I am to a beading deadline by the state of my beading table. Right now, for example, I have about a week to finish any designs to submit to Stringing. So, it's bad, but I still can see actual bits of the table here and there. Next week at this time it will be much, much worse.
I'm not the only one who is a messy creator. In fact, last fall, Jennifer VanBenschoten, the editor of Beadwork on About.com started The Messy Beaders' Club. There's only a few entries, but I'm positive that there are lots of other "unofficial" members (like me). Take a look through the artful Bead Table Wednesday photos and tell me that that no one cleaned up before taking those photos!
At some point, the table will be cleaned up (look at how nice it was back in August 2010!) What drives me over the edge and makes me finally start straightening up the mess for real?
It's time to clean up the bead table when . . .
- You're taking photos for your blog and you don't want your readers to know that you're secretly a creative slob. When I had to take a photo of my studio for Handcrafted Jewelry Studio emag, I moved the clutter elsewhere, rather than cleaning it up. I would have been in serious trouble if we had done a video or a panoramic view!
- You've decided to only make jewelry based on what is already on the table, since you dare not pull anything else out.
- You start making jewelry standing up because you're afraid that the motion of the chair being pulled out might cause a collapse of the bead/tool/wire mountain on the table.
- You can't find something you know you bought, not because it's under that pile on your table, but because you had put it away in its proper place and that thought never crosses your mind in your frantic searching.
- You set a pair of pliers down "just for a second" and never see them again.
- You find a half-finished necklace. Or was it a bracelet? A dog collar? You're not really sure, since you don't really remember making it and have no idea how you planned to finish it.
- You get excited about a package of gray, fuzzy beads you find on your table that you didn't remember buying. You sneeze. The beads are no longer fuzzy.
- You hurt yourself (hopefully, just a minor injury!) on bead debris—bits of wire, broken beads, rough edges of metal, or metal slivers.
- You drag over another table next to your beading table to "temporarily" expand your workspace.
- You start lobbying the family for a larger dining room table—so you can commandeer the old one as a second or larger bead surface. (My beading table is my former kitchen table—I probably can't use that trick more than once!)
- You start using the table as a kind of bead journal, remembering certain seasons or events in your life based on where the related beads are on the table. ("I bought that snowflake charm over here during the blizzard of '05.")
- You need a family member to clean up his or her room and the darling asks why you don't need to clean up your room.
- You have a pile of beads and a pile of little plastic bags, but you can no longer match them up because the printing on the bags has faded and is no longer readable.
- You're only making earrings now because that's the only size project that fits in the 3" x 3" square of clean space on the table.
- You've switched to making stud earrings the size of a microchip. Those long, dangly earrings are out of style, aren't they?
- You're having company over and they are less understanding than your family about "eating around the beads." ("That's not a crunchy topping on the casserole, those are my size 11 Delicas!")
How do you know it's time to clean up the bead table?