• Donate or sell any unwanted (but still good) supplies. (See my donation ideas in a previous post.)  You can also arrange a bead swap with friends.
  
  
• Throw out anything that's no good.  I tossed a dried-up tube of jewelry cement and a paintbrush I used for resin that I forgot to clean.
  
  
• Add in missing parts.  I snagged an old kitchen rug for my studio when I realized how much beads bounce on a bare cement floor.  I also keep a running list to stock my studio more efficiently. Often I'd be in the middle of the project and realize that I was running low on brass head pins or silver jump rings, but when I had time to shop, I'd have forgotten I needed them.
  
  
• Make it fun.  I've been doing a lot of cleaning by listening to music or podcasts.  Podcasts like Crafty Pod and NPR's The Splendid Table (two of my favorites) are especially helpful because they run for a certain length of time, so you don't have to let cleaning eat up your whole day.  You can get a lot done in thirty minutes or an hour.
  
  
• Create a place for everything.  It made a huge difference in my productivity last year when I finally went from a single bead container to separate drawers for different kinds of beads. I also have a special box for in-progress projects which makes it easy for me to carry around if needed. 
  
  
• Make a "junk drawer."  While it may seem that the point of organization is to eliminate junk drawers, this is a tip I picked up from The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  It's good to have a place you can rummage through and find unexpected treasures when the mood strikes.  The key is to keep it to a single box or drawer. 
  
  
• Keep an empty shelf or drawer.  It sounds crazy, but it makes me feel good knowing I have two completely empty drawers in my bead storage system.  It makes me feel more open to possibilities.  I obviously don't have enough beads if I still have space to hold them! 
  

Be sure to check out the other Art Bead Scene posts on "renewal" in mid-September.

Lately I've been obsessed with making resin pendants.  While looking for possible items to add inside the pendants, I picked up an old plastic container with sequins, mini pom-poms, bells, and buttons.

Somehow, the box turned itself over and popped open.  Yikes!

The box sat this way for a week.  I finally decided that I didn't have the patience or time to sort through thousands of tiny pieces.  I dumped everything into a jar.

On the positive side, now I can use my workbench again.  At the same time, the super-organized part of my personality cringes when I see this jar.  I wonder if I would feel differently had I spilled beads rather than "stuff"?  Or if I had at least spilled stuff that was all the same—all button or all sequins.  I think this jar might be destined to be a crafty gift.  For some reason, it's fun to dig through piles of stuff that belong to someone else, but when it's my own stuff, it's just annoying!

Sisterhood of the Traveling Beads Giveaway

Speaking of other people's stuff being inherently more interesting than your own, Heather Powers of Humblebeads is conducting a giveaway with a box of beads worth $200.  She has just finished a major studio reorganization.  Heather writes, "One woman's tossed out beads is another woman's treasures!" The idea is that the box will travel from place to place and everyone will take a few items out and put a few back in for the next person. Read the details here.

To be honest, I thought these Tri-Trays from Beadalon were silly when I first saw them.  I mean, really, special little dishes to hold your beads?  It sounded a little pretentious—like having a special dish that could only hold crème brûlée. (Not that I have anything against crème brûlée.)  But now that I've used them for a year, I have to say that I don't know what I was doing before I had them.  I love them!  Here's what I like:

1.  While I use them mainly for seed beads, I've found that they're also useful for tiny in-progress projects like a pair of earrings.  They work well since I want to see how a bunch of beads look together before I assemble them.

2.  These dishes are so small (each side is just over 3 inches) that I can fit one or two in a small Ziploc bag, along with my needles, thread, and seed bead tubes for an on-the-go beading kit.

3.  They stack!  I can fill them, stack them, and scoot them (carefully) around the table.  They stack nicely when empty and don't take up much room in my storage area.

4. They're white.  This might seem like a silly "feature" but imagine if they were red, for example.  It'd be impossible to see the bead colors.  (That said, speaking as a designer, I'd prefer it if the company logo were on the side rather than in the middle, so that I could see the bead colors without dark blue in the mix.)

5.  And the big reason:  they're triangular.  Once you're finished with your project, you can tip the corner into a seed bead tube and clean up in 30 seconds.  Trust me, for someone who used to dump her Delicas on the arm of the sofa to sort them and then pick them up one by one to put them away, this is a big step up.

One place I like to visit for book recommendations is Library Thing, an online community of 900,000 readers.  These are people that not only own the titles, but have taken the time to enter them into the system and label them with different subjects to make them easy to find and share. It's fun to see which books appear the most often on people's bookshelves.  Here's a quick look at four topics at the time I wrote this post (click on the topics for the full, current list):

Crafts:

1. Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook by Debbie Stoller
2. Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet:  The Happy Hooker by Debbie Stoller
3. Stitch 'N Bitch Nation by Debbie Stoller

Knitting:

1. Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook by Debbie Stoller
2. Knitting Without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmerman
3. Stitch 'N Bitch Nation by Debbie Stoller
   

Quilting:

1. Quilter's Complete Guide by Marianne Fons
   
2. Heirloom Machine Quilting by Harriet Hargrave
   
3. Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!! by Diane McClun
   

Beading:

1. Creative Bead Weaving by Carol Wilcox Wells
   
2. The Art & Elegance of Beadweaving by Carol Wilcox Wells
3. The Beader's Guide to Color by Margie Deeb

It's not a perfect system.  Since people can use their own subject tags, you'll find different books listed under variations. For example, "quilt" will pull up different results than "quilting."  Even so, it gives you a good idea of who the popular authors are in various categories. 

There are also some reader reviews, although I've found that Amazon tends to collect more reader reviews than Library Thing.

If You Liked This . . .

The other fun thing to do on this website is to look up a favorite book to see who owns it and what other books they would recommend.  This is the kind of thing I do all the time with my friends—"If you liked X, you'd probably like Y."  The connections aren't always obvious, so this really helps me find books I might never have sought out.  For example, I put in Wire Style by Denise Peck and one of the recommended titles is Semiprecious Salvage by Stephanie Lee.  Try it and let me know what you think.  Do you agree with the recommendations?