“Honey, where are all of our little Pyrex dishes?”

“In your studio? Along with the other small bowls?”  This is a question Bruce asked me last week. I had to ‘fess up. Yes, all kitchen bowls of a certain small size were in my studio. All full of beads or doodads or whatnots. All in use. All holding something important, I thought, but what they were really doing was holding me back.

I am not good at focusing on one thing. A deadline helps, but even when I am faced with one, I will dance around the edges of whatever needs to be done, not quite able to sit still and accomplish the task at hand. Eventually I complete it, and sometimes I manage to finish a few other things I had no idea I was going to do.

This weekend the Alone Moose Gallery opens their doors for their 36th season in Bar Harbor. I have chosen the jewelry I’ll be taking over there tomorrow, but at 9:30 p.m. I still do not have it priced and inventoried. What the heck is the matter with me? I really hate doing this kind of work at night and this time I was determined to have all my pricing done before dinner. Didn’t happen. And now, here I am posting a blog before I finally get my work done for tomorrow.

But I did get all my little display cards made ahead of time, and that really is one thing finished on time.

The other thing I did was to empty out and return all the little bowls to the kitchen where they belong. (I have plenty of “studio little bowls” but they were also full.)

The last bits of the collection. Emptied and ready for the dishwasher.

It was no mean feat to get the dishes returned to the kitchen because it meant cleaning my studio. (Again.) When working with beads, one of the fastest ways to clean up is to dump the beads into a little bowl, to sort out later. This works for a while, until I run out of bowls and/or they take up too much space on my workbench. Without going into long detail, because I still have that jewelry to price, I sorted out beads from all these bowls, along with throwing out some magazines and rearranging some storage in the studio.  After 2 days, I have 3 very tidy work surfaces and the ability find things without making a bigger mess. Tomorrow I’ll be off the island, delivering my start of the summer inventory, getting groceries, and visiting my mother. My friend Susie will be arriving on the 4:30 boat, the same boat I’ll be taking. On Friday, there will be more people arriving for the holiday weekend. I’ll want to catch up with all of them, but if I get a few moments to work in the studio, I might actually be able to focus on what I’m doing. It is so much less distracting to have access to an uncluttered space.

After, after and after: