Art happens while you're making other plans

So what with one thing and another, I've been thinking a bit more longterm, things like is this place right for me, do I have too much house, leading to,well, the first thing to do is to continue organizing and clearing, including taking the parts of my lovely custom made platform bed down from the third floor studio to the second floor bedroom. Big decisions like housing are a bit further down the road.

Some back story here: when HP and I had separate homes, I had a lovely double size platform bed built, perfect because it breaks down into a number of very portable component parts, but is sturdy as a rock when assembled, clever engineering. However, it was too low for HP when we combined homes, impossible for him to get out of. So we adopted his bed, and I broke mine down and carted it up to the loft, which was now my studio.

And used the parts, the main base as worktops, the supporting bits as shelving, all very pragmatic and useful. But now I can think about bringing it down again as part of the general organizing principle. Soooooo, that meant moving a ton of stuff off the worktop, and the shelves and fighting off the cats who were anxious to help, and reuniting the parts ready for HS (he doesn't know this part yet) to bring down one floor to the bedroom and help me install it in place of the current bed. Which will involve taking the frame part out of the current one, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Anyway, in the course of doing this, I found all kinds of great stuff, including a few artpieces I'd put away and never found again, joyful reunion, and parts of future artist books, which is great because next week I'm doing a little presentation about artist books, specifically the sort we circulated around our Field and Fen group, since the local group is interested in taking a shot at this. I know where my complete books are, but now I have more interesting raw material in addition, to show people who probably haven't done artist books before. Your original art will be hugely admired, dear blogistas!

And I found a huge binder of ATCs (artist trading cards, for them as don't know about them, like baseball cards, but original art), and I can bring them in to share and show, too.



At this point, panting and dusty and wondering if I should have ever started on this, you know how you get halfway through a job like this, I realized that the newly cleared worktop (oh, I found all my mulberry paper and Arches lovely hotpress, too, yay, oh yes, and I found all the stencils and stamps and things I might use to teach the little girl scouts if they ever ask me to do it, and located the crate of kits I made for teaching monotypes, which I will be doing in February) anyway, where was I, oh yes, the worktop that was on top of the bits from the bed had seen yeoman use as I painted and printed,over the years, and I realized that accidental art had taken place there, too.

So, before it gets all filled up again with artwork and materials, I took a few quick pix. Thought you'd like this.