What To Do When You Can’t Think Straight

I recently had a discussion with a client about this topic and I think the ideas talked about would make a good basic list I’d like to share with you so here goes:

1 Clear the physical clutter

Let go of the old to make some physical and psychic space for yourself. Tidy up and rearrange neatly the stuff you DO want to keep. Sounds so obvious but it really does make a difference in the energy and how you feel straightaway. Aim to make your immediate environment beautiful, peaceful and uplifting – don’t allow anything else in your sacred space.

2 Clear mental clutter

by writing down a stream of consciousness – the “Morning Pages” of “The Artist’s Way” book. Write 3 pages of thoughts without censoring or abbreviating anything. Do this once a day or at ad hoc moments when you are feeling particularly confused. Continue reading »

Digital Serenity

My digital clutter clear is going well – if rather time-consuming. I needed to go through rakes of emails to pull out some addresses I didn’t want to lose.  I have finally got my email folders down to 4  from about 100 and now to tackle the inbox of about 180 messages – most of which will be deleted tonight! I am sorry to say that I fell badly into this category Digital Packrat. The relief from deleting most of those emails was palpable. I have kept a few by saving them as text files. I found out that if you highlight all the emails at once and then do ‘Save As’ you can save them all in one text file.  If and when I want to look at them again I can open them in Notepad and just do a search for a relevant word. That way they take up only a tiny amount of space. How cool is that?

Other digital clutter clearing in the pipline is to continue deleting software that I only use occasionally if ever.  For example software that came with my phone to enable the transfer of music and pictures was installed when I first got it and that’s it. I’ve realised it’s just not part of my way of doing things to listen to music on my phone or use my phone for photography – so what’s the point of having software installed that does all that?

Now to the really hard bit Continue reading »

Clarity Breeds Serenity & Other Things Too!

Now that my mass clutter clearing has moved forward with several bags going to charity the last couple of weekends and various plastic toys and art materials going to the little people - my studio is looking a thousand times better. There are no loose papers lying around. Amazing eh? It feels strange. It feels different. Sometimes the emotional side of clutter clearing can get to you. Sometimes being clear can bring peace but it can also bring a feeling of being so shiny and new that it hurts. It’s almost like being scrubbed clean can leave you stinging for a while before you get used to it. Empty spaces can feel vast and uncomfortable and well as clean and zen-peaceful. After a while though I noticed that I started to get energy to clear other things too.  Continue reading »

How Big Should a Stash Be?

I just read this interesting article about fabric stashes and there are some conflicting views on there about what is acceptable and what isn’t. I don’t agree that all scraps are clutter – quite the opposite – they can be really interesting and give rise to new ideas and things to make with them. Although I do agree that scraps have the potential to become clutter if you don’t do anything with them – also they can be a sign of having a fear of lack because you can’t bear to part with them. Continue reading »

The 5 C’s of Small Is Beautiful

I have recently returned from a jolly jaunt in Shropshire spent in our (new to us) caravan. At last I fulfilled my long held dream of having a caravan and some of the things that attract me about caravans (apart from the lack of mud and cold you get when camping!) are you can only take a small number of possessions with you and those said possessions have to be important ones; ones that have the most meaning and usefulness. There is no room for crap and clutter. How brilliant! I love the idea of being able to look around the space and take in everything I own in one sweep of the eye (well, nearly). Deciding what to take into the van was a great exercise in focus – what do I really, really want around me? I know it was only for a week but this exercise has great value for every day life whether on holiday or not.  Some friends of ours are planning to live on a narrow boat soon and they will be going through the same process. Everything they own will be reviewed for it’s usefulness, value and meaning. To simplify your life, reduce the space you live in. It seems obvious when you say it like that. Countless times people say the larger the house they have the more clutter they collect. The larger the handbag you carry around the more junk you take with you etc etc. Things expand to fit the space allowed to them. My studio seems to attract junk like a magnet – it’s the largest room in the house and it’s the place where people put stuff when they don’t know what else to do with it. In a small space like a caravan, a studio flat or a boat you are forced to deal with what is in front of you immediately. You can’t have stuff lying around – it’s just not possible. It makes you face up to your life and deal with your own shit – literally! The idea of an overflowing chemical toilet is not an appealing one! Continue reading »

Is Clutter Clearing Always a Positive Experience?

When planning to do some clutter clearing I always get a tingly feeling of anticipation. The anticipation of feeling focussed, lighter, clearer, better, freer afterwards. Those are the rewards I look forward to. But is clutter clearing always so positive? Are there any downsides to it?

Watching the awful news about the cyclone in Burma got me thinking. These people have had clutter clearing enforced on them in a double whammy. Firstly millions of people have lost nearly all, if not all of their worldly possessions along with their livestock, family members and livelihoods. This is “clutter clearing” of the most extreme kind. The kind of earth-shattering blow that asks the recipient to practise non-attachment on the highest level while they scrabble to survive. A severe and sudden lesson to be sure. How many of us could accept this with grace especially in Western society where the ownership and acquisition of physical possessions is very much encouraged? Following on from this there is another kind of “clutter” – the debris from cyclone damage is immense and the clearing up operation can take years of hard work – how can one go about clearing and rebuilding when loved ones have just died?

Which brings me onto my next point. When clearing clutter all kinds of painful memories and emotional attachments are suddenly activated. This can be extremely uncomfortable. I have watched de-junk your life programs on TV where the person whose house was being de-junked spent most of their time either in floods of tears or feeling angry with the de-cluttering coach for forcing them to make decisions they would rather not make. It can be scary and disorientating to get rid of clutter. We are so used to mapping out our environments using our stuff as landmarks that when it’s gone we can feel empty, unnerved and vulnerable. Of course these are all signs that the process is working but let’s not pretend that it’s always a wonderfully uplifting experience. Sorting through your own shit can be downright painful. One has to face up to all the things you have been hiding from. And what is left at the end of it? That is the really scary part. What is the truth? What are the vital elements we want to keep in our lives? Can they stand up to scrutiny or are we happier living in our own cosy delusions of clutter and what we feel it does for us? Knowing who and what we truly are and then arranging our environment around that Knowing is powerful medicine but you might need a spoon of sugar to make it go down!

How to make clutter clearing a bit easier: Continue reading »

Keep It Fresh! The Power of Immediacy

I wrote previously about the “debt of unspoken dreams” that builds up when we buy materials intending to use them later and/or partially create things but don’t complete them thinking that we will finish them later. To my mind this is a form of clutter or “energy debt” in the sense that there is always an element unresolved waiting for us to make a decision and take some action. For example I have gathered a list of some of the creative urges I have bought materials for in the past. Having not acted on them my creative debt looks something like this:

• To produce goldwork/metallic embroidery – I have had these drawers of metallic threads for 20 years waiting to be used!
• To make Rag rugs – the canvas and latchhook have been lying around for years.
• To get into lots of knitting and felting and weaving – I have a whole basket of woollen yarns.
• Paint lots of watercolours – I shudder at the money spent on expensive paper.
• Ditto with scrapbooking and collage.
• To fully explore digitized embroidery – I shudder even harder to think of all the money and effort spent on software and learning how to use it. Only to find out that I didn’t really enjoy using it after all and preferred free motion embroidery using my old second-hand machine.
• To experiment with stamped, dyed and devore velvets.
• To make lots of tambour work designs.

The list could go on… Of course none of this has happened because in reality we only deal with a very very small amount of what we own, inspire and create. Remember Pareto’s principle - the 80-20 rule? I would surmise that 80% of the materials and equipment we own as Creatives either never get used or used very rarely. This 80% is made up of all the impulse buys, “nice to haves”, “must try thats” and other justifications that make us build up “stash” and of course we are encouraged to do so buy all the material suppliers. The other 20% are the things we use all the time/use a lot of. Applying this rule to any aspect of life can be highly revealing, showing where our attention is focused and where are true priorities lie – whether we would like to admit them or not!

Now to the point about immediacy – if I had bought some materials and immediately put them to good use then I would get the benefit of the fresh energy flow. What I mean by that is: I have an idea, I want to create, I need some materials so I gather them and use them straightaway. I feel fired up to complete the project because the energy is fresh and I am still excited by the novelty, the ideas and the pleasure of using these materials. The energy has flowed around the energy cycle quickly and cleanly and had produced results. If I buy stuff thinking I will use it one day the “one day” rarely arrives. Here are a few thoughts on keeping fresh energy in your creativity:

• Only buy sufficient materials for a specific project or idea that you are currently working on or intend to work on in the very near future – like this weekend.
• Don’t stockpile materials for “one day”. If you’re not fired up/don’t have time or resources to use them right now you probably never will. Even if they are bloody gorgeous.
• If possible assemble all the materials and equipment you need for your project before you start it like you would do when assembling all the ingredients for a recipe.
• Capture the urgent passion by keeping the time between thinking of an idea and taking practical action to execute it as short as possible. This gives less time for  buying materials you think you will use later and for the ideas to grow stale. It keeps your inquisitive, creative mind focussed before moving onto other things.
• Rid your creative space of all extraneous materials, equipment and things you don’t use or are broken and you have never got round to fixing.
• Try using what is in your immediate environment to create with instead of buying something new.
• Be realistic about how much output you can make and how much time, money and energy you can give to projects. It might be smaller than you would like to admit but there is no shame in that. It’s better to complete something small successfully than have your creative space littered with grandly ambitious but never finished projects.
• Keep your current projects in your immediate environment so that they are at the forefront of your consciousness. When things are visually “present” and emotionally vibrant they are easier to complete.
• Keep in mind that materials and ideas can have a shelf-life. It would be ridiculous to hoard cut flowers, rather, they are put out in a nice vase to be enjoyed immediately in all their transient glory. It’s the same with creative materials and ideas. Keeping the immediacy between getting them and using them helps to keep up the passion and enjoyment levels too.

Having advocated the above I can see some flaws in it – what about coming across something bought a while ago which just happens to be perfect for a current project in a moment of pleasant serendipity? What about not being able to get hold of materials easily so buying them in bulk at a large suppliers fair for example seems like a good idea. I can see the merit in both of these scenarios but I still think that buying only what you will use immediately is better because there is less chance of staleness building up and weighing you down. If you need more then you can always get more and if you can’t then you can always improvise a creative solution – you are good at that aren’t you?

Hard Wrench to Freedom

The studio clutter clearing continues and I have even now managed to get to the point of letting go of my beloved sewing machine Pfaff 260 that I hadn’t used in ages. (Still got my Designer 1 – which isn’t as great at doing Free Motion Embroidery but it still does the job ok). It has taken me a long time to get to the point of feeling ok about letting go of it. Maybe because I feel like we have been through so much together it’s like getting rid of a faithful friend and there is a sense of regret and even perhaps betrayal. How mad is that?! Also in the dark recesses of my mind I kept thinking that my little workhorse would get better one day and not play up so much – I thought that somehow this might happen magically and one day it would return to it’s previous state of glory like 20 years ago! What a load of nonsense! Well, that settled it then. Little Pfaffy had to go.

I had thought that the people I bought the machine from would like to have it back so they could recycle it for spare parts or recondition it possibly but they didn’t bother to reply to my email so I have now donated it to the Africa Project that my brother is involved in. They take all kinds of machinery, tools and implements over to Africa including garden tools, computers and printers and even a braille making machine! I think this is a great way to recycle technology and squeeze even more use out of it. At least I know it’s going to be in part useable to someone.

I have also now got rid of the big bags of books which were hanging around – having made the decision to not bother trying to sell them on ebay or amazon – I just can’t summon up the energy to catalogue them all and then have to deal with all the packaging and posting. And I don’t care about getting any money back from them. Let it go, let it go.

After a really big effort I have cleared my worktop of most of the paper. Just all those little postit notes to go through and one more small pile of paper and then I am done. Phew! Now I will actually be able to use the worktop for something creative!

Now the hardest part: I still have quite a lot of fabric to get rid of and I have two scrap bags full that I was going to give to a nursery or school to use for creative stuff. There are a few items that I would like to give to someone who does craft/sewing because they are more specialised: Tiny sewing hoop, padded box blanks for hand painting and decorating, braid, mother of pearl buttons, bead containers, pinking shears and so on. I will get a better list together and if anyone is interested then please contact me by leaving a comment on the contact page. This stuff will be free but you will have to pay the postage.

Now the hardest bit really is separating myself from my previous foolish purchases of fabric that I have had hanging around for years and years. It really is so hard to admit that it was a waste of money and that I will never use it and why on earth did I buy in the first place? – those visionary ideas of it’s use were so fragile and fleeting they really didn’t warrant all £’s I spent. It’s hard to admit to myself that I made errors of judgement and that what looked good at the time was probably just a desire to feel better rather than a conscious choice of materials for a particular project. And yet, because it’s creativity related, because it’s fabric I find it so much harder to part with than other clutter. There seems to be such a strong emotional attachment to creative clutter that doesn’t exist with old clothes or books, for me at least. Do you find the same? There seems to be an immense fear of “but I might need it someday” with fabric that isn’t there so much for other types of clutter. I notice also that there seems to be a sense of miserliness I have when using fabric. Perhaps it’s all those dire warnings from junior school teachers: “ALWAYS cut from the edge of the fabric and NEVER waste any because wasting it is really EVIL and you are a BAD, BAD girl for wasting even the tiniest scrap of fabric that we have bought with our teeny school budget and we may NEVER EVER get the chance again to buy any more fabric because our budget might not stretch to it and IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT for wasting precious materials when the school principle is watching you!!”. I sometime have to literally force myself to use fabrics up instead of just sitting there looking at them. It’s like a really strong belief that this is as good as it’s going to get and there will never be another chance to get a fabric like this again so don’t use it because you will lose it! Recently I used up some lovely dark purple and turquoise printed cotton that I didn’t really have a special purpose for but I just liked it. I bought a basket with leather handles to put my books and journal in next to my bed instead of having them strewn all over the floor. The basket had a cheap canvas lining of grubby looking off-white. So as soon as I got it home I ripped the lining apart and used it as a pattern for a new one using this delicious purple fabric. It felt great once I had done it but there is always a part of me that really hates cutting up fabric. I think I need some more cutting therapy to get over it! Now I am using the purple scraps in a patchwork quilt I am making – not sure what to do with the scraps from the scraps though! I still can’t bear to throw them away! Will this clutter clearing ever get easier?

Info Overload

I know I keep harping on about clutter clearing. That’s because it’s something dear to my heart and I feel that it’s so important. And I keep having to do it!

I’ve been looking around my studio lately and have come to realise how much information I have in there. Discounting the computer, which is an information cesspool/wonderworld in itself depending on what mood I’m in. My workspace is piled high with books. Books that I was planning to get rid of, give to others or refer to later – that was the last time I did a clutter clear. Sometimes I feel like I am a bit harsh with my clutter clearing and later relent if I leave the stuff hanging around for long enough. I’ve had these large bags of books and old videos dumped there for a couple of months now waiting for me to make a decision on them – I was going to try to sell them on Ebay until I realised how much time and hassle that would be. The other day I went through them again and thought maybe I am being a bit over the top and minimalist in getting rid of them. But now I am swinging back the other way and dying to get rid of them all. Am I right to trust my initial feeling? Anyone want any books on flash action script? Oh that felt like a good idea once upon a time but I know I will never get round to using it.

Anyway, back to the main point which is: my studio is swimming, nay, drowning in information. Everywhere you look there are books, postcards, artworks, sketchbooks, folders and trays of decorative papers, magazines, collages, post it notes, notes on scrap paper, receipts, info printed off the internet, leaflets and brochures and all manner of stuff. Do I really expect my brain to process all this barrage of info each time I walk into the studio? For an Earth person such as myself processing tons of information is at best a challenge. There is only so much my brain can handle at any one time and for a certain period of time. An Earth element person in particular finds information overload particularly distressing. There is a feeling of being unable to process this stuff and so it just gets left “undigested”. The Earth person finds it hard to make a decision about what to do with this information; to make it become useful. It can take an enormous mental/emotional effort to turn my energy towards it.

As a visually orientated person I like to “see” everything at once. It’s almost like if it’s hidden away I am afraid I will forget about it. So I need a way of linking what I am doing and need to be doing next to the information that I have so that I can pull out the relevant stuff when I need it and not have it hanging around all the time bugging me visually and mentally. I am a real fan of the clear desk idea but I find it really hard to implement regularly. I really have no idea how to link the stuff I need to refer to, to my current projects other than have them out with all the stuff visible and in my face as it were. Perhaps it’s just a matter of reducing the sheer amount of the information and keeping it to a more manageable level?

Having a bit of creative clutter is fine as long as it’s relevant to what you are currently doing. I don’t see that as a problem. It’s when the clutter stops you or slows you down in your creative process that it really becomes an issue.  I still haven’t got down to my “one box” idea  for fabrics. When I was looking through them the other night searching for a bright spring green I realised how quickly the creative mind moves on to the Next Big Thing. What appealed last month might not appeal this month. Sometimes it’s even a moment of “Oh! What was I thinking?!” Certainly it’s time to clear out all the fabrics I am not using right now and at least get them out of the way. What do you do with fabrics you don’t want anymore? Dump them in the textile recycling bin, give them away?

This is SO True!

 This is a great article about possessions – I couldn’t agree more with it! Stuff Owns You.