Organization

Starting a business is a lot like writing a book. All the ideas are there. The skills are there. Even many of the materials are there. But the trick of it is to put it all into some sort of order that someone can follow besides myself. This isn't just about the art that I do with my needle; its about my ability to share it with others. And that requires not only putting my thoughts in order but putting the rest of it in order as well. That's a little more challenging.

Designing a piece used to be about an afternoon with a pad of graph paper, a pencil and an eraser and a few colored pencils. It only took a while to get together enough notes to myself to know where the project was going and the rest was just in the doing. I have a stash of floss and fabric that has grown since I did my first project many years ago that has been augmented by gifts of floss bundles from other people cleaning out their work boxes. Eventually, I sorted it out by color into sandwich bags and from that by color group just to have things sort of where I could have them in my line of sight. Once I had a project in mind, I'd pick a little from here and a little from there, or I'd go to the craft store and browse the colors picking out what pleased me at the moment. And the new acquisitions added to the ever growing melieu.

Artistically speaking, design is about spontaneity with a structure. The structure is what you intend to make - your original concept, while the spontaneity develops it as the work progresses and brings it into reality. But now that I intend to put my designs into patterns and kits, I am faced with not only getting my thoughts in order but also keeping track of what I do so that I can communicate it to others. Using needlework design software helps enormously, (and I hope to talk at some future time about various design programs on the market) I just need to remember to take a few notes and recall what colors or lines I change as I do the actual work. But it was the colors themselves that finally demanded attention this week.

First, I should mention that no matter how good your software is at the initial design, there is just no substitute for choosing your colors for real. To sit in the sunlight with a tray full of bright flosses to put one beside the other, to see how they correspond and contrast, how they interact with each other. There's only so far sandwich bags will get you - from a rainbow nest of snakes with no order at all, eventually you have smaller nests with lots of bags in between - its just another kind of nest of snakes. Earlier this week I finally snapped. Trying to pick colors for a baby elephant with flowers shouldn't be that big of a challenge but there I was sitting on the bed with colors spread all around me moving them from one heap to another. Putting bags back in the box, taking them out again. Forgetting where I'd put that whatever it was, putting it somewhere, forgetting where I'd put it, finding it when I'd found something else. I finally gave it all up in disgust and stormed off to the craft store. For a while now I've been using those little rectangular plastic bobbins that DMC makes to keep track of my floss splits and they've proven wonderfully handy. Well this was the day to bring out the big guns. I bought a couple of package of cardboard ones. They come 56 in a package and I figured I had at least that many single colors here and there.

It took the rest of the afternoon to get at least one of every color wrapped and ordered. Finding what I had multiples of, what I have bought over and over because I really really like that color. Then I found a small stack of tackle boxes we'd bought for some other project ages ago and ended up not using. Now the bobbins are again sorted by color. But instead of a jumble of bags, I have ordered ranks of color arranged by hue and color group. Its like taking a pile of piano keys, yes, each one makes a sound, but which one is right for the melody, etc etc, and now putting all those keys in a row arranged by note. I know where they are and, although I may not use every single one in a composition, they are at least available for the choosing. I even reserved one box for the colors I actually choose for the project. And although I'm not a big fan of plastic boxes as I work, its absolutely wonderful to have this contained and ordered rainbow at my fingertips, shaded like an artist's palette with nothing tangled or snarled. Its a righteous feeling. I have even made a resolution to keep things organized, to put colors on bobbins when I bring them home, to file them where they ought to go before they sink to the bottom of the work basket. We will see where that goes - where organization sits down with spontaneity. After all, they don't call me the Container Queen for nothing.