Visions of bookshelves and baskets, meet Sandra.

A year and a half later and a half-size craft room acquired ... one which serves the purpose well but leaves much to be desired from my original dream ... (reposting this Jan. 3, 2013)

Sometimes I lay awake at night plotting to the minutest detail what my dream craft room will be like. It seriously gets me pretty worked up and I have to think about boring things (like cleaning up that craft room) to calm myself down and fall asleep.

Of utmost importance will be the shelves. A whole wall of shelves, like my favorite coffee shop in Seattle (Bauhaus) that is two stories high and has a bookcase running floor to ceiling along one side, a spiral staircase leading from the bar up to the loft, another entire wall of paneled windows overlooking the space needle set among the eclectic skyline and waterfront of downtown, dimly lit old school chandeliers, Harry Potter style, hanging sporadically from long rafters over rough-hewn wood tables where college students play chess like old men or homeless men read books like college students should, the remaining walls dark wood-paneled and graffiti-ed with the personality of an earthy, free-spirited, musty summer evening, and the ultimately-seattle aroma of freshly brewing coffee …

Wow. Homesick much?

Aiya.

Back in Oklahoma on a sleepless night …

Dang. If I could design the perfect art studio, it would be exactly that.

This wasn't where I was intending this to go at all.

Blaming it on the Sudafed. (taken purely for medicinal purposes. Although the inspirational writing side effects are nice …)

Ok, ok. Take 2:

A whole wall of shelves, some long, some cut up into cubes (yes, definitely lots of cubes!), some double-wide or tall … it doesn't have to be fancy. Actually, Timothy could build it for me from some re-purposed scraps of wood panels. (panels? 2x4's? boards? ...) I want more spaces than I could ever imagine needing, so that I can have a place for everything I have, and then more spaces for when I pick up the beyond-everything-i-need stuff. The problem with finite space is that I start multi-purposing and trying to coerce things that really don't go together, like useful scrapbooking scraps of paper and old birthday cards that I haven't reasoned away yet, into cohabitation and the results are just plain ugly. Soon enough my organize-able cubes turn into boxes of confused disaster with no governmental system telling things where to go and what to do. And then I turn into a disaster b/c I can't find anything and don't know where to put things b/c they just don't want to go with the birthday cards … yup. So the obvious solution is lots and lots more cubes and shelves. And baskets. Maybe I'll write a blog post about my affinity for baskets later. Or maybe Timothy should write that one. It might come out more interesting from his perspective … it would probably be titled something like "my wife's eerie and completely unreasonable obsession over wicker baskets especially if they have cute gingham lining or are "discounted" 50% off so as to still be more expensive than one should ever have to pay for a box." Anyhow, I shall have lots of baskets on my shelves and tidily tucked away in the cubes.

And then there will be project tables. There will be long expanses of Flat Space. And a big coffee table with cushions on the floor on which I shall sit Japanese style as I fiendishly piece together amigurumis in time to make it to the post office by 5:55.

And a wall of windows. Preferably. Or mirrors. Notsopreferably.

And on these tables will be some wire letter organizer things, with cute manila folders in them (only they won't be plain manila ~ I'll find some cute ones on etsy or cover some plain ones with wallpaper or magazine cut-outs). I don't know what those are for yet. But once again, if they did have a pre-determined purpose, then I would need twice as many so as to have enough for the emergency purposes.

The only problem with this whole dream world is that I don't belong there.

This picture gives a little insight into what my crafting environment most often looks like. Although I cleaned up for this picture, so you have to imagine lots more scraps and tape and pens and tea and Kleenex and cats (hence, the Kleenex) … I usually try not to take pictures when I'm in process, b/c it's such a cluttered messy mess that is very messy and I'm altogether in denial about it, preferring to think that the end justifies the means. (Thoughts/comments are welcome at this point. Just don't judge me.)

(it's a scrapbook I made for our one-year anniversary)

Here's a more genuine shot:

I wonder what would happen if my visionary self ever met my disheveled chaotic spontaneous self. I'm not sure that they know yet that the other exists.

No conclusion. But Sudafed is wearing off and I'm going to sleep.