Bead Storage and Organization, Workspace And WIP

I got comments from Aleta on how I had a lot of beads stored in a relatively small space. 

This is true. What I like about the storage system I settled on is that it's amenable to expansion as needed, without major investment. It also keeps the maximum number of beads visible at once. This is what I see when I open a couple of drawers in the rolling units.  I try to keep the smaller plastic boxes 1 or 2 deep as much as I can. If too much of the drawer gets 3 deep, things start getting forgotten and ignored.

But yes, there are a lot of beads in there. Some drawers are much more full. Many are sparse, like the drawers with clear beads, and the one with white beads. I may have less than a dozen selections in each of those color drawers.

You can see the numbers on the boxes. Those are the inventory numbers that tell me in the software what size, shape and color the beads are, as well as material and cost (and when and where purchased). So when I use twelve of #102 in a work, I know how much each bead cost me. 

I've been investing heavily this year. Perhaps it's just the first flush of beading fever. Now I try to buy staples, like carnelian rounds, or unique items, like focals, cabochons, or materials I haven't seen before. Other than that, and seed beads, stringing materials and findings, I'm trying to limit my purchases. Use what I have.

Often the limitations imposed by budget, availability or time lead to the most creative work. Total freedom often leads to lack of focus. Today I went to two stores, mostly to look for amber-hued seed beads. 

One was JJ Bead, on Edinger in Huntington Beach.  It's a small storefront in a strip mall. They are awash in Swarovski crystals and freshwater pearls. They have a large selection of each, and a fair number of seed beads and findings. They are friendly and helpful and the store has been rearranged since my last visit to provide wider aisles for those in chairs. Very roomy now.  They have a lot of Miyuki seed beads, and a fair selection of kumihimo supplies. Near the back of the retail floor is a medium sized work-table for beaders to come and work at. 

Right across Goldenwest, the cross street with Edinger, is Beadology. The focus of their store is glass beads, one whole wall worth. They have vintage glass in small tray containers, and a small selection of stone beads & semi-precious. The floor space is generous here, surrounding a large work table in the center, once again open for beaders when classes aren't being held there. They also have a reasonable selection of Toho seed beads, most widely in 11/0 size. These people are also kind and friendly, and give out purchase cards so that after you buy a certain amount, you get $25 off your next purchase. I like those kinds of encouragement, don't you?

I found a reasonable selection, mostly at Beadology, of the colors of seed beads I wanted.  I'll get all my purchases entered into my inventory software tomorrow, so I can start using them. I want to do a companion piece to my amber and carnelian neckace. Not a duplicate, but a logical development from that starting point. 

I also took another picture of my workspace. You can see a bit more of the actual space here. Everything is handy, nothing is too far away, and I have room to the side to set things that are being glued or in a waiting stage. You can see the pile of project boxes at the right rear there. 

And this is the current project I've picked up. A medallion to go with a kumihimo braid, and lots of fringe with glass fruit beads. Very fun. The purple border is the base ultrasuede, and will disappear after I've trimmed it off and sewed a beaded edge around the border. The cabochon is actually a dichroic bead. It's got a pin back glued on now, to help control the necklace, as it's meant to hang off-center, and that never works without some securing, as the weight isn't distributed evenly. I'm going to try to get the border started tonight. After I post this.

Keep those comments coming! I love them. 

More Bead Organization, Storage and a Peek of Workspace

I talked before about the rolling drawers I use to organize all my non-seed beads by color. I did purchase the two additional drawer sets and now I even have a couple of spares. In addition to the by-color organization, I did some sub-categorizing.

The pic of all four sets shows them lined up as I have them when I work. They do all four slide right under the kneehole of the desk when I'm not working, or want to make the living room look neater. 

Yes, that's a cement floor. We ripped up the carpeting several years ago, and believe it or not, the concrete floor, with a big fat crack running across it and big swoops of carpet adhesive, is actually far more attractive than that carpeting was! Never have off-white carpeting in a house where people eat in the living room and walk around with their shoes on. Not a good idea.  Just say no. The previous owners installed it right before they sold. Sadists, I tell you!

When I need to pull the drawers out from under the desk, I use a long backscratcher to get hold of the farthest-in sets. Very handy. It's a reacher, it's a backscratcher. 

Sub-organization. I found out I had huge numbers of red beads, so I subdivided those into large & small, as you can see in the closeup of one of the drawer sets.  I also have separate drawers for findings, cabochons, ultrasuede, stringing materials, and finished work. Right now, that is. Finished work is growing rapidly and I'll have to find better storage than just stuffed in plastic zip-loc bags and piled in a drawer. I even have a few unlabeled drawers waiting for new items. My precious labeler has its own drawer.

Beige/tan/natural/brown and orange beads were also filed all together, but were also overpopulated, like the reds. So now Beige/Tan and Orange/Brown each have their own drawer. A drawer that's too full, piled 3 layers deep of the tiny plastic boxes you can see in the workspace picture, just impedes finding the perfect bead. 

On top of the drawer set you can see a couple of the seed-bead storage kits I use. Turns out that one of these on top of the drawer will still slide right under the desk. So that's a place for four of them, I have two more that stay on top of the desk. Oh, and I need to find a place for my growing collection of books and magazines. 

And here is a shot of my workspace, littered with beads, with my pathetic $7 magnifier from Harbor Freight and a former bedroom LED lamp. Clearly I need better visualization tools. Finding the ideal combination, though, of a comfortable position for the magnifier, the lamp, and my hands as I work in and out of the magnified area is tough. I know a lot of people use Ott Lites. I still haven't found one that suits me and I'm actually considering a professional grade magnifying lamp like those used in scientific labs. Pricey, though. 

The small colorful round dishes are the tops off of storage tins, they have a glass bottom and I've found them to be ideal holders for beads I'm working on. I have enough I can distribute many different kinds of beads and have them handy and controlled while I work. It minimizes the dropping on the floor syndrome. Not eliminates. Minimizes.   

So you can see my mess, bent needles and all. I have various bowls to hold items, and in the second desk drawer I actually keep all my tools. It's on the right hand and placed properly to reach for in the middle of something.

I do clear the desktop after every project is finished. You can see on the third drawer set from the left in the first picture a tiny peek of the current work in progress, a bead-embroidered picture frame on midnight blue ultrasuede, with silver and crystal beads. It might turn out okay, after all. 

Oddly, I hate hate hate filing papers, but I love to organize, label and tidy up my beads. I wonder why those two tasks, which seem to be similar, stimulate different centers of my brain. One is good, the other I avoid like, well, a chore. 

So there. My creative space. It's all in the living room, on the left hand side of the desk where my living room computer lives. It's a big desk. Notice along the front edge, those tiny torn post-it bits marking off measurements. If I didn't care about marring the desk, I'd just scribe those suckers into the wood. But I love the natural maple inlaid with ebony of the desk, so post-its it is. They last surprisingly long, and are amazingly handy for measuring thread, wire, and beaded lengths. 

The Theory and Practice of Bead Organization, Part Three: Seed Beads

There are so many seed bead kinds, colors, sizes, and shapes, that trying to organize them requires a whole separate system of containers and organizers.

In the software, BeadEnCounter, that I'm working on, seed beads are tracked separately from other kinds of beads and findings. They have their own section in the database, and I can print out a current inventory any time I want to. This is invaluable when I want to purchase new beads, because when I'm confronted with a whole rack of beads in a store, I find myself drawn, over and over to the same range of colors. After I purchased my third batch of 505 blue plum in 11/0, I said "this is enough!" and started keeping the list in my purse.  It's right next to the long list of medications I take, and just about as important!

Of course, not all stores, local or online, adhere to the same numbering system as Toho does. If they use their own numbering, you'll have to rely on color descriptions, which can also vary. Delicas have their own system. But at least I know if I've bought too many tangerines, or if I happen to need a tangerine in size 15. Having a list, as well as organizing your beads, can let you know where your palette is thin. For instance, since I divide my drawers of regular beads by colors, I know that I've got red beads out the wazoo, and very few actual clear beads. Yellow and white are also under-represented.

In designing the software, I found I needed several important criteria to distinguish among my seed beads. Size is first. Then comes shape, then code/color.  Cost is not as important as it is with regular beads, as it's impossible to count all the seed beads in a piece. I can guesstimate (a word which interestingly, my spell-checker does not flag) that I've used a certain number of grams, or half of the container I bought, but I can get close enough for costing that way. I generally only worry about seed-bead costs with the heavy metal type beads, which can run close to a dollar a gram. 

Every store, it seems, packages their seed beads differently. This makes comparison shopping difficult, unless you're able to break the prices down per gram. However, I've found that if you get on the email list and watch the sales, the most economical way to buy seed beads is from Artbeads.  At times they have dollar sales where 8gms of beads will be discounted 75%, depending on the original cost. Or they'll have 50% off sales. If anyone has a better source, let me know.

Artbeads uses small plastic bags for their beads, 8gms each. Other stores around here use round tubes, with 30 gms in them. Or triangular tubes. Or short round tubes with 15 gms. Or different tubes for different sizes of beads.

In any case, it's impossible to logically organize anything when everything is in different containers. Drives me nuts. So I standardized on these plastic containers with a flip-top like a Tic-Tac box.  Dee's Place has them in at the best price I've found anywhere, locally or online. She ships quickly too, I've ordered several times, trouble-free. I get the smaller ones for small amounts of beads. The 3.75" ones will hold 28-30 gms of beads easily. 

And then I lay them down in these "project cases" from Stacks & Stacks. Right now, they're divided by size, though my size 11's are just about to outgrow their case, when they all come home from the project boxes they're currently in.

Inside the box, I'm not terribly fussy about how the colors sequence. I figure if they get messed up, I'll just see some new combinations that might spark an idea. What I do not want is two layers of containers. That's why I chose the shallow document case. I can fit about 55-60 containers in one case. One layer means I can see them all without shifting anything about.

Notice the labels? First each item is entered into the software, with a code if it has it, by size & color if not. Each flip-top is labeled with the P-touch as I transfer the beads into it. If there are special facts, such as one being a heavy metal or extra-costly, I note that on the label too. I found that one bead mixture was costing about $27 per 30 gm tube. But by combining two other $3.95 colors, I got my own custom mixture that is essentially identical. At least I can't tell them apart. 

I'm still working on way to stack these boxes so each of them is accessible without having to pull one off the bottom all the time. 

Soon, I'll include a picture of my working area, with all the storage in place. 

Spring Cleaning, a Genetic Imperative? Bead Organization, Part Two

I realized during my recent cleaning/organizing effort with my beads, that this may be the last remaining symptom of the Spring Cleaning bug I inherited from my mom.

When I was a kid, turning out the closets, cupboards and storage areas in the house was an annual ritual. I think it must have been this way back in the caveman days...after a long winter sweeping out the accumulated bones, fire cinders and schmutz of months of people huddling together for warmth must have been a great relief, not to mention a hygienic necessity. 

Why this is mostly limited to women, I don't know. Do men who live alone spring clean? I sincerely doubt it. 

Just like the urge to buy school supplies in late August, spring cleaning is an urge I still get. Fortunately, I've learned to mostly quell it. I don't do heavy cleaning anymore, and whatever organizing I need to do I try to spread throughout the year. 

Yesterday, the additional two drawer units I ordered arrived. I've labeled and filled the drawers, though I still have one drawer left over. I'm sure it'll get filled pretty soon. I was able to break up three of my "color" drawers for beads...the brown/tan/orange one is now two, one for tan/beige and one for brown/orange. I split out the true blues from the blue/blue-green drawer. And now red is split by size, large & small. Those were the three fullest drawers, and now I'll be able to find things much more easily, not to mention acquire new stuff. Ahem. Eventually. Not soon.

And now I have a drawer for my ultrasuede, a separate spot for all my stringing materials and wire, and a whole drawer for cabochons. Designing will be easier, though I'll be sliding a lot more drawers during the process. 

All this is in service of getting stuff off the top of the desk, so I can spread out and work, and also keep things a bit neater. The work area is in the living room, after all. Yesterday I also got a couple more of the project cases for seed bead storage, and I'm still seeking a way to stack those while retaining an easy way to get them out of the stack. Whatever I want is always at the bottom. 

The goal is easy access, logical organization, and elimination of visual clutter. Less crap, more beading.

Still a work in progress.

The Theory and Practice of Bead Organization, Part One

My husband looks at me funny when I sit down to work with my bead software and catalog all my inventory, as I call it.  

But for me, it's an odd combination of business logic, design process and a very slight organizational wankiness.  It's a warm, feel-good process for me, combining right & left brain.  At the end of it, I know where every bead I've just purchased has gone, and helps to prevent the older purchases from getting buried or fading into the background as new ones come in.

The business logic results in my being able to trace the source and cost of every bead I purchase, whether it has been purchased wholesale or retail, and recording close to purchase date what material the items are made of, and any special facts about the item.  In the future, if I want to know what the beads labeled #244 are, I can just look them up. 

I can also check the accuracy of my receipts, and get a grasp on my total investment in beads. Right now, I suspect that other than consumables such as stringing materials, findings and perhaps seed beads, I should probably not be buying anything new for quite a while. I need to produce and sell.

The organizational quirk is that I'm not a big organizer in most areas. I avoid business and personal filing as much as I can, and still find things when I need them. My clothing is not arranged by color, nor my canned goods alphabetized.  But beads, I feel, should not remain in thousands of teeny but varied plastic bags, jumbled together.  I need to have an over-riding organizational principle, or it's all just chaos and I can't create in chaos.  I'll describe more of the physical organization of the beads in a later post.

The design process comes in as I handle the new purchases, and then integrate them with my existing inventory. I see combinations that look good together, or just see the new items in the context of my own workspace, and ideas arise. Of course, I always end up having so many ideas I'll never be able to make them all, but in the course of cataloging, the ideas arise, combine, evolve, and finally, come close to the surface enough for me to grab them, sketch them, audition partner beads and actually start the project.

So here's how the whole thing goes. I bring in the incredibly tiny packages that result from profligate spending and marvel again how buying beads and stones can pack so much value into such a small cubic space.  I try to preserve the store receipts, but frankly, often those receipts are completely useless in describing what's been purchased. Store owners just don't have the capacity to make or print receipts for specific bead purchases.

In my software, I enter each strand or bead purchase, and the software assigns an ID number. The entry has a complete description, with material, color, shape, size, place and date purchased, price and number of beads. The program calculates the price of each individual bead for me.  I'll make a list or mark each package with the computer-assigned number.

This latest trip, at Chapman's, I got a lot of different cabochons. I'm very excited about using some of these. 

Next, I take the new pieces to my workspace. I've got a Brother P-Touch label-maker to create numbered labels for each separate item.

At Harbor Freight (a great store), they sell small plastic boxes that measure about 3" x 7" x 9" that are filled with smaller plastic boxes, either 1.5" square or 1.5" x 3". These small boxes are good for strands, loose beads, cabochons of the smaller sizes, etc. I label each box with a printed number, and that's all I need to do. 

Then I file each numbered small box by color in the drawers of a set of rolling drawers, purchased from Stacks & Stacks. For me, color is the overwhelmingly important quality of a bead. I have two of these sets that roll under my desk, and I think I need two more.

I'll talk more about the color-organization later, and about my seed bead storage, which is separate from the regular beads.

The larger Harbor Freight boxes, I keep for use as project boxes. More of the small boxes fit in each drawer if I remove them from the large boxes.  For our latest trip I was able to pack enough project work into three of these boxes for the entire trip, including tools. That way I can keep materials for each project separate and not have to finish it right at the moment. I do have to be careful about not having critical materials segregated in project boxes when I need them for another project. I guess that means I have to not have too many Unfinished Projects hanging around.

So that's part one. There'll be more on the workspace, color organization, seed beads, and working tools later. With pictures. (oh boy that means I have to clean up)