Let’s start with my web hosting company: LinkSky. I switched to them about two years ago, because my previous company was charging me a lot of money for very little space and few features. LinkSky charges me very little for lots more space, unlimited bandwidth, and more features. The trade-off is that I have to be somewhat self-sufficient. I install all my own software, configure it and get it up and running by myself. LinkSky offers no help with any of that—but I’m sort of at the point where I really don’t need any.

LisaVollrath.com is powered by WordPress. Some of you might have WordPress blogs hosted at WordPress.com—well, this is pretty much the same software. However, I have it loaded on my LinkSky server space, which allows me to install all sorts of extra goodies like custom themes and plug-ins. The gallery is powered by Coppermine, which is a very large, full-featured gallery package. I don’t really love Coppermine, because it’s a much larger package than I need, but I now have so much work posted that migrating to something else is just too frightening to contemplate.

Ten Two Studios is also currently powered by WordPress. It uses a heavily modified version of The Morning After theme, with some assorted code snippets to create the shopping cart effect. I use a PayPal shopping cart, and the downloads are facilitated by the nice folks at E-junkie. However, I’m currently working with Zen Cart on my test space, and plan to migrate to it as soon as I feel like I know what I’m doing with it. It’s much more complex than the current site setup—like, the current WordPress powered site has about 30 tables in the database that powers it, but the ZenCart database has over 100. It might be a while before I make the switch, because there are a lot of features I haven’t learned to use yet. I want to make this switch so I can stop using Etsy to sell kits, and E-junkie to sell downloads (they both charge a small comission on each sale), and so I can start doing sales, specials and discount coupons, which I can’t do while I’m on the PayPal shopping cart.

Go Make Something is powered by Joomla and Coppermine, which are bridged together to allows users to log into Joomla, and remain logged in when they surf through the galleries powered by Copppermine. I don’t love Joomla, but I use it because it allows me to limit most of the how-to content to registered members, which is something that’s not so natural in blogging software like Wordpress. I would like to eventually migrate the site onto software that allows me to be a little more arty in my layouts—Joomla is a little rigid about letting me present content in a way that’s visually pleasing.

The really wonderful thing about Zen Cart, Wordpress, Coppermine and Joomla is that they’re free. There are a whole bunch of talented folks out there who contribute their time and abilities to creating them and keeping them updated. Each piece of software uses themes and plug-ins that are also free, created by more developers. There are support message boards for each package, and for most of the themes and plug-ins where idiots like me can go for help when things don’t turn out quite as planned, or when we’re wondering how to do something. Just last night, I was reading the Zen Cart message board, looking for information about using banners to customize category pages, and found a snip of code that allowed me to put three lovely banner boxes on the main page of the site that will rotate images and links. It’s very cool, and took two minutes to insert—and it was just something one person figured out and posted. I really love that collaborative feature of these packages.

Well, that’s it. I hope this helps those of you who are wondering how these things fit together.

• All the how-to lessons have moved to Go Make Something. There is no now-to stuff living at LisaVollrath.com.

• All the free printables from Just Print Something have also moved to Go Make Something.
• My products, books, CDs, and collage images for sale live at Ten Two Studios
• Pictures of my original artwork live in this gallery.
• All the editorials I still want to share are posted here
• The articles on copyright and mixed-media art have been removed. If you want to learn about copyright, read the material on the United States Copyright Office web site, or the national copyright office of whatever country you’re in. I’ve done my part—I’ve read the materials on the site, and re-read them when I’m confused, and I’ve also taken a six week class on copyright basics to help me understand what I’m reading. If you’re concerned about copyright issues, you should do the same, rather than arguing with other artists about what you think the law kinda maybe says, or what you heard might be the law. I will not waste my breath or my web space further on this issue.
• Also gone is my article on the selling of artist trading cards, because again, people seem intent upon interpreting what they think I might kinda maybe be saying about this, instead of actually reading what I write. Here’s my one sentence replacement:

  I do not support the sale of artist trading cards under any name, and have never, nor will I ever, sell my ATCs, or purchase anyone else’s ATCs—but if you wish to sell yours, you should feel free to do so.

I thought I’d talk a little bit about this piece’s evolution. This is less a how-to article than it is a piece about process, which is why it ended up over here at LisaVollrath.com rather than in the how-to instructions at Go Make Something.

I’ve written in the past about shrine making, and the personal nature of this process. Each artist makes shrines for a different reason, and approaches their pieces in different ways. While my smaller shrines are often created to express brief thoughts or sudden ideas, my larger pieces tend to be the result of some large event that I’m having difficulty processing. My father’s death, or my anxiety about leaving the corporate world and starting my own business have sparked some of my larger shrines.

Hurricane Katrina and the events that followed it were extremely difficult for me to process. New Orleans is not far from where I live. It’s a place you can hop in the car to visit this evening, or fly to in an hour or so. I’ve been there several times since I’ve moved to Dallas, and I was there for a long weekend just two months before Katrina hit.

I have hundreds of photos of The French Quarter and the historical cemeteries from this May 2005 trip. I also accumulated a large pile of found objects on this trip, because I was playing a game with the other photographer who travelled with me—we’d find an object, photograph it, and then I’d pick it up and take it with me. My plan was to use the photos and objects in a series of pieces.

When Katrina hit in August, I know that most of you saw the same images on your televisions that I did, and had your own responses. I can’t really talk about most of this even now, because I’m pretty sure this article would quickly turn into a big political rant. What I can say is that many of the people around me felt a sense of hoplessness. There was also a deep sense of anger. Why wasn’t anyone doing anything?

Like many artists, I started letting those feelings out in my work almost immediately. I did a whole string of pieces that were my way of venting. Paradise Lost was one of them.

One morning, I set out to find a box of some kind. Whenever I start a big piece, I always seem to begin by a need to find a box to hold whatever I’m feeling. It’s almost like I need to get these feelings out, and put them somewhere outside myself. For this piece, I looked through my pile of boxes and containers, and none of them seemed right. I found this old bathroom cabinet at the thrift store up the street, and it seemed right—it was old and sort of architectural, and in bad shape.

I’m generally a take it apart kind of girl. By wiggling and pulling, I discovered that I could take pieces off the cabinet. The mirrored panel in the front was removable, as was the whole wood panel in the back. Once the back was out, the inner shelves were also removable. I started thinking less of a bathroom cabinet, and more of a house or a shop. A lot of the photos of the area taken as the water began to receed showed water stain lines high up on walls, and debris draped over household items still sitting on their shelves.

I started to relate to my subject in terms of color. New Orleans is a strange place for color. At a distance, you might see a building that’s quite bright and colorful, but when you get close to it, the paint is chipped and faded, and there’s often a lot of water staining and mildew, because even without the hurricanes, it’s a wet place. I started thinking of this piece as something that was once colorful, but had been stained with water and mud. To make that happen, I built up the layers—first gesso applied unevenly to tone down the dark wood, then very bright colors applied in uneven layers to represent years of painting and repainting, and finally layers of walnut ink staining.

While the outside of the box was getting its many layers of paints and stains, I contemplated the front panel. At first, I considered replacing the mirror with some plexiglass. I decided to play with the mirror a little, to see if I could do something with it rather than discarding it. I was thinking in terms of layers—that looking at this mirror shouldn’t be a direct reflection, but a revelation of many layers. I sanded off a big chunk of the back coating to give me an area of clear glass, and then worked on both the front and back sides of the mirror. The front got a transparency of one of the French Quarter photos I took. I used this transparency as both artwork and support for the glass.

I applied some prints of vintage photos on the back side, in the clear area. Now, the photos seemed to be floating in space—building in front, people in back. I realized that if there was a mirror here, it had to be broken, so I backed the whole piece with some sturdy board, and in a particularly nerve-wracking moment, I smacked the finished collage with a hammer. The mirror shattered, but the pieces were held in place by the board and transparency.

With the box painted and dry, and the front panel finished, I reunited the two pieces. Rather than using the little plastic stoppers to hold the mirror in place, I glued and nailed pieces of wood across, thinking of the wood panels that people used to cover their windows.

Turning my attention to the interior of the box, I started to recreate the images of the common household things covered with debris. I stained the whole interior, using walnut ink to recreate the dried water stains. I also painted a few things that had disturbed me—some of the messages people had left behind on their homes, and the coding used by the officials as they searched each building.

I thought the items that went into the box should look as though they all came through the same dirty, muddy water, but they should also appear to have been old before that. I did a lot of strange aging of items. I dripped wax over bottles, and fogged glass with acrylics.

I also did a lot of aging of paper with Distress inks. Almost everything I’d collected in New Orleans was already water stained, because it was raining while I was there. Real water stains and age weren’t quite enough—I did a lot of wadding up and flattening, then inking.

I added a ghost to the box by doing a gel medium transfer, and applying it to the interior of the hurricane glass.

I filled the box with all sorts of random items from my New Orleans trip blended with things like branches from my backyard, and spanish moss from the craft store. (Spanish moss does grow wild here, but it’s usually filled with tiny spiders—it needs either fumigation or freezing for an extended period to kill the spiders and their eggs.)

I worked back and forth with the branches, figuring their final placement, and then removing them to add items that would sit behind them. When everything was finally placed properly, I had to gently lift each item, apply glue to it wherever it might tough the box, then reposition it. This part is always very tedious, but there’s something really calming about it.

One tiny, sad arrangement went on top of the box. I really did find this lone baby shoe on the street, and took a lot of photos of it—it seemed so sad. I also spent a lot of time in the Garden District unearthing Mardi Gras beads and photographing them in the dirt. They get pressed into the wet ground during parades, and they’re also hanging in all the high branches of trees along the parade routes.

Making this shrine really helped me get over some of my anger and saddness. When I finished it, I thought at first I would sell it and donate the selling price to the Red Cross, but I found I couldn’t quite part with it right away. For a long while, I had it hanging in the hallway, right outside the door of my studio. This month, it’s finally moved to a gallery, where it’s for sale. I’m finally ready for this box to leave home.

This is what you see when you walk in the door, which is at the very end of the hallway—a good thing, because that means nobody has any reason to be down there. To the right of the door is a cabinet, and the closet. To the left, just out of this frame, is an entire floor to ceiling wall of shelves. On the wall straight ahead are a window, the end of my work table, which is sort of built like a bar sticking out from the wall, and a lateral file with drawers on top. On the fourth wall is another counter with drawers underneath, and storage above, and my sewing machine, with a window above it.

Over the end of my work table is an absolute requirement in all Texas homes—a ceiling fan. Mine is on a wall switch, which also powers the lights. It’s sensitive enough that I can dial the fan down so that it moves air, but doesn’t move the tissue paper on the table. The windows in the room provide a great deal of light. The one in this photo is covered by blinds because it faces my neighbor’s alley access to his backyard. The other window has no blinds covering it, and faces south. I suppose if my neighbor behind me angled his head just right, he could see straight into the room, but I doubt it. We have a good 100 yards between the backs of our houses.

The floor to ceiling shelves to the left of the door hold books, plastic bins filled with supplies, and boxes waiting to be altered. I have a box obsession, so I recently added the very top shelf to get them up and out of the way.

The plastic bins are unlabelled, which is just plain stupid. I do sort of know what’s in each one, but seriously, there are days when I just have to fish through them until I find what I’m looking for. Notice the fine storage of my iron here, with the cord trailing down. This is because the small ironing board that’s propped on a set of rolling drawers next to the door doubles as my photography station. Did I mention that my office is now undergoing renovations? That means photos are taken in a temporary space, and my computer lives in the bedroom. It’s sort of crowded…

This area also tends to hold finished projects. They’re just sort of lined up on the fronts of the shelves until I figure out what to do with them. Poor planning, because if I need something in a book or bin behind them, I have to shift everything around. I’m hoping I’ll be able to store finshed things in the office when it’s completed. There’s a dead wall in it that really can’t hold anything other than really shallow shelves.

The cabinet to the right of the door. I use this to store vintage ephemera and other paper items that might fade in the light. I try to keep them in plastic bins to avoid any infestation by silverfish, which like to hang out in old paper. So far, I haven’t seen any. I also store glass items like old photo plates and medical vials here, because it’s the one place in the room that doesn’t take a big beating.

On top of the cabinet are bottles and cans. Some day, when I’m trying to avoid working, I’ll run around the corner to Home Depot and get more brackets and shelving, and add shelves over this cabinet. Sadly, they have to be shallow, because the heating vent is right over this area. Anything that sits on top of this cabinet gets blasted with hot air, which is probably why there’s no paper up there.

Notice how the doors are still pristine and white? I roll my ironing board, which is covered with a white t-shirt, around to the front of the cabinet, and use it as a background when I shoot photos.

To the left of the cabinet is the closet, which still doesn’t have any doors on it. That’s bad, because it holds all my fabrics, and there’s a window in the adjacent wall that streams sunlight into the room. I recently realized that I was lacking places to hang things for photography, and adding some white bi-fold doors would solve both problems. Don’t hold your breath, though—I just hate hanging doors.

I wisely filled this closet with wire shelving on adjustable brackets, with just a little bare space for my dress forms and hanging fabrics. As I eventually reduce my fabric stash, which is leftover from when I was a costume designer, I can reconfigure the shelves without a lot of effort or expense.

Turning the corner, here’s my sewing machine. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! I used to have a whole room dedicated to sewing, but I just don’t do that much of it any more. I usually have a bunch of crap piled up around the machine, so when I do need it, I have to rake it all off to make room. The left side of the machine cabinet doubles as a power station, since there’s a big power strip facing it. I’m usually charging batteries for the camera and my drill there.

This is the window that faces my backyard, in all its weedy glory. There’s a whole fenceline of honeysuckle about ten feet away. It smells lovely when the window is open.

To the left of the sewing machine is this run of drawers and storage. Somewhere in there, there’s a countertop. I originally thought this would be my work table, but for some reason, I ended up using the other countertop for that. See those lights up above? I’ve used them maybe once. This area is constantly full of projects in progress, and just isn’t a good place to get anything done.

So, down below, there are a bazillion drawers, none of which are labelled. Again, stupid. I sort of know what’s in most of them, but there are a few that just have junk leftover from my old workroom in them. The row of drawers with blue handles is a new addition, and they’re sort of empty right now.

Next to the drawers is a filing cabinet with four drawers that hold beeswax supplies, ribbons and fibers, beads, and oversized books.

Above the countertop is a whole wall of plastic storage. On the right side are CD holders with unmounted stamps in them, and tilt out drawers that hold inkpads. In the center are drawers with embellishments in them. On the left is a very small set of shallow shelves that hold a few mounted stamps.

Turning another corner, there’s a lateral filing cabinet that holds all my papers and cardstock in the top drawer, and foreign text, map pages and assorted other background type papers in the bottom. On top of the shelves are plastic drawers with supplies I need most often: paints, mediums, and ATC supplies like blank cards and sleeves. The wire grid cube holds my scraps. All this is right by my right arm when I’m working, which is very convenient.

OK, here’s my work table. Yes, there’s a table under there somewhere. I’d just finished this month’s issue of The Monthly Muse when I shot these photos, so it looks like a bomb went off. It’s usually just a little cleaner than this, with the center section of the table completely empty.

On the end of the table at the left are two rotating holders that I think were designed to hold kitchen utensils. One holds all my brushes, and the other holds hand tools and pens that I use most often.

The black pole in the center of the table is a tripod. If you’ve ever wondered how I do the step by step photos with two hands in them, this is how—a table mount tripod, and a camera with a time delay switch. Most of the time I work with that black pole right in front of me. I’ve learned to ignore it.

Beyond the table, you can see my great wall of shelving, with books on the left and storage bins on the right.

Below my work table is storage. Rolled papers and wood pieces stored in a shoe bin that’s laying on its back to the right, and wire shelves to the left. These shelves held lots of scrapbook paper until recently, when I gave it away to the girls in my local group. Right now, it’s sort of bare. I’m not sure what will live there in the future.

The floor below my work table. Yes, that’s an incredibly large trash can, because clearly I need one. I work standing rather than sitting—I just got into the habit in school, and never stopped. To keep my feet happy, I have the whole area under the table covered with fatigue mats.

That’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about my work area, but I’ll bet you’re relieved to know that you’re not the only one who creates a huge mess when you work!

• On an altered art list, someone asked a question about a term. An experienced member replied with a brief answer, and provided a link for more information. Someone replied to her message, telling her it wasn’t descriptive enough for new members, and could she elaborate. If the person sending this reply had taken the time to click the link provided, she would have found a wealth of information.
• Someone sent me a message through the contact form on my web site (which is clearly marked for business contacts only), asking me to provide a link to some PhotoShop brushes I mentioned in the description of one of my pieces. I ignored it, because the description names the web site where I found them. The same person emailed me in reply to last week’s newsletter, asking for the same information. I replied that the information I provided was sufficient to find the web site. She replied that the brushes weren’t there. I told her to read the message posted on the web site—the site owner has moved on, and is no longer offering the brushes.

In my world, there’s a time to ask questions, and a time to go off and find the information on your own. Both of these people could have answered their own questions, instead of expecting someone else to provide their answers. This is an ongoing problem for many experienced artists—that the bulk of the emails we receive are questions that can be easily answered by doing a quick search. Speaking for myself, I just don’t have the time or energy to be someone else’s personal search engine. I’m busy doing my own searching!

Perhaps the problem is that nobody has taught these folks how to search effectively. When I was at Michaels.com, there was an ongoing joke amongst the staff that I could find anything on the Internet in two minutes or less. I rarely do a search that doesn’t produce some sort of relevant result. It’s an aquired skill—the more you search, the easier it becomes to find information quickly.

So, in my ongoing effort to make basic things easier for the altered art world, here’s my crash course in searching for information. Since it’s on the forefront of my mind at the moment, let’s use one of the words that caused a problem this week: zettiology.

Let’s say I’m a member of an altered art group, and someone says the word zettiology in their email. I could email them back and demand that they explain the term, but I’m an impatient girl, and want the information right this very second. My first stop would be to search the group’s archives, to see if this term has been used in previous messages. All groups, message boards and email lists have some sort of archive. Look for an empty box, with a button next to it that says Search. Type in the word zettiology, hit the button, and see what comes up.

Well, let’s say that some messages using the word zettiology come up, but after clicking one or two, I don’t see a definition. That’s OK—I can use a search engine.

So, let’s talk about search engines. These are places that attempt to index all the information on the Internet. Google and Yahoo are probabaly the best known search engines. You all know the concept, right? You type in a word or two, hit the button, and a list of web sites containing that word appears. Sometimes, it’s a pretty hefty list. The key to effective searching is to type in enough words to create a narrow search, but not so many that you eliminate sites that might be helpful to you.

In my day to day work, I use Dogpile for my searching. Dogpile searches many search engines at once, so I can pull search results from Google, MSN Search, Yahoo! Search and Ask.com all at the same time. That means I’m sifting through a lot more information, but I’m often getting more relevant results.

So, here’s what happens when I type the word zettiology into Dogpile:

zettiology search results, in a new window

Go on, click it. Here’s what I see when I’m looking at the page:

There’s a site at zettiology.com. If I explore that, I’ll find journals from Tracy Moore, and a line of rubber stamps called Zettiology. Hmm, maybe this is what that person was talking about in her email. If I continue down the Dogpile list, I can see that there are a lot of people listing Zettiology stamps—and lots of them are into altered art. They all seem to be pointing toward Tracy’s site, so I’ll give that a read, and learn all about Zettiology.

Let’s try a harder one: the PhotoShop brushes I listed on my site, from 8nero.net.

This seems pretty simple. First stop is the address: 8nero.net. I don’t see any PhotoShop brushes there, but there’s some text in Italian: “lascio chiudere la Porta a chi resta. io me ne sto andando via”. I don’t speak a lot of Italian, so I need to translate this to see if there’s a clue. For translation, I use Babel Fish. Just copy the line of text into the translator, choose Italian to English, and click the button. Roughly translated: “I close the door to whoever remains. I’m going somewhere else”. Gee, sounds like whoever runs the site has closed up shop. Still, I might be able to find more information about those free PhotoShop brushes somewhere else. Let’s try Dogpile. If I type the words 8nero brushes into the search box, here’s what I get:

8nero brushes, in a new window

Go ahead, click it. I get an interesting list of links—the 8nero site, which we already know is closed. Then, a bunch of sites that have linked to 8nero at some point. I dug around, clicked a few links, and discovered that there’s no hidden door back to those brushes—all the entries have been removed. OK, no free brushes from 8nero, but I kept my eyes open for other sites that offer free brushes of the same quality. I found a directory I really liked:

Free Photoshop Brushes - Photoshop Brush DIRECTORY

So, with one search, I’ve established that 8nero really is closed, but also found a great resource for endless free PhotoShop brushes—all without emailing anyone.

One more? Let’s try a question I’m asked endlessly—where to find virgin bottle caps.

My search on this one is a little more complicated. First, since the people asking me this question have clearly seen them somewhere on my site, I’ll search my own site for the information. Yes, you can search here—look in the right column for the search box. I’ll type in bottle caps, and here’s what I get:

bottle caps search, in a new window

OK, some articles on bottle caps, but no listing of a source anywhere. Well, let’s try Dogpile:

bottle caps search on Dogpile, in a new window

Homebrew Heaven sounds like a place that would have blank bottle caps, doesn’t it? I clicked through their link, and found that they’re selling them in assorted colors, in one pound packages. Nice! (If Homebrew Heaven is not the first link that pops up in the Dogpile list, then do a search on Homebrew Heaven.)

That’s all you need to know to find your own information. Now, wasn’t that easy?

This is what my new workroom looked like when I started: bare floor, dirty walls, and a pile of supplies with which to work some magic. I had four general things to do to whip this room into shape:

1. Electrical work. The room now has a new, completely silent Hunter ceiling fan, controlled by a wall switch, so I can turn the lights on when I walk into the room instead of fumbling for the pull chain on the fan. I also swapped out nasty old outlets for nice new grounded ones. I considered moving the outlets up the wall, above the countertop, but opted to plug power strips in and anchor them where I needed them—my one concession to making the house resale friendly.

2. Paint. This room belonged to an eight year old before I bought the house, and it had little boy funk all over the walls—old poster tape residue, holes, dirt, and stuff I was too afraid to examine closely enough to identify. It was really nasty! This is a photo of the paint job halfway through, and you can see the difference between the old wall on the left, and the new paint job on the right. I painted walls and ceiling with two coats of Behr Ultra Pure White Interior Eggshell Enamel, which is the same white paint I’ve used elsewhere in the house. This paint is more of a cool white than a warm one, so it doesn’t yellow. It also increases the amount of light bouncing off the walls by quite a bit. I use eggshell to keep the glare down—I want light, not reflection. The room is now quite bright during the day without adding overhead light, which is a huge improvement over the light quality in my temporary quarters.

3. Flooring. I struggled with flooring choices for quite a while before opting for vinyl tile. I wanted something that was easy to clean and that would take a beating—but it also had to work well with my African slate tiles in the hallway, and the wood floors in the adjacent bedrooms. I found a vinyl tile that was an almost exact match for the slate in the hall—OK, the texture is printed on instead of dimensional, but the transition between the two isn’t too horrible. I also opted for brown vinyl baseboards in this room rather than the stained wood elsewhere in the house, simply for ease of cleaning. My one gripe so far is that the vinyl over concrete is much harder than the padded carpet on my old room, so I have to invest in some fatigue mats—I work standing up rather than sitting, and by the end of a long work day, my legs hurt from standing on the hard floor.

4. Cabinetry. This is a photo of the run of cabinets and countertop I’ve already installed. I purchased the black drawer unit at a local used office furniture store, and then built a base cabinet to hold all my little drawer units and support the countertop. I’m happy to say that the countertops were leftovers from my kitchen disaster, courtesy of Home Depot and Kraftmaid—they shipped an eight foot end panel four times before they finally got it right, and kept telling me to keep the wrong ones rather than ship them back. I’ve been storing these in the garage, knowing I could use them in my workroom.

The other side of the room isn’t finished yet, because I keep moving the furniture around. I decided to go ahead and move in the one side, and see if the space I’d designed was usable. The first day, I had pages in eight decos, two altered book layouts, a matchbox shrine, two vintage nude decos and an altered postcard on my list of things to do, which is an average work day for me. After walking back and forth between my new workroom and my computer in the next room about 100 times, I realized that putting the computer in its own room just isn’t going to work for me. My artwork has changed enough that it relies on having a computer handy, so I need all the toys in one room. Fortunately, I could move things around a little bit to make room for a computer desk, but it does mean that my sewing equipment will be banished to the second room. I think that’s a compromise I can live with.

So much for the things I don’t love so far—here are some improvements that are working really well for me:

I invested in a used two-drawer lateral file. I used to store all my smaller papers in a regular filing cabinet, so the stuff that was pushed into the back of each drawer got lost. Now, I can see everything! I’m still working on the perfect sorting system—right now, it’s by type of paper, but perhaps sorting by color might be better. Regardless, I can see what’s in each drawer, and grabbing the right paper went much faster.

In the yet-to-be-built run of cabinets is a set of shelves for my 12 x 12 papers. I never thought that my skill set would have to include building cabinetry, but to get exactly what I want, I’ll have to bite the bullet and pound some nails.

In my old room, I had a pile of rolled papers that kept falling over stuffed in a corner, and a bunch of handmade papers hanging in the closet. I would always forget about both, since they were away from the other papers, and also away from my work table. Now, I have rolls of paper right at the end of one run of cabinets. This is just a shoe cubby turned on its side, and so far, it’s working well. I’m a little worried about how much paint and embossing dust will end up on these papers, but I’ll deal with that issue later.

I really liked my ink storage system, but had outgrown the drawers in the old room. I found some nice tilt-front drawer units just like the ones in the cabinet I’d been using at Home Depot, and bought as many as I could fit on the wall. The tiny space between the drawers and my rubber stamp storage holds a row of embossing powders—now I can see all the pretty colors I have, instead of just staring at a sea of white lids in the top drawer.

I had ephemera all over the place—in drawers, in boxes in the hallway, on shelves in my bedroom. Now, I have a big cabinet with plastic storage bins. I invested in a labelling machine, so eventually, all these will have nice little labels telling me what’s in them.

I haven’t conquered the closet yet, but since the sewing machine is moving into the other room, I’m sending all the fabric there, too. That leaves the closet available for more ephemera storage! Be afraid…

That’s it so far. I’m hoping to finish up the other half of the room before the end of the summer.