You guys know that I'm a creative person. I delve in-depth into making vintage style toys, creating print fabrics, making my own pattern for sewing, knitting out of my imagination, and of course I was trained as a painter, a visual artist. I love colors, I really like old things, the sterile white minimalist cube thing is so not for me. Except the time when I was pregnant and nauseous and everything felt icky, I dreamed of living in a sterile white cube. But I digress.
I have struggled with my creativity as opposed to my desire and need for simplicity and minimalism, and also my faith. How do I create art for the lory of God? I know I'm supposed to do everything for his glory. How is me making art helping his Kingdom? Isn't it just useless? Yet I enjoyed looking at art myself, and I enjoyed well crafted furniture and thoughtfully made, functional kitchen ware, things that made my life easier, or more beautiful somehow.
I recently had a breakthrough in the second dilemma, of how do I create art for the glory of God? I kept thinking.. everything you do, do it as unto the Lord. And I suddenly had the desire to paint pictures of people living for God. And they could be doing anything - everything to His glory. And suddenly the ideas are endless, and I notice that my painting style has changed from hectic to slow and peaceful. I take longer to finish a painting, but I don't exhaust myself so that I get totally put off by the idea of starting a new one.
The other issue, is of course that most creative efforts require materials. Supplies of all kinds, and sometimes a significant amount of space. Even when I was creating fabric prints, I still used physical paintings and drawings for most of them. Our last few moves have been done with one van. Sometimes it was a small van, sometimes large. We had 20-40 moving boxes rented. I'v heard of people with the same size family moving with 200 boxes and two trips with a large truck. So ever since I had a lightbulb moment, the year my daughter was born in 2008, while reading Karen Kingston's Clear your clutter with feng shui, we have been quite okay. But one thing I struggled with was fabrics - and recently mostly because I quit my company's own shop and all the leftovers came to live in my house. I had a big sale and I donated lots of fabrics, but it seems like they never end! But it was not only those fabrics, as I realized yesterday while going through them. I had many fabrics that I had bought without a specific project that I was going to use them for. Some of them had moved twice with me. During this time, my daughter grew from a child to a teenager and her dressing style and color preferences changed. And MY dressing style has changed. I had lots of colorful jerseys that I had no use for, if I was going to be honest.
So now I have packed up five large bags of fabrics that are going to leave the house and I'm still going to take another look. I cleared a big space in the upstairs room that houses my sewing machine and ironing board, and that can now be used to store my empty canvases, which are actually being used. Or, as it now seems, I may actually be able to get rid of this huge, very lovely antique cabinet that is used for storage in the living room, and I could store my extra canvases here, at least most of them, and I may have room for a guest bed upstairs! I would like that. I recently had a friend stay over a night and I gave my bed for her to use, because we have no proper guest bed. DD's friends sleep on the floor on a mattress that is usually on top of her mattress. I borrowed that one and slept in the middle of the sewing room floor when I had an overnight guest.
In case you were wondering, this house is only 71 m2/ 756 square feet, or 89 m2 / 958 square feet if you count the un-heated foyer and the low spaces under the ceiling. In Finland, the official count get cut off at 160 cm or 5'3" height. As far as rooms, there is the cold foyer which gets freezing in the winter, but it has our chest freezer, and it has a low cabinet in front of the window that stores shoes and some things like a extension cable roll and a hammock. It also has a small bench that opens up and I store larger tools there.
The entrance hall has doors on every side and only has a coat rack / shelf for hats and scarves, and a large basket where DD keeps her hats, mittens, scarves, and usually drops her jacket there too. Our vacuum cleaner is currently there too. Then there is kitchen, which has a large farmhouse table and four chairs currently. Only two fit on each side, because the legs are a bit towards the center instead of at the corners, and our chairs are 60 cm wide, but we like the comfy chairs too much to change them. I would rather get a new (old) table. There is an extra chair beside an antique cabinet that came from my childhood home and used to be in mom's childhood home. My bedroom is officially an alcove, as it is so small. It has a window and door to the entrance hall, and open doorway to the living room. It has my bed and one antique cabinet, and since it doesn't fit a bedside table, I put a small rattan shelf on the wall to function as a night stand.
The living room then, of boy. A bookshelf, two large and two small easy chairs /arm chairs, a large and small antique cabinet, my vintage computer desk and chair, my easel and chair and a small chest of drawer for paints and to double as my palette, and in front of one window a narrow sideboard, so that my monstera can get enough light. And there is the fireplace, and each wall has either window or a doorway.
DD's room is also a bit difficult to decorate due to the low sloped ceiling, but she has a mattress on the floor as bed, which is not optional, but the only way to get a bed up the narrow stairs if to get something that can be assembled in place, and we haven't gotten around to deciding what kind of bed would be best. She also has a secondhand Ikea Leksvik desk, desk chair that her dad bought which is an expensive Herman Miller, a low easy chair, a small low Ikea bookshelf and a low stack of drawers from Muji.
The second, or actually first upstairs room is a walk-through, and has a small antique desk for sewing and a chair. The desk is actually a bit low, and I have noticed my back getting sore when I sew in front of it. It also has an old cabinet which was first bought for DD but she didn't like. The doors and drawers don't open and close properly and the shelving on top was not a good fit for books. It just fits under the low ceiling and so I kept it for my own sewing stuff. In the winter the drawers close a bit easier when the wood contracts.. It's not perfect for works for now and as I don't need to open and close it daily, I can't be bothered to get rid of it and find a new one right now. I also have an antique ironing board I re-covered. The laundry / dressing room that used to be an indoor sauna, has the washing machine, a rack and a vintage cabinet to store both of our clothes and personal care products.
All in all, everything else is spacious and under control, but the fabrics have taken up an unreasonable amount of space, which became unsustainable after I started painting actively again. Preferably the house had one extra room, or the upstairs room could be either my bedroom (it can't because DD goes through kit to her own room) or painting studio (it's too low, and I really prefer to paint downstairs anyway).
But it is what it is, and as a long time simplifier I know that the best solution is to get rid of stuff. The stuff I don't use or need, but I'm keeping either because I spent a lot of money on it, or I think I might use it sometime in the future, though I haven't used it in many years.
In order to get rid of the large cabinet, I really just need to cull stuff from it, and everywhere else so that the stuff there that I want to keep, fits elsewhere. It is a general storage mesh mash, it has some art supplies there, a memory box, office supplies and important papers, planned gifts, some too small clothes or maybe-donatables, a couple of preparedness items like a water purifier, a bag of extra hygiene products like DD's toothpaste that I buy in bulk, and it also had an unused small Fiskars axe I got when I already had the same exact one.. oh and my things for winding yarn to a ball.. It has been like a big catch-all! (I did decide to give away my last spinning wool and spindle as I have not used them in many, many years. I sold my spinning wheel and carder over ten years ago but held on to just bit of the supplies.. just in case.. they fit in my allotted knitting supply space.. alas, I do not use them. If I were to ever spin again, I would want to do it with a wheel anyway.
In addition to the obvious craft stuff that I need to cull, I identified a few other things I needed to go through, and this is still in process:
-Sadly, the larger one of my monstera plants. It was growing all over the place in the living room and I just had no other space to put it either. I donated it to a good new home yesterday.
-Dishes and kitchenware
-Tools and renovation supplies now that the renovation is done (a couple of small things I still should do, and I do have to keep basic tools)
-Clothing, though there is not much excess there. Mostly T-shirts I made form my own fabrics but haven't worn now in a long time. I got tired of the prints and also shifted to wearing mostly woven fabrics. Worn out ones were cut into painting rags, also useful for cleaning out cat puke.
-Also any personal care products and food stuffs that have expired and I know we are not going to use. I'm having a Crohn's disease flare-up and there is a bunch of cereal that is just sitting there taking space, I can't eat it and DD just eats one kind of cereal now. I'm also thinking that I don't have to keep THAT much dry fruit, nuts, rice and tomato sauce at home, and I could use some of that space to store glass bottles and jars I use for homemade rhubarb juice and apple puree and such. I also maybe have too many of the glass jars and could get rid of some. They do work for freezing as well though and I have used them to freeze soup and sauce as well as fruit and berry puree.
Anyway, an excess of supplies actually often stifles creativity. For me, it's the exhaustive amount of choices that makes my eyes glaze and my brain freeze, as well as a guilty feeling of having so much stuff that I should be using - which creates pressure which makes me run from the whole thing!
I find myself enjoying a sewing project much more when it is planned and intentional, not " I really should make sometime out of this, oh well, I guess I can make a tunic out of it" - and the tunic ends up being not loved, not worn, so I was essentially just transforming supply clutter into clothing clutter.
Restricting myself on purpose gives me boundaries, which in fact give me freedom. The possibilities lie in my mind, not in the huge hoard of supplies, which just end up feeling like a burden.
It has happened that I get excited about a small project, order the supplies, and it takes so long to get them that I'm over the whole thing before they ever arrive! In that case, I just need to move on. Find a new user for the supplies. Remember to next time think a little bit longer and harder whether this is really worth it, really something I want to do and spend money and time and space on. Sometimes I do a small project or learn a new skill ( hello porcelain painting) but don't love it, so I don't have to continue doing it, even if I do have supplies left. I could have signed top for another year of porcelain painting (can't do that at home because it needs the high heating ceramics oven) but then I would have spent more money on something I already realized I didn't enjoy that much, and I didn't want to have those painted items around. I'm not sure the dishes are safe for everyday use, as the color is on top of the glaze! Initially I took the course because I wanted to decorate some white zellige tiles for my kitchen, but I changed my mind and decided to just install white ones, if anything.
As far as the money spent, there are two ways to handle it. Either sell try to sell the stuff, and get some of the money back, but get to work for it too, or donate it and just think about being able to donate money too, so why not the stuff? Try to find a good place to donate, if you don't have friends who want and need it. Or, if you already gave so many fabrics to your friends who sew and wanted them, that they have no more room in their storage. I don't want to create a clutter problem to others, either. When I give something to a friend, I always tell they are free to share it to others too, or if they end up not needing it, to donate it to someone else.
With canvases, I order mine from abroad as I want ones primed for pool paints, or just sized and I will prime them myself, and this kind is not really available here. I used to make mine from scratch but that takes too much time and space and it's messy to cook your own primer! So I gave it up and spend a bit more on ready or half-ready canvases. I can't paint of cheap ones, or use cheap paints, it just takes away from the intentionality and wish to do everything well and as unto the Lord!
So, what do I store in the cabinet in my bedroom? Well, you will have to stay tuned for another episode of Cat's Meow, because this post is getting long and rambling, and that is whole (a bit embarrassing) story on its own!
Oh, and should you want to check it out, my artist website is vappurechardt.com :)
I do sell my paintings and ship the all over the world, and I do take commissions. Ask for availability if interested!
