Recording the Disaster

So the shelves fell down, all was chaos, the chaos began to assume some semblance of order...

Somewhere in amongst all that mess, I found my missing scrap-mojo!  Last Sunday I made two pages and last night I made the third page, that had been planned for the Sunday crop (I ran out of time - always happens).

My page to record the Event!

I just had to call it this...

The big photo lifts up, to reveal two little pictures beneath...

... and under that mini-book, there is a great space, where I will attach the story of my Disaster, when I have typed it out and printed it (still thinking how best to do this - paper, font etc).

I deliberately kept the design simple, having only the one large photo on the front and keeping the journalling out of sight too.  I wanted the layout to have impact, so the strong black ribbed cardstock and striped Basic Grey scrap paper were ideal.  The grey-blue patterned paper is just great with these other two papers - so glad I still had some of it left.

Another page to cover some of the scary holes on the wall above my desk!

Oh, and I finished the new Wedding Guest Book for my shop:

A Wedding Guest Album, with 40 pages of white cartridge paper; covers in Birds and Flowers design paper, with peach lined covers and peach art paper section wraps.  10-needle Coptic Binding, in Ivory and Dark Moss Green hand-waxed linen thread.

Progress is being made! I'm off to start the next Book!

A Definite Improvement!

The Studio is back in operation - yippee!  It is so much better than the huge heap of chaos from last week.  DH kindly helped me to tidy the worst of the mess on Saturday and I spent some of yesterday afternoon and this morning getting it a bit straighter and tidying the desk.

It's by no means done yet - the new storage solution needs to be organised and it could definitely do with seeing a vacuum cleaner (DH will carry it upstairs for me!!), but it's a Definite Improvement.

The boxes that were on the shelves are now stacked neatly against the back wall. At least I can now get to my stuff - and as I had already labelled them, I can see which box I need straight away - woo-hoo!

The wall above the desk still looks scary... huge holes to be filled and painted over...

... but the desk is pretty tidy now and I can work at it.

I got out that photo album project today, to see what I could do with it.  Two of the 12 pages were ruined, but the others are fine. The cover boards are undamaged and the interleaves are fine. The sheet of paper I was going to use for the cover did have a hole in it, so I will use it for a smaller project - it wasn't going to look right anyway, as the design didn't line up as I wanted.  I now have another plan for that book and this afternoon I bought another sheet of card to replace the spoiled pages. I may even give it extra pages!!

Then I started on another book, which is currently on my desk, under weights, all cut and ready to sew tomorrow.  It will be similar to this, which I recently sold in my Etsy shop:

This is the same paper that I was going to use for the photograph album, but the covers are smaller, so the design lines up really well.  The binding will be slightly different, but overall it's a very similar book. I'm excited about it, as the original was really lovely - I hope this one will be too!

So, my desk is back in use and I'm coping okay without my extra work table.  I didn't like the blank wall with holes that is now above my desk, so I decorated it up a bit:

Yippee!

A Sunday of Scrapping

Our Scrap Club met yesterday, for the regular monthly crop.  I hadn't managed to go to the last two, so hadn't seen the other ladies since before Christmas.  It was so nice to "be back" and see familiar, friendly faces (oh and the biscuits weren't bad either!).

I manged two pages yesterday - a big achievement for me, considering the mess things have been in recently.  It was really very nice to be away from the chaos and just relax!

A memento of my lovely surprise on Friday!

This seemed like an appropriate title, seeing as that is where the parcel came from and also the sweets are "totally USA", since you can't easily buy them here!

I used the photos I took while I was admiring my newly-opened parcel; the tags Deb made for the little parcels were so nice that I added these to the page, along with bows made from some of the ribbon she used. 

I used a few Valentines Day rubber stamps, with pink, red and brown inks, to give the page a bit more interest; I had a great bit of scrapbook paper about friends, so a piece of this, with some nice red art paper, made a good mat for the photos. I left a pocket behind the red paper, then added a little bit of ribbon to the lovely note-card that Deb had put in with my parcel.  I can keep the card and some journalling in this little pocket.  Such a nice way to remember a special present from such a special person!

A page about how J. got his black eye!

I thought the heading just about summed up the Lesson that he learned...

I used some brown felt letters for the word "Cuddles" - quite appropriate I think! The background paper was a great piece of shaped kraft paper I've had for ages; I used some matching kraft embellishments, along with some cute stickers and some arrows to draw attention to the "main attraction", since it's not so obvious at first!

Hugs and Hershey's

Oh the excitement!  There I was, about to sit down to my lunch today, when the doorbell rang.  Who could that be?  The postlady... with this:

A Small White Box... from U.S.A.

It had the sender's name on the other side, a certain nice blog friend... What could be inside?

 

Yummy! Sweeties! And American Sweeties at that.  We don't have these here (or not in my little provincial County Town anyway). 

Also This - she even remembered my response to a post with a recipe for Cornbread, where I said I'd often wondered what it was like and would like to try some.  My very own Cornmeal; and a beautifully written recipe so I can try it for myself. 

How Exciting!! So beautifully packaged too, with ribbons and pretty labels.  How lucky am I? 

I had to have a Tasting Session:

Oooh... quite sharp and rather Hot flavoured! Wasn't expecting that - I thought they were Sweeties... but actually they're quite nice, once you get over the shock. 

Six different wrappers... I wonder if there are six different kinds? 

This one was white chocolate and very creamy - nom, nom, nom... sticky...

And these are very sweet, slightly rough in texture and you have to suck them lots!  Nice...

So, resisting the temptation to scoff the lot all at once, I put the packets back together, so I could show them to DS when he comes in from school.  No doubt, he'll be willing to sample some himself.  I wonder what he will think of these?

And I must say a huge Thank You to Deb! 

Thank you Deb, you really do Rock!

Aftermath...

Dear Readers,  when we last heard from our heroine, she had suffered a bit of a disaster:

What used to be the shelves in my Studio...

Having removed the remaining shelf fittings and picked up the stuff that was thrown onto the floor, we had been left with this:

A load of stuff all over the desk and a precarious work table and "supporting" metal strips...

... piles of stuff all over the floor...

... boxes piled up in the hallway and shelf-boards leaning on the bookcase.

That was Sunday. 

* * *

Thursday

Yesterday afternoon I started work to clear and re-arrange the studio, so we could replace the lost shelving and put all the stuff away properly.  I carried on today and  DH helped me to take down the work table, that was clipped to the metal rails on the wall.  We took the bent and useless metal bits down too.

This is what it now looks like:

Sigh...

Sigh again.... I'm trying to "Keep Calm", but I must admit that "Eat Cake" is the best advice I've had all week...

I have taken the stuff off the three remaining wall shelves, so I could re-arrange them, to hold the more important stuff.  However, they are not supported by a bracket at the wall end.  So, the far end of each shelf is not properly supported - we need to put another support up in the corner.  I can only put very light things on the corner end of the shelves and not-very-heavy stuff everywhere else.  

Sigh...

Some progress has been made - but not very obvious.  I have measured and thought, consulted with DH and decided to buy an 80cm wide bookcase from Ikea, which I will put in the gap at the end of my desk, where my worktable was.  See the white drawer unit in the photo? The bookcase will go behind that, against the wall.  It is 28cm deep and the drawers (and worktable top) are 60cm deep.  

Still with me?  Hmm... So.... I can buy another white drawer unit too, plus a tall 20cm wide cd/dvd unit, to match the bookcase, which will make the whole bookcase-wall-thing 100cm - same width as the worktable.  I can use the drawer units to support the table top, making a pedestal desk (yay!). 

If it is placed right in front of the bookcase, the whole thing will be 88cm deep, meaning it will stand out 8cm (about 3.5")  from the edge of the big desk; but as it's by the window, we think that will work ok.  I won't be able to alter the height of my table any more - but then, I never did do that anyway... and the part of the bookcase behind the drawers will be difficult to access (the dvd shelves will be totally buried), but I'll still have 125 x 100 cm of shelves to use for storage, plus a work table again (and another set of drawers - yay!).

Hmm.... So that's all very nice... But we still have the problem of the Studio Needing to be Tidied Up First.

These are two of my current Bookbinding projects...

and this is my desk, where I'm supposed to be making the books...  Sigh...

...and the rest of the room, that I'm trying to tidy up...

bigger sigh...

So, overall, I am feeling rather overwhelmed by all the mess, clutter and confusion.  I have filled half a rubbish bag and most of a recycling bag, yet hardly seem to have made any difference.  There is just stuff Everywhere.  I was trying to "put away" the things on my desk, only there is no "Away" just now.  I want to clear the messy side of the room, so I have a large and clear patch of floor - where we can build a new bookcase, then put the boxes of stuff while I re-organise the room...

It got to the point where I couldn't do any more.  I just don't seem to be able to work out where to start or what to do.  

The stuff that fell down from the wall didn't bury me - yet I somehow feel that, really, it did...