Declutter is a dirty word

Or maybe clutter is the more filthy, I can’t make up my mind. I like clutter, the Sir John Soane Museum is one of my favourite places,  and it’s hard to get more cluttered than that – albeit beautifully curated  clutter.

My studio, however,  is cluttered on an altogether different level. I use a lot of recycled / repurposed items and in order to have them available I have to collect and keep them when I see them. It has recently occurred to me that another word for this is ‘hoarding’.  So today I had a bit of a tidy up. Am feeling virtuous, having whittled down the bottle top collection to one jar full, the (cleaned, obv.) empty milk bottles to just a few entirely necessary ones, and concatenated a lot of disparate items into boxes with their relatives. All the in-progress dolls are in one box and their potential hair is in another. The paints, pencils and inks have a drawer to themselves, the papers are in a box, the stencils and general crafty stuff is in a drawer, the dolls are on the walls (looks spooky, but it works for me), the sewing machines are back on shelves and the cottons and ribbons have been mounted on to the walls. Feeling smug now and I fully expect this to last right up until the point I next go in there to do dome actual work, and destroy all the organisationin about five minutes…

Before

After

Whaddaya mean? I can see the difference!