Bye bye books; See you, 'zines

In case you're not aware of it yet, I'm pretty nuts about books. I went through this weekend and did a count of the books I own, something I should have done a while ago, and came up with about 380. I was a little surprised, actually, because it seemed like it should have been a higher number. I went through and sorted out a bunch of books to get rid of (some textbooks, some paperback fiction I'm not likely to read again, some children's books I'm not all that attached to) and then counted how many I was donating - 60, nearly one sixth of my library. That figure made me a little sad, but also very proud. I have an incredibly hard time getting rid of books and I'm finally thinning my collection so that I'll have an easier time of it when my husband and I move.

Here are a few tips for sorting through your library and seeing what you can pare down:

1 - Question Textbooks. I'm a pretty recent college grad and I wanted to keep a lot of my textbooks: they were expensive and shrugging them off seemed wrong. Well, I got a little bit lucky because I was a Lit major - there's no reason for me to give up my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare, even if it is a big, heavy textbook; I largely kept my Lit books, though several of the books on literary criticism and theory are taking a hike. I decided to keep my language texts and dictionaries because I'd like to be a better polyglot and those kinds of materials can be expensive. But there was absolutely no reason for me to hang onto things like civics books, algebra texts, or history books (though the Deadite in me knows that there's always a good reason to hang onto a chemistry text).

2 - Ditch Duplicates. Shakespeare is a good example here too. I own the Riverside Shakespeare, which is a comprehensive, annotated, and criticism-filled collection of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. I also own the Barnes and Noble Collected Works of Shakespeare. I also own Hamlet, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth as Arden editions. I also own Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing in a cheaper format. I also own Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear in a tragedy collection. By my count that is a total of 5 copies of Hamlet. I'll try to make due with two copies from now on, and let the rest go into a donation box. But maybe you're not as crazy as me - maybe you've got a Jane Austen collection and another copy of Emma that someone gave you as a gift. Maybe you've got a copy of Moby Dick from high school and another copy that you needed for college. What I'm saying is make sure you know what you own so that you can donate or trade duplicates.

3 - Soberly and seriously ask if you're ever going to read this particular book again. There are some books that I'm not going to read again, and if I do read them I'll just get them on my kindle and not bother storing them. I freaking hated Wuthering Heights. I'm not going to read it again, if I do read it it won't be for years, and I can get a free download of it as an e-book so there's no need for me to keep a book that I don't particularly like just because it will look good on my shelf. There are a LOT of people who buy books because they want to round out their libraries, and that is utter bullshit. No one is going to think less of you for not having a beautifully bound copy of The Iliad on your shelf, but I will TOTALLY judge you for having it and not reading it. Don't be a Gatsby, please actually read the books you own.

4 - Figure out if the book is in a readable condition. I don't exactly know why but I tend to end up with a lot of dissolving books. Some dissolved books would be difficult to replace (things that are out of print, like children's books from the 1950s for example) and so you may want to hang on to them, but other books will be pretty easy to replace. If you've got a Stephen King book that had the glue fall apart because it was left on a dashboard, replace it. It'll be less frustrating to buy a new copy than to keep the old copy collected in one place.

Getting rid of the books was NOTHING compared to cleaning up my magazine collection.

I'm a page designer; it's my number-one hobby and the best thing I've ever been paid for. I have worked for newspapers and magazines laying out pages, editing stories, taking photos, and writing articles, and the magazines have always been my favorites.

I spent 4 semesters as a magazine art director in college, then started a magazine with a bunch of my friends when I graduated. I was on my high school yearbook for 3 years and spent all of that time making the pages look as utterly badass as possible. Basically I've been designing magazines and magazine-style layouts for twelve years now.

All of that got started when I went to a yearbook camp and one of the instructors told me to check out Details (with my parents' permission - I was only fifteen and Details has some things that many might consider to be inappropriate reading material for a 15-year-old). So anyway, I looked up Details and holy shit you guys, that was a REALLY awesome magazine in the early 2000s. I ended up with a subscription and when I was tidying up I realized that I had ended up with about 100 200-page magazines full of men's fashions and tit-shots. I also ended up with two copies of my last two high school yearbooks, about 20 copies of each of my junior college magazines, a giant stack of newspapers full of cartoons I'd drawn and articles I'd written, a year's worth of Communication Arts Magazine that was my graphic design class textbook, two years' worth of print-resolution layouts on my laptop, and about 100 11x17 posters with magazine or chapbook covers on them. And on top of all of that I've got bits and pieces of my design box floating around - little pieces of great advertising or design or cool images that I hoarded over the years so that I could eventually gather them in one place and have a completely badass portfolio to pull design inspiration from.

And I had to get rid of almost all of it.

Book are heavy, everyone knows that. But magazines are heavier. When I looked around at the pile of magazine detritus that was hanging out, I felt like I was drowning in glossy pages and card stock. I ended up hauling well over a hundred pounds worth of magazines into a garbage can that was too heavy for me to pull out to the curb.

It was so, so hard to part with copies of the magazines and yearbooks that I'd had a part in, but I didn't need ten copies of the Fall 2008 issue of the FC Torch - I need, maybe, A copy. Not ten, and so somewhere between fifty and a hundred Torches ended up in a garbage can. I for sure don't need two copies of all of my high school yearbooks - they're huge and heavy and I still remember the bruises I got unloading those fuckers from the truck the day they were delivered; I don't need the same book making the same bruises when I box it up and move into a new life. So I gave a copy to my parents and have one set tucked away for me.

All but two of the Details (those with Daniel Radcliffe on the cover) got pitched, and as a compromise I let myself keep Communication Arts - but I've also been pitching my design box as I find chunks of it because CA acts like a nicely printed and bound version of a design box.

Here are some of the things I learned cleaning up my magazine collection, and some tips for paring down your own:

1 - You don't need the entire print run of a magazine. If you're saving all of the issues of a magazine because you like the style of photography they use, the type of features they write, or the layout of the pages, don't save every copy. Flip through (quickly) and isolate the best examples of whatever it is you like and keep only those issues.

2 - You don't need an entire magazine for a single article. If you've kept the whole January 1983 issue of Vogue for thirty years because it has one fantastic spread, consider cutting the spread out of the magazine and ditching the rest. A three-ring binder with sheet protectors will do a lot of good for you when it comes to cleaning up a collection - especially if you're saving magazines for things like recipes; why save 200 pages when you only need one? Snip out the recipe you want and build a cookbook instead of hanging on to a whole issue, and even if you like a lot of the recipes or articles in a magazine you probably don't want to keep all of the ads.

3 - Figure out what's important to you personally. One of the magazines I came across in my cleanup was the issue of Time that came out the week George Harrison died. Another one was a random surf magazine that inspired a lot of my design. I'm a big Beatles fan, but I don't need to hang onto that Time anymore; the surf magazine was more personally important to me even though Harrison's death was a really big deal to me when it happened.

4 - Desperate times call for drastic measures. Did I mention that I had over 100 issues of Details? Or that I had close to 200 Mad Magazines from three different decades? Or that I had at least 20 copies of each of my college magazines? And that I had at least 100 various Spin, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Communication Arts, Guitar World, Time, Newsweek, and New Yorker magazines? My magazine collection weighed almost twice as much as I do. I kept telling myself that some of these could be sold, some of them could be donated, and some of them could be kept. I told myself that for two years. I was delusional about them. So I had to make one very simple rule for myself: If my magazine collection is too heavy for me to pick up and carry all at once and all by myself, it is too big. That's all there is to it. I am the kind of person who gets obsessed with magazines and if I don't keep that impulse in check I'm going to get attached to and hoard magazines again until I'm once more up to my ears in unread back-issues.

Please, please, if you collect things, any kind of thing, take a good look at your collection and figure out whether you're in control of the collection or if it's in control of you. Don't give a bunch of space to something that starts to edge you out of your life - it's time for you to assert yourself over that collection if that starts to happen.

Anyway, after all the drama of books and magazines, this is a pretty good picture of what my cleanup is like right now - I've gone through and removed most of the immediately recognizable junk and it's now time to get through the major re-sort, the final step in my plan before actually packing.

Next up for discussion: tidying, organizing, and trashing/donating crafting supplies.

Bag Count so far:
Trash bags - 25
Donations - 18 bags, a boogie board, and a bed.
Memory Book - 6 1gal storage bags
Real Day Count - 13-15
40 Day Task Count - 27

Breaking up with old art supples

This is my second blog about 40 Bags in 40 days, the first can be found here.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I'm doing a massive cleanup project at my house and my parents' house. It's an interesting combination of nightmarish and really, really liberating. Nightmarish because I can't believe how bad I let things get (and no, I didn't take photos because it's too shameful), liberating because I feel less weighed down by what I own as I'm able to get rid of it.

 My room as it was last week had one organized area - the closet that I had emptied and sorted through when I needed to store wedding/bridal shower presents in 2011. Because I had moved out, my room sort of became a storage space - my dad cleaned out his office and boxed up his laserdisc collection and moved them into my room to get them out of his way. Unfortunately this largely blocked access to the areas of my room that I needed to get to. But all that meant was that I had to have a plan to attack the room. I couldn't just go in blind and try to force space - there was no space to force; I had to systemically remove crap from the room and then minimize the floorspace that the other stuff took before I could really get anything done. So first I sorted through the stuff on top of, under, and at the foot of my bed before disassembling the bed and standing it up on end. After that I lugged the containers full of laserdiscs into the corner and out of my way so that I had some good floorspace to use for sorting (as well as for the ever-growing trash bag).

The current state of the room isn't any more liveable than it was before, but it is much more useable and as more space clears up I'm able to clean and sort more quickly. The only reason this is a problem is that I've now reached my art desk and (as every single artist you know will tell you) it's REALLY hard to get rid of art supplies and old art.

Art is an expensive hobby; the cost of art supplies is actually part of what drove me to crafting - a single tube of acrylic paint costs twice as much as a skein of acrylic yarn and you never need just one tube of paint for a painting. The cost of supplies is a huge part of why it's hard to get rid of them - you know how much you paid for your paint or your paper or your canvas, and you might want to use it again someday, so it's hard to throw it away or donate it because it feels like you're just shoving money into a garbage bag.

If you happen to have a huge stash of art supplies that you need to clean up or move from one state to another, here are some tips for paring down your collection:

1) Figure out if the supplies are in good shape
Paint dries up and separates, markers dry out, brushes lose bristles, crayons and pastels break, ink and turpentine evaporate, nibs bend, paper warps and tears, and canvases get stained. Look at your supplies carefully and if anything is in less-than-perfect condition throw it out. You don't need a box of broken crayons or a canvas with a rip down the center, and you sure don't want to pat to move or store it.

2) Consider the cost of replacement versus the cost of moving
I'm not a marker person - I don't buy nice markers, I by shitty markers meant for kids. It is not reasonable for me to move a bunch of half-dried, cheap markers when I could simply replace them at my destination.

3) Ask yourself if it's difficult to store the supplies
Watercolors are fantastic - they're totally inert until you add water and they don't take up much space in the meantime. Acrylic is fantastic in the short term - if you're only storing it for a year or two it'll stay pretty safe and isn't likely to leak, but it is completely useless if it dries up; the same is true of oil paints. Crayons and oil pastels are super easy to store, chalk and charcoal are subject to breakage and create dust that gets all over everything. What do you want to live with in your storage or moving? I'm probably going to end up with watercolors, some acrylics, oil pastels, and pencils - everything else is too much trouble to pack and move.

4) Ask yourself if you still use it, or if it will still be good when you want to use it next
I haven't painted with oils in about fifteen years. My oil paints are probably completely destroyed by this point and need to be disposed of since I'm not likely to use them again. I haven't painted with watercolors in about five years, but when I do want to use them again they'll still be in good shape so they're worthwhile to keep.

5) Figure out if there's somebody who could use it better than you will
I found a big box of tempra paints, markers, colored pencils, and crayons. None of them are worthwhile for me to move, but my mom's classroom might get some use out of them: if you have cheap (NON-TOXIC) supplies that are easy to replace, see if there is a school or a child in your life who might have some fun with it. (Again, safe is the biggest issue here - you DO NOT give any supplies with cobalt, cadmium, or any other heavy metals to children, don't give them to adults without warnings about the toxicity and don't throw them in the trash - they are considered hazardous waste. Find someplace to safely dispose of them by searching This Website).

Getting rid of or consolidating art is another issue altogether - each piece is a concentrated memory, a footnote of a day or a year, heavy with meaning. A lot of what I've found so far has been abominably bad art and I'm not sure what to do with it but I do feel like I should document all of the pieces that I'm not going to keep, so I'm setting the art aside to photograph before I either discard it, donate it, or give it away.

But here's what I've figured out so far about keeping or paring down art:

1) For complete works on small sheets of paper, you may as well keep them. It's nice to have a record of your progress as an artist, and a piece of paper is easily stored. I have a large three-ring binder with sheet protectors in it - anything that is approximately the size of a sheet of letter paper will fit in it and a binder doesn't take up much space.

2) For small sketches, either add them to your memory book (as I mentioned in my last post, it's not as complicated as a scrapbook, more versatile than a photo album, and it's nice to have different sorts of things from page to page) or throw them away. DON'T keep duplicates - if you have a sketch of something and a finished piece, keep the finished piece and discard the sketch.

3) For larger pieces, decide whether or not they're good enough to keep. You can always take pictures of a large canvas and keep the photo instead of the original piece. If you don't want to bother storing, transporting, or displaying a large piece try to either sell it on Etsy or see if any of your friends or family would be interested in keeping it - there are several paintings that don't mean much to me or aren't a good representation of my skills, but do a lot to liven up my Mom's classroom. I will say that I'm a little torn on one - it's a nude self portrait that I don't feel comfortable donating and isn't very good, but I'd feel pretty bad about throwing it away. I may end up cutting the canvas away from the frame and simply rolling it up and hiding it somewhere.

4) For full sketchbooks, absolutely keep them. One more book on a shelf is no burden, and it's wonderful to pull out an old sketchbook and flip through to see where you were whenever that book was made (a few years ago one of my sketchbooks was destroyed by my dog, and even though I was able to take pictures of a lot of the drawings I still regret losing the whole of the book). For incomplete sketchbooks, it depends. If it's spiral bound or has tear-out pages, remove what you like and add it to a binder with sheet protectors and donate the remainder of the book. If it's a perfect-bound book, fill it the hell up! Get drawing, people.

5) For sculptures, look up shipping rates and custom crate costs - it's freaking hard to move sculptures and it can be really expensive. If you DO choose to keep your sculptures, try to have them moved professionally.

I get the feeling that going through the rest of my art crap is going to take me a pretty long time. I'll try to be ruthless but it's pretty hard - it feels like I'm walking away from a part of me.

After that I've got a giant pile to start sifting through, so here's hoping that it moves pretty quickly.

I'll keep you posted.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Bag Count so far:
Trash bags - 12
Donations - 10 bags, a boogie board, and a bed.
Memory Book - 4 1gal storage bags
Real Day Count - 8
40 Day Task Count - 10

I own way too much crap, time to fix that

I've been learning about Pinterest recently. It still seems like freaky voodoo magic to me most of the time, but I periodically find an interesting recipe or a nifty craft or an incredibly helpful household project. The best thing I've found so far in March has been the 40 bags in 40 days decluttering plan, so that's what I'm writing to tell you about.

Here's a little bit about me:

I live with my in-laws. When I got married in 2011 my husband and I thought that we'd be moving out of state within six months, so I didn't bother moving everything out of my parents' house and to my new home because I thought I'd have to do it all over again. Flash forward and three years later I'm still in the same spot and I still haven't packed up my room; I liked the ability to drive half a mile away and still have someplace set up for me. But the time has come, at long last, for me to get my shit in order. Even if we aren't moving soon I own too much junk and it's well past time to pare down so I'm systematically going through my room at my parents' house, as well as through all the spaces I occupy at my in-laws' house, and getting rid of everything I don't actually need. It's crazy how liberating it feels.

The 40 days plan is simple - the site I linked to has downloadable forms with blank spaces for each of the days. You write out what area you're going to attack and what your plan is for the stuff in that area in each of the blanks, then you go to each of those places and fill up bags of trash and donations. It's recommended that you only do one space per day, but I'm getting a lot done each day because I want to limit the amount of time I'm spending turning my parents' house into a landfill.

So far I've learned a lot about myself and about what makes for an effective decluttering attempt, so here are some tips for you:

1 - MAKE A PLAN: Sit down and think out a reasonable plan of attack when you ARE NOT looking at the room you're decluttering. My plan for my bedroom started at the foot of the bed, moved to the top of the bed, then under the bed, then to disassembling the bed and getting it out of the way. I think if I'd actually been standing in my room, taking in the magnitude of the mess that I was looking at, I never would have gotten past the foot of the bed. Instead I stuck to my plan and the bed is disassembled and taking up only 25% of the floor space it was when I started (it's probably getting tossed at the end of the project.)

2 - SORT SMART: One of the problems that I tend to have when I'm cleaning is that I'll find myself getting wrapped up in one of the books that I find, or digging around for an earring to make a set with the one that I've just found. Not this time. I'm traveling through my junk quickly and ruthlessly with several bags in tow. I have a bag for trash, a bag for Goodwill donations, a box for things that I'm keeping, and a small plastic bag for memorabilia. Anything I'm keeping can be sorted out later so I don't worry about it in the moment - just get things out of sight and out of mind so that you can move on to the next item. When one of your bags for donations or trash gets full take it out of the room you're working in and get a new one. When your box for "to keep" gets full put it somewhere out of the way and get a new one.

3 - MAKE A MEMORY BOOK: This is nothing so complicated as a scrapbook, nor anything as simple as a photo album. This is a disorganized jumble of small stuff that makes up a big part of your personality. I had started making my memory book about five years ago and then lost it in the junk of my room. Thankfully it was one of the first things that I found when I started tidying up. Mine is full of matchbooks and business cards and drawings I made and newspaper clippings and pogs and birthday cards and all manner of things. Anything that I find that is relatively flat and has some kind of sentimental meaning for me gets slapped on a page with other things that have meaning for me. You don't need to save the whole novelty tie someone gave you as a gag gift, you only need to save a swatch of the fabric. You don't need a dedicated box for movie tickets, you can scatter them among your other memories. I highly recommend the "magnetic page" type photo albums for this - they're large enough for almost any photo or card size, they don't require any glue or tape or photo corners, they take an enormous amount of abuse, they hold a tremendous amount of stuff, and they're cheap as hell. You can find them for under fifteen dollars at Amazon.Com. I've reduced entire boxes of stuff to a single gallon-size ziplock bag for my memory book, then reduced that ziplock bag to twenty pages in my book. It's seriously one of the best space savers I've ever found.

Things that I've learned about myself:

1 - I draw on everything. In some ways this is awesome, because I'm looking through all of these old notebooks and I get to go "oh yeah, I am a good artist" every few minutes. In other ways it's terrible, because I want to save all of this crap. Lots of stuff is getting cut up and put in my memory book so I don't drown under the sheer volume of sketches.

2 - I took photos of everything. I've found ten envelopes of photos, two canisters of negatives, and five photo albums and I'm only six days into my cleanup. Once again, more stuff for the memory book.

3 - I was lucky to make it to adulthood. A lot of the stuff that I'm finding suggests that I was a little shit until I was at least eighteen or nineteen years old. I'm pretty sure my parents thought about strangling me on a regular basis and, while I'm glad they didn't, I don't blame them.

4 - I have a bizarre obsession with rocks. I don't know where most of these rocks came from, but I've found at least twenty rocks of various sizes, shapes, and textures. I know I still periodically pick up and pocket rocks, I have no idea why. Most of these have been put out in the garden as I come across them, but I'm still having a hard time tossing some of them away, which is stupid because they're just rocks. 

5 - About 50% of what I own is books. 50% of the rest of the stuff is notebooks. 50% of the stuff after that is rocks. I made a pile of books to donate to my mom's classroom and have classified two boxes as "to keep" but so far I've found about 100 books and I'm not even close to the side of my room where the bookshelves are. I'm probably going to have to have a serious book-sort at the end of this project, and see if I can find a used bookstore where I can do some sort of trade.

I'll post photos as I go along, and at the end of the project I'll do a photo of my truckbed loaded up with all of my donations.

Bag Count so far:
Trash bags - 7
Donations - 6 bags, a boogie board, and a bed.
Memory Book - 2 1gal storage bags

Cheers,
     - Alli