Apparently I can’t resist a photo project where color is the focus. For the LOVE of COLOR week just ended, and I have had so very much fun looking for the brightest colors (spring green, fuchsia, orange, yellow, royal blue, purple, and bright red). Spring seems to finally be close, and this week of super saturated, cheery colors has gotten my mind even more primed for some springtimey goodness.
During that last crazy snowstorm, I spent a lot of time bouncing off the walls of my apartment. I had a Wednesday evening to myself, then all of Thursday and most of Friday off thanks to the snow. The problem was that I ran out of things to do. I’m not currently working on any crafts, I painted my nails the first night, and my dvr was mostly empty by Thursday. So Thursday evening I sat and stared at my craft bookcase and pondered how I could organize it more efficiently. I mean, it wasn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel, but organizing soothes me in a way that I couldn’t possibly explain without sounding like a nutcase.
After collecting the boxes and baskets and organizey things from Target, Staples, and the Container Store, I finally have it all set up exactly how I imagined. And I’m pretty psyched about how it turned out. Here are the before and after shots:
This is where it all started: the binder with clear protective sheets. Each sheet holds either scraps of paper organized by color or sheets of labels. Geeky? Perhaps. More efficient than a giant pile of mismatched paper? Totally.
I wanted a better way to organize the notecard sets, index cards, old daytimer pages, and other similarly-sized stacks of blank paper I’ve been stockpiling. So I got a photo box and then some 5×8 index card divider tabs. Of course, if I had gone to Staples first I might have bought an index card box and then I wouldn’t have needed to cut those 5×8 dividers to fit into the photo box, but I stand by my choice because I doubt the index card box would have been hot pink. I also put my shipping tags and the deck of cards I use for crafts in the back to keep the box orderly.
My full-sized 12×12 scrapbook paper posed one of the bigger dilemmas as I took on this project, because I really wanted a nice box to store it all. I used to just keep it in a giant pile on one of the shelves. The Container Store sells these boxes meant for legal sized documents, and the short side is 12 1/4″ wide. Which fits most scrapbook paper but not all, because some of the sheets have this little strip for the barcode and brand information. But it’s good enough. My nitpicking has a limit, people. So this box stores the bigger sheets of paper, my clipboard, some stray felt, my graph paper pad, and the box of transparency sheets I took from the library because they were going to throw it away.
This plastic bin holds the supplies that don’t fit the other categories: paint, binder rings, safety pins, and a couple extra things I’ve bought for crafts that I still haven’t gotten to. These would be really good to buy in bulk, because of how nicely they stack. And how crazy cheap they were compared to most of the bins and boxes at the Container Store.
Last of all, I wanted a smaller box that would hold the supplies I use most frequently: the tape, glue, glue sticks, stamps, and punches and corner-rounders. And I wanted it to be prettier than that clear plastic bin. I originally ordered one from the Container Store, but my inability to visualize measurements backfired, because that original bin was GIGANTIC. So I sent it back and found this one at Target, which I somehow missed on the previous trip. It’s perfect.
All in all, this was a really satisfying project on a small enough scale that I could tackle it very easily. Just don’t ask what my closets look like, and instead enjoy my overly organized ridiculousness for now.
When I wrote my 28 To Do List last summer, #11 was to watch some of those movies everyone thinks I should have seen, but I haven’t. There are a lot of important cinematic classics that I’m embarrassed never to have seen. Like The Godfather. Or Terminator 2. Or most of the classic baseball movies. But it’s not like I have a list of movies that fit this criteria, it’s more that I hate that feeling when someone can’t believe I haven’t seen something so ubiquitous. So this list item has been knocking around in my head, without a good solution. But my friends, baseball season is drawing near, and what better time than now to start an extended marathon of the classic baseball movies? (Prior to this project I had seen Major League once, Bull Durham once, A League of Their Own a bunch of times, and Rookie of the Year a million, billion times. Also frequently watched: The Sandlot. And Angels in the Outfield.)
So I consulted my brother and my boyfriend to make sure the list of movies was complete. We left out most of the children’s movies (see above: I’ve seen them a million times). The ones we included were ones John or Dan loved, or ones that were important to the baseball movie genre. Or simply ones I really need to have seen, just for the sake of completeness. We aren’t planning to watch these in a standard marathon, but over the course of the weekends in March, leading up to opening day. Maybe this will be a new tradition!
We started off with The Natural. I loved it. And I think I have a crush on Robert Redford now. This one had all of the best things non-comedy baseball movies should: solid montages, a spitfire manager, someone trying to take down the team, and best of all, old timey uniforms. Dan and I really like old timey baseball. It has a certain something modern baseball just can’t get at. I think, though, that this one I’m definitely going to need to watch again. The problem with watching a movie that you know is classic and well-regarded is that you’re on pins and needles waiting for something bad to happen. This happened when I finally saw the Shawshank Redemption three years ago, too. I was waiting for something horrible and sad and heartbreaking to happen at the end; to end up sobbing. It’s hard to relax and enjoy a movie with that in the back of your mind. But nothing as catastrophic as I feared happened in The Natural, and the scenes on the field at the end are pure baseball magic. Classic through and through.
Next up was Field of Dreams. I’m no stranger to the creepy whisper-shouted If you build it, he will come. I didn’t expect that the building of the baseball diamond in the cornfield would be finished so early in the movie, and that a larger spirit-quest would ensue, with further mysteriously whispered and unintelligible instructions. Before I say anything else, I do want to point out that I’m obviously approaching all of these movies with the open mind of a true baseball fan. But Field of Dreams? It was a little MUCH, wasn’t it? It was all Important Swell of Music and Long Pauses Before Meaningful Moments. It felt like they were bashing me over the head with these Meaningful Baseball Moments, rather than just letting the moments develop in a meaningful way just because it’s a good story that pulls your heartstrings. (See: The Natural). Maybe it was because the story is about life and nostalgia and this one man’s journey, rather than about the game of baseball… But I could do without this one. I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t know if this needs to be added to my personal rotation or anything. Of course, Dan’s brother Dave yelled at me for saying all of this. “This is one of the few guy movies with non-cheesy emotion! How can you mock it?!” Ooops.
This is going to be such a fun project.
This week’s color for the sixty four colors project was timberwolf, a gray crayon that I definitely don’t remember from my many childhood days spent coloring. After looking at the super fun Crayola timeline, I discovered that timberwolf was added in 1993. So even though that may have been still firmly in my coloring heydays, I’m almost positive that my little plastic briefcase of 96 crayons had been mine for quite some time. AKA, I didn’t need new crayons after 1993 and probably never had a timberwolf one.
Anyway! It’s a very pale gray, and it felt like the whole world was timberwolf this past week. So it was fitting as we wind down the end of winter.
Macaroni and cheese was an interesting color this week for sixty-four colors. It’s a very warm yellowy orange. And a lot of my hesitance was more about the fact that this color definitely didn’t exist when I was a kid. But I love that they let kids vote on the names for the new colors, and I’m sure as a kid this would have been groundbreaking stuff. In the end, I only found one new shot for this color last week, but I found some pretty good matches in the archives (and from that trip to the beach on Presidents Day!).
(Confessions One) (Confessions Two)
Blue violet is one of my favorite crayons. It’s purple enough to be pretty, but blue enough to not be quite so, well, PURPLE. It was harder to find in real life, perhaps because I wanted to get it perfect. And trust me, these two photos from the Gap are not perfect, but in real life, they were precisely blue violet. And then you’ve got some flowers because purple flowers are pretty nice.
As I finished the last rows on the scarf I made for Dan for Christmas, I realized with a jolt that I haven’t made a scarf for MYSELF in a very, very long time. I used to crochet scarves a lot. Because crochet is so mindnumbingly relaxing. And because while I’m not the word’s best crocheter, I sure have mastered the long, narrow rectangle. Anyway. I looked back in the archives and discovered that I was right, and I haven’t made myself a scarf in four years. (Unless you count the only thing I ever made from the Happy Hooker book, which I don’t, not really.)
So it was past time to make myself a scarf. I decided it should be aqua and red, partly because it’s an awesome combination, and partly because I have a red winter coat and I have a brand new turquoise down vest waiting impatiently in my closet for the weather to get warmer and all this damn snow to melt. I’m nothing if not practical, people.
And as I polled the universe about how to arrange my stripes, a challenge emerged. My own mother dared me to crochet my scarf in a completely random pattern. I should toss my carefully randomized graph-paper rendering. And ignore mathematical sequences like Fibonacci numbers, or the random stripe generator. No, she dared me to just wing it. Because I think the thought of me struggling over what counts as really random made her giggle. Friends advised me to drink copiously while working. And I learned that I’m not the only one who feels a little creepy-crawly when thinking about a scarf whose ends don’t mirror each other.
Is my brain really that inherently ordered? (I’m of course thinking back to that fateful personality test we took at that librarian workshop. You know, the one where I was deemed to be the gold personality – the rule-following, order-loving, organized one. The geeky, stick-in-the-mud, no-fun-for-you one! Not the creative, emotional, sensitive one! Or the logical, questioning, scientific one! And surely not the outgoing, party-lovin’, loud one.)
Crocheting the scarf turned out to be quite the mental challenge. With each new stripe, my brain started whirring. “Okay, the red stripe you just finished was two rows. I did a blue stripe with two rows before that one. Am I putting in a pattern of two-row stripes here? Am I using red enough? Maybe I need a really, really big blue section here instead. And after that a short blue row with some longer red ones. No! Short red ones. No! One long red one and one short blue one and then a short red one and a short blue one. No! That’s a pattern!”
It was EXHAUSTING.
After I measured out to just past where I thought the middle should go, I decided it would be a good idea to count the rows of each color, just to make sure I wasn’t using way too much of one color or the other. So I counted the rows at the point where the above picture was taken.
And to my utter HORROR, there were EXACTLY 50 rows of red and 50 rows of aqua. And I DIDN’T DO IT ON PURPOSE. I was trying to be random! My brain IS that inherently organized?
I’m so embarrassed.
But I kept going, and at the very end counted the rows again to make sure I’d end up with the same number of rows of each color. I suppose that’s against the spirit of the project, but even I have my limits.
In the end, I’m pretty happy with the result. Is it a little TOO overly long? Yes. Does it need some breaking in thanks to the cheap yarn? Yes, especially compared to the pashmina style scarves I’m used to. Am I totally psyched with the random-ness of the stripes? Hell yes. Will I embark on another “random” project soon? Probably not, no. And that’s okay with me.
I was surprised upon looking back at the photos I took yesterday at the boardwalk that I spotted so much cheery yellow on what was a very cold, very gloomy, very gray kind of day. I really like that.
she likes stripes 