storage – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Bagged

Yesterday I refilled an old travel palette with new watercolors. This meant rummaging through my paints, discarding dried up tubes of paint, and sorting them out. This is always fun as I get to choose my colors out of the collection that has accumulated over time as well as just clean things up.

I don’t know about other people, but I really like my stuff – of which I have scads – to be organized and tidy in all its scaddiness.

Baggies are great for this. Permanent markers label them, too, to help me sort things out. Categories include red, blue, yellow, orange, earth colors, teal & turquoise, violet, neutral-white-grey-black, green, and maybe a few others. If a color leaks, the baggie keeps things from oozing everywhere and when this happens, the offending bag is dumped into a bowl of water, the offending tube(s) removed, the rest of the tubes cleaned and dried, and moved into a new home. We are all happy.

Chaos Contained

Christmas and New Year are busy times of of the year, particularly if you tend to make things for the holidays. That’s me. After all the sewing and knitting and baking and such, I sort of collapsed and just didn’t do much of anything except blob along. As a result, nothing was really like I wanted it to be – this here, that there. What was getting me – and is still, to a point – are sewing supplies, material, machines. Today I made a dent in the mess and put all my patterns into under-the-bed shoe storage containers that I got here on Amazon. These storage containers got good reviews, but best of all, you can move the dividers around as you need, to fit your stuff, whether shoes or patterns! I am actually really pleased with these and recommend them – for shoes or patterns or…?

Well, one part of my sewing life is a bit neater. I also worked on the closet where the machines reside. I rearranged the machines, put a plastic tray system in the closet to hold things such as manuals, and other trivia. Tomorrow, since I freed up a whole drawer in the sewing bureau, I am going to go through it to rearrange fabric and interfacing, along with other little things. If I get really organized, I’ll even sort out the material by yardage and future usage. The studio shelves have projects in containers to work on. On a digital level, I want to make sure I have a back-up of my pdf patterns. Once this little bit of reorganization is done, my head space will be clear for upcoming projects!

Traveling Light with Photography

I am finding myself in a bit of a dilemma.

My laptop took a bit of a dump, and I really don’t feel like messing around with it. However, it is a very important piece of equipment when traveling and taking digital photos – I need to store my images somewhere. Basically, it is a system running Windows 8.1, and when I fired it up a couple of weeks ago, it wouldn’t start properly. Eventually I managed to roll back the system to Windows 8.0. Upgrades to 8.1 failed multiple times, so now I have a laptop that I really don’t feel I can rely on to deliver.

So, the dilemma. Do I invest in a new laptop? Should I take a chance on the Windows 8.0 system? Do I take an old and very slow one for the trip, and hope for the best? Or, is there some way, using my Chrome Book and the Cloud, or an external HD, to back up my SD cards?

I need to back up my SD cards – I take too many pictures. Buying oodles of SD cards seems rather dumb, and potentially expensive.

I have small external HD I used on my questionable laptop . . . . so this afternoon, when I get home from work, I plan to take a camera, take some pictures – maybe a lot of them – and connect it to the Chrome Book. The external HD will be in the other USB port. And then let’s see how the transfer works out. I might be able to use a USB flash drive instead – and it will be smaller in size than the external HD.

I expect it may be horribly slow. And, I will not be too happy.

Another option is to use a cloud-based storage system, but I need to find out about that one.

And I also need to look at one of our old laptops from 1732. Considering we are leaving in 10 days, I better get my ass in gear.