A small accomplishment

Some weeks you accomplish a lot.  Some weeks you accomplish almost nothing.

This week has been the latter.  Not that I'm a terrible slug but I've had a bunch of other commitments -- a lecture, dinner with friends, the orchestra, meeting our son at lunch -- and not much has happened in the art department.

But this evening I roped my husband into helping me with a task that needs to be done every several months: redoing the quilt storage area, aka the third guest bedroom.  The bed has clean sheets on it, and if we ever needed three bedrooms for company I could theoretically convert this room into service, but it would require three or four trips to the storage locker with all the quilts that live on the bed and elsewhere in this room.

Most of my old quilts are rolled up on swim noodles and wrapped in sheets, but those still in the rotation -- likely to be sent out to a show or taken with me for demonstrations -- are stacked on the bed in the third guest bedroom.  As time passes, the stack gets messier and messier, as I pull out quilts from the bottom layers or dump newly arrived quilts on top of the pile.

Since I last organized the pile, several quilts have returned from two- or three-year tours or recent shows, and things were getting pretty messy.  I couldn't find a quilt I needed to photograph for my new book, although I had searched and thought I had looked everywhere, including the pile on the bed.  And a few quilts that had come home from shows hadn't made it out of their shipping boxes.

So yesterday we pulled everything off the bed and proceeded to remake the pile, with the biggest quilts on the bottom, everything face down to prevent fading.  We opened the shipping boxes, undid the rolls of quilts that had been taken to a workshop, pulled out quilts that needed to be rolled up and put into "permanent storage" and incidentally but happily, found the missing quilt.

I could theoretically do this task myself, except that my back starts hurting very quickly.  Like making the bed, spreading the quilts out is best done by two people.

Today I'll finish up the job, rolling up the older quilts for "permanent storage," putting the smallest quilts into under-the-bed storage boxes.  But meanwhile it makes me happy to contemplate this small area of my art domain that is perfectly organized and put together.