Ten on the Tenth - Top Ten Crafting Injuries

A post for my blogging, bookbinding and scrapping friends!

We all love to cut, stick, trim, punch, stitch, tear, layer, draw, write, plan, print, photograph and create. 
We all love to craft - especially with paper and fabrics.

But often, our dedication to our Craft can result in personal injury.

We all know the risks involved in our Crafts... yet we bravely go forth and create, regardless of the personal dangers...

Top Ten Crafting Injuries

10) Stubbing a toe on a box of crafting equipment - OW! (Observer Wince) Factor: 1/10

9) Pricking a finger on a sewing needle - OW! Factor: 3/10

8) Papercut... on fingertip - OW! Factor 3/10, on knuckle - OW! Factor 5/10

7) Dropping a box of equipment on your foot - OW! Factor 4/10

6) Banging your head on the desk, while picking up a dropped item - OW! Factor 5/10

5)  Burning fingers on heat tool - OW! Factor 6/10

4)  Trapping finger in die-cutter - OW! Factor 7/10

3) Cutting hand with craft knife - OW! Factor 8/10

2) Hair loss, due to frustration - OW! Factor 9/10

1) EARTHQUAKE!

Speaking from Personal Experience.... OW! Factor - 11/10!

For more 10 Things on the Tenth, see Shimelle's post today!

The Great BIG Cupboard

Woo-Hoo!  Finally we have put together my new cupboard!  It is huge... enormous... gigantic! 

This is a wardrobe carcass, from Ikea, with three packs of shelves inside, instead of a hanging rail etc. 

This is the stuff I have put away so far - but I reserve the right to shuffle it all around, about twenty times, before I decide exactly where it all goes best!

At the very bottom, are the A1-size storage bags, with most of my book-binding paper supplies, plus some sheets of boards, for book covers.  These have been clogging up the floor of my bedroom wardrobe, since 28th February (see this post if you don't know why!)

Above that are boxes of fabrics, felt and some materials for my sock-creature courses. 

In the middle, for now anyway, there are pizza-boxes of paper, scrapping project bits, mini-albums and chipboard embellishments.  This may all change round - I have another of those big white boxes under my desk, which needs organising!

The two white plastic boxes above that are for tools - bookbinding and scrapping etc - and general "bits", of the type that create so much clutter on my desk, shelves etc.  These all still need a lot of organising. I am thinking of ways to put the things in the boxes, without it resulting in chaos!

The shelf above these is for scrapping and crafting materials, such as paper pieces, embellishments of all sorts, brads & eyelets, grommets, studs, ribbon bits, stickers, feathers, flowers... just stuff really!

The second shelf from the top holds some A4-size (letter size) white boxes, with various papers, quilling and origami papers, templates, bits of vellum, film, metallic paper, special paper (like stuff to make your own rub-ons, which I had forgotten about), shrink plastic sheets.... There's also my quilling kit, a tin of card-toppers, a stack of petal-point ink sets, my sewing basket and a few other bits.

At the very top are papers that are rolled, rather than flat (though I aim to tackle this, as rolling isn't good for paper), also rolls of hand-made bookcloth, leather pieces, baking parchment, waxed paper, bondaweb sheets...  These are all tucked into a large, stiff paper bag, from a boutique shop (you know, the bags that make you glad you went shopping there, because it's such fun to carry your stuff home!).  The large grey box holds my "Stock" - the ready-made books and stuff that are currently on sale in my Etsy shop. 

So that's it so far.  Lots to do though.  There are still loads of things hanging around my studio, that have to be organised, sorted and put away.  I am keen to have everything on the shelves set up so it's easy to get at things - especially the stuff I use often .  There are some large spaces at the back of the shelves, behind some of the boxes, as the cupboard is very deep.  This means I can store less-used items at the back, also in the gaps between the white drawers etc.  I just want a way to keep items together, so I don't have to take out lots of little things, just to reach one item.

Meanwhile, there are still plenty of messy areas in the studio...

... like this corner, for example...

...and my desk is a tip!  Tidying up always seems to make more mess to begin with!  This must be sorted out, as I have more orders to make as soon as possible. 

But tomorrow, I'm having a day off and going to Scrap Club.  I certainly need a break!

Recording the Disaster

So the shelves fell down, all was chaos, the chaos began to assume some semblance of order...

Somewhere in amongst all that mess, I found my missing scrap-mojo!  Last Sunday I made two pages and last night I made the third page, that had been planned for the Sunday crop (I ran out of time - always happens).

My page to record the Event!

I just had to call it this...

The big photo lifts up, to reveal two little pictures beneath...

... and under that mini-book, there is a great space, where I will attach the story of my Disaster, when I have typed it out and printed it (still thinking how best to do this - paper, font etc).

I deliberately kept the design simple, having only the one large photo on the front and keeping the journalling out of sight too.  I wanted the layout to have impact, so the strong black ribbed cardstock and striped Basic Grey scrap paper were ideal.  The grey-blue patterned paper is just great with these other two papers - so glad I still had some of it left.

Another page to cover some of the scary holes on the wall above my desk!

Oh, and I finished the new Wedding Guest Book for my shop:

A Wedding Guest Album, with 40 pages of white cartridge paper; covers in Birds and Flowers design paper, with peach lined covers and peach art paper section wraps.  10-needle Coptic Binding, in Ivory and Dark Moss Green hand-waxed linen thread.

Progress is being made! I'm off to start the next Book!

A Definite Improvement!

The Studio is back in operation - yippee!  It is so much better than the huge heap of chaos from last week.  DH kindly helped me to tidy the worst of the mess on Saturday and I spent some of yesterday afternoon and this morning getting it a bit straighter and tidying the desk.

It's by no means done yet - the new storage solution needs to be organised and it could definitely do with seeing a vacuum cleaner (DH will carry it upstairs for me!!), but it's a Definite Improvement.

The boxes that were on the shelves are now stacked neatly against the back wall. At least I can now get to my stuff - and as I had already labelled them, I can see which box I need straight away - woo-hoo!

The wall above the desk still looks scary... huge holes to be filled and painted over...

... but the desk is pretty tidy now and I can work at it.

I got out that photo album project today, to see what I could do with it.  Two of the 12 pages were ruined, but the others are fine. The cover boards are undamaged and the interleaves are fine. The sheet of paper I was going to use for the cover did have a hole in it, so I will use it for a smaller project - it wasn't going to look right anyway, as the design didn't line up as I wanted.  I now have another plan for that book and this afternoon I bought another sheet of card to replace the spoiled pages. I may even give it extra pages!!

Then I started on another book, which is currently on my desk, under weights, all cut and ready to sew tomorrow.  It will be similar to this, which I recently sold in my Etsy shop:

This is the same paper that I was going to use for the photograph album, but the covers are smaller, so the design lines up really well.  The binding will be slightly different, but overall it's a very similar book. I'm excited about it, as the original was really lovely - I hope this one will be too!

So, my desk is back in use and I'm coping okay without my extra work table.  I didn't like the blank wall with holes that is now above my desk, so I decorated it up a bit:

Yippee!

Aftermath...

Dear Readers,  when we last heard from our heroine, she had suffered a bit of a disaster:

What used to be the shelves in my Studio...

Having removed the remaining shelf fittings and picked up the stuff that was thrown onto the floor, we had been left with this:

A load of stuff all over the desk and a precarious work table and "supporting" metal strips...

... piles of stuff all over the floor...

... boxes piled up in the hallway and shelf-boards leaning on the bookcase.

That was Sunday. 

* * *

Thursday

Yesterday afternoon I started work to clear and re-arrange the studio, so we could replace the lost shelving and put all the stuff away properly.  I carried on today and  DH helped me to take down the work table, that was clipped to the metal rails on the wall.  We took the bent and useless metal bits down too.

This is what it now looks like:

Sigh...

Sigh again.... I'm trying to "Keep Calm", but I must admit that "Eat Cake" is the best advice I've had all week...

I have taken the stuff off the three remaining wall shelves, so I could re-arrange them, to hold the more important stuff.  However, they are not supported by a bracket at the wall end.  So, the far end of each shelf is not properly supported - we need to put another support up in the corner.  I can only put very light things on the corner end of the shelves and not-very-heavy stuff everywhere else.  

Sigh...

Some progress has been made - but not very obvious.  I have measured and thought, consulted with DH and decided to buy an 80cm wide bookcase from Ikea, which I will put in the gap at the end of my desk, where my worktable was.  See the white drawer unit in the photo? The bookcase will go behind that, against the wall.  It is 28cm deep and the drawers (and worktable top) are 60cm deep.  

Still with me?  Hmm... So.... I can buy another white drawer unit too, plus a tall 20cm wide cd/dvd unit, to match the bookcase, which will make the whole bookcase-wall-thing 100cm - same width as the worktable.  I can use the drawer units to support the table top, making a pedestal desk (yay!). 

If it is placed right in front of the bookcase, the whole thing will be 88cm deep, meaning it will stand out 8cm (about 3.5")  from the edge of the big desk; but as it's by the window, we think that will work ok.  I won't be able to alter the height of my table any more - but then, I never did do that anyway... and the part of the bookcase behind the drawers will be difficult to access (the dvd shelves will be totally buried), but I'll still have 125 x 100 cm of shelves to use for storage, plus a work table again (and another set of drawers - yay!).

Hmm.... So that's all very nice... But we still have the problem of the Studio Needing to be Tidied Up First.

These are two of my current Bookbinding projects...

and this is my desk, where I'm supposed to be making the books...  Sigh...

...and the rest of the room, that I'm trying to tidy up...

bigger sigh...

So, overall, I am feeling rather overwhelmed by all the mess, clutter and confusion.  I have filled half a rubbish bag and most of a recycling bag, yet hardly seem to have made any difference.  There is just stuff Everywhere.  I was trying to "put away" the things on my desk, only there is no "Away" just now.  I want to clear the messy side of the room, so I have a large and clear patch of floor - where we can build a new bookcase, then put the boxes of stuff while I re-organise the room...

It got to the point where I couldn't do any more.  I just don't seem to be able to work out where to start or what to do.  

The stuff that fell down from the wall didn't bury me - yet I somehow feel that, really, it did...

Disaster!

We spent the weekend away at a family party - more soon, when I've gone through the photos.

So we drove home this afternoon and didn't plan on doing much for the rest of the day, except relaxing.  The Boys had a model-painting project on the go, followed by a networked computer gaming session. 

I settled down happily in my studio, with some nice new covering paper, cutting pages and boards for a new book.  I had  finished the pages and interleaves for a photo album and reached up to put the art bag containing the rest of the tissue and interleaving papers back onto its shelf. 

Disaster struck! 

The shelves in my studio came away from the wall.  Everything cascaded down on top of me (and Sherlock), tipping me into a heap in the middle of it all!  DH and DS had to come running to help us - DS rescued the poor, frightened cat and DH rescued his poor, frightened wife!

It was all a huge jumble of fallen boxes and packs of paper, books, trays of bits & pieces, board games from the top shelf, shelving boards etc etc. 

Added to the mess was the anxiety that the wall brackets would break, landing those metal shelves on top of us.  We had to very gingerly clear up whatever we could, moving it all out of the room and stacking shelf boards in the hallway.  Then DH helped me to take down the brackets from the bent and twisted metal supports.  Once we had done this, he carefully removed all three metal shelves and took those away too.  

My poor Studio, that I was so proud of!  It's a terrible mess... Piles of stuff all over the desk top and under the desk, all over the floor...

There were some boxes already on the floor along this side, waiting to be tidied up and for their contents to be put on the shelves (!).  Now they are just part of a large and general jumble. 

In the centre there, topped by a sheet of blue mulberry paper, are the pages and sheet of covering paper for my new photo album project.  The lovely paper has two big holes, where corners of shelf boards speared it!  Yet, in spite of the chaos, the damage to this project was minimal and it looks as if I'll be able to make it after all  - some time! 

Everything else has had to be moved into the upstairs hallway, or our bedroom.  I have managed to relocate my paper stocks to the bottom of my wardrobe, although the cover-bags are just a little bit too deep and the doors don't shut properly.  It's going to have to do for now, until we can sort out what to do next.

I have had to clear the desk by the window; it's my "clever" desk, with adjustable legs - legs that clip to the metal shelving strips that are (were) screwed to the wall.  It will need to be taken apart now, so the metal strips can be taken down completely.

My laptop computer was on the desk when everything fell. I am so lucky it wasn't damaged at all.  In fact, so far, apart from the wrecked shelving and a few dented boxes (one full of sock-pet making stuff, that I fell on and squashed!), hardly anything was damaged or broken.  The paper I was about to use for the photo album cover has two holes - but I think the sheet can still be used for something, as the holes are at the edges.  A little ceramic pot I used to hold "bits" was smashed and I threw it out, the handle of a paint-brush mug was broken and a lot of little shreds of paper and bits of cotton, bookbinding thread and stuff were scattered over the floor - should have tidied them up before anyway! 

No-one was injured, though the cat was very frightened and had to be lifted out from under the pile of stuff (unsquashed though, so he was lucky). He recovered well, after a lot of kind attention from J.  I was badly shaken up and needed a stiff cuppa and a chocolate, along with a sit-down, before my knees would stop wobbling and my hands shaking.  Other than that, it's just a matter of injured pride and disappointment. 

I will need to have another think about the storage situation in my studio. Meanwhile, that pile of stuff that I've been "going to" tidy up, will have to be tidied, so I can make a much neater pile of storage boxes, containing all my equipment, scrapping supplies etc, that used to be on the shelves. 

This is obviously my own fault. The shelves must have been overloaded and me dropping a bag of paper on top of the pile was just one thing too much - that tiny bit of force needed to pull it all away from the wall. We had put the supports up carefully and used good, long screws. I think there was just far too much weight overall, pulling constantly at those metal strips. At least I wasn't sitting down when it fell, or I would have been injured by the falling shelf-boards.


Obviously wall-mounted shelving is not the solution to every storage issue! Overloading shelves is dangerous and foolish (duh!!) and I won't make that mistake again.  I was in J's room after this, checking what is on his wall shelves - nothing nearly as heavy as the things I had dumped on mine!

So, I have stopped shaking and am having an early night (8pm, sitting in bed!).  Tomorrow is Monday - jobs day - so I will have to leave things as they are.  Tuesday will have to be the start of the Big Tidy Up!

As if I had nothing else to do, eh?