Hoarding and Cleaning

I really am a sucker for crappy reality TV shows.  The latest one I've been watching is a show called "Hoarders".  It shows here in the U.S. and is all about people whose houses are literally filled to the ceiling with stuff and the floors falling in.  There is a similar show that has been on the BBC for a few years as well.  I have to laugh as it really is incredible.  But I also have seen that I tend to keep a lot of stuff, even it is well packed away in tubs.  This is even true for the blown glass pieces I've made over the years.  

I've been blowing glass for a decade now.  I've made about 1,100 pieces.  Of that number, probably 600 have been sold.  Over a hundred have been given away as gifts over the years.  I have almost 200 marbles of various sizes (2" to 3" in diameter).  There were probably a hundred items that were numbered and photographed, but were cracked or in some other way defective.  That meant somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pieces are floating around my house, basement, garage, and pole barn either being displayed or packed away.

The hoarding had reached its breaking point and now I had to cleanse.  So I spent all day Sunday rounding up all the suspects and laying them out on my living room floor.  I really should take pictures, but I don't always think of it at the time.  There were some that were now apparent that should be destroyed.  I have pictures, but they are either really bad, defective in some way, too wonky to correct, or just plain UGLY.  I got rid of about twenty of them right away.  

Then my toughest art critic (my wife) was brought in to sort them remainder.  We donate about a dozen pieces a year to various local organizations for silent auctions and other fund raisers.  She picked ones out of the pile that fit that need.  We also agreed on the ones we would keep.  My personal collection of about fifteen evolves over the years and older ones keep getting replaced with newer or better ones.  Then I had her pick ones out that we'd try to sell.  There are forty that are in that pile.  About 50 of the "Rothko" series are in various stages of finishing/displaying/readying for sale so these got spared for now.  The final fifty-ish "good" pieces were packed away for a seconds sale or some future use.  That left about fifteen more to toss.  

Probably should have been more critical, but I did get the pieces sorted, organized, and reduced in number.  

"HAVE YOU SEEN ME?"

One of the pieces I was looking for was a blue "Sea Fan".  This is a really crappy picture, but it was already uploaded so I am going to use it here.  We can't find this piece!!  It happens to be one of our favorites and I hadn't planned on selling it.  It was here sometime before we packed up all the art and put out the Christmas decorations.  It isn't here anymore.  Can't really see myself selling it as it is the last one of three or four that I made.  Kinda weird.  I usually have a good sense of where anything is - and I just can't recall what happened here.  Just strange.

Oh well, guess I'll have to make more.