I didn’t used to think of this sort of thing as art—it’s not like I made the beads; I just tied them to a piece of stretchy filament—but I suppose that’s like saying a painting isn’t art because I didn’t make the paint.

Probably I’ve mentioned this before, but I spent DECADES of my life hoarding art supplies. My family didn’t really value art (they said they did, but they didn’t; they valued capitalism and they didn’t think art was part of capitalism so therefore it was not as important as anything that resulted in a regular paycheck) and when I did receive art supplies it was impressed upon me that they were both expensive and frivolous and I must not waste them because nobody was going to replace things that I used up. And when I moved to my new place at the beginning of the pandemic I vowed to stop hoarding (what was I saving this stuff for anyway) and (after throwing out bags of unused but dried-out paying and markers) I began enjoying my massive collection of every kind of art supply.

Soooo…

Last Christmas I mentioned to the Coyote that I wanted the kind of tiny cut glass prism suncatcher that made rainbows everywhere. And he, being him, gave me 20 of them. So I had the idea to make an unconventional kind of beaded curtain with them, so my whole house would be filled with rainbows every day.

To that end I dug through the 2 drawers labeled “beads and shells” in my studio, and then went through the rest of the house, and came up with every little thing that could possibly be construed as a bead, and a few things that definitely weren’t beads in any sense but whatever, I’m going to tie them to these beads anyway. Then I sorted them by theme and tried to “tell a story” with each strand.

Some of these elements are quite old; many of them are things I’ve been carrying since the ’80s and a few of them are likely much older. For example, one of the “beads” is a broken ring that might be jade or malachite or turquoise and probably belonged to one of my ancestors. And then some of the elements are very new: the metal horse was randomly given to me by an artist at a street fair last year. I didn’t buy any beads for this project. Everything here was already in the house (except for the tension bar I used to hang them, and also I had to buy another roll of stretchy filament when I ran out halfway through). There’s old earrings and discards from the Bear’s shop and broken wind chimes and little art pieces I made in the ’90s and have kept in a box since then…

Here you can zoom in and see all the details.

If I had just used beads I expect this would have been easier and more relaxing but tying a bunch of random objects did make it a bit more complicated. Worth it, though, I think. It’s not really apparent from the photo, but I also used 12 colors of embroidery floss to tie them up so there’s another rainbow even when the sun isn’t shining through them.

For me, it’s harder to make art in a trashed space. I’m not comfortable doing it in a perfectly clean one either, but my brain doesn’t function as well if things are very messy, and frankly, my house had not been clean since before I had covid, which was a year ago. I paid Miss Kitty to do 5 hours of deep cleaning this week, and I did about 10–15 further hours, and then I was just standing there in my perfectly clean house looking at my perfectly empty table thinking, “O, wow, I can totally finish a project in this space!”

And I did. And it’s great. I picked up another project that I’d abandoned months ago and worked on that as well.

I actually had a few moments where the freedom of not-a-mess was so incredible that I almost cried

So my house is clean, my mind is clear, and every day is going to bring rainbows.