Artist Quirks: Things I Hoard

As all artists know, art materials can be quite expensive. It's not just paints and pencils you need to buy, it's canvases, good quality paper, sketchbooks, etc. As an artist, especially when you're first starting out, you need to have a wide range of materials, so your supply collection tends to build up over time. This post, however, is not about those materials in the typical artist's collection.

Apart from things like fabric, bundles of yarn, ink (etc) that you might immediately think would be in my collection (as a fibers/textile artist), I also have things as inspiration as well as for documentation, research, or just-in-case purposes. In the week's blog post, I will be discussing the weird things in my materials/supplies collection. The "odds and ends" if you will...

Found Objects

This pile of sticks (pictured above in the container) have been sitting in my art area for about six years now. I found them on a hike at the bottom of the Palisades along the Hudson River, thought they could be useful, and carried a couple handfuls of them back. I've ended up using them for two purposes: (1) I hot-glued a bunch of them on a piece I did in high school and (2) beads!

Flip through the Instagram post above to see some process pictures of how I made beads out of these sticks! I've used these guys in earrings for the most part (examples pictured below) but I've been wanting to make some beaded bag handles with them as well.

Another example of found objects I currently have in my collection are these springs (pictured below) that I recently found while helping to clean out my grandma's garage. My grandpa had a lot of random tools and supplies piled up (nails, screws, etc) and these kinda spoke to me. I haven't done anything with them yet but I'm hoping to start experimenting soon!

Fabric Samples

I have way too many fabric swatches stuffed into a single drawer in my studio space. Starlandia, a local art supply store in Savannah, had a sale where you can fill up a plastic bag with these and only pay $5 or something for the whole thing! I think I ended up filling 3 bags so I've stocked up quite a bit. Most of them are discontinued fabrics from home textile companies. These come in handy when designing mood and color story boards as well as for other research purposes.

Yarn Waste

I've only taken one weaving class but that was enough to accumulate a LOT of warp yarn waste. It's hard to throw away so much good yarn so I've saved all of it pretty much to use in process work. I've done some experiments with it in daily practice studies, made tassels for earrings: small stuff like that. Other than warp waste, I have a bunch of old knitted and crocheted swatches from when I was first learning those techniques (which I also have used when doing material exploration). All of this stuff goes in a big portfolio pouch, which leads me to...

Miscellaneous Paper/Material

Just like all my yarn waste, I keep all of my miscellaneous paper scraps and other random leftover materials in a portfolio pouch. Whenever I don't have the heart to throw away good or interesting material, it goes in there. Some examples, pictured above, include: used gold textile foil, brass pressed foil from a high school project I took apart, marbled paper from some arts and crafts workshop, fancy copper craft paper, a scrap of veg tan leather, and old unusable film that my roommate was throwing away. Now, the brass foil and the old film, I can (and I have) used to make handmade sequins. Everything else, however, I have no clue when it will be used, BUT whenever and, if ever, I want a marbled background for a sketch, I know where to go!

Paint Chips

Last, but certainly not least, my favorite thing to hoard are those paint sample cards you find at hardware and paint stores. They can be so much fun to work with!

In a fabric dyeing class I took back in 2018, my professor encouraged us to use these guys to make color story boards! While doing process work for the final, I used a 1" craft hole puncher to punch out a bunch of chips so that I can organize them into color palettes. Then, when it came time to start mixing the dyes they were a perfect reference for color matching! The results are shown below:

I've continued to use them for color exploration and process work since.

I hope this post will inspire you in your own studio practice to try some new things out, think outside the box, and to think twice before throwing something away (Remember: your trash can be future you's treasure)!

Thanks for reading!