let's see here the creator matt asks a very pertinent question he says i'm assuming matt is
a he do you ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of materials that you have if so how do you overcome
that or do you use the endless possibilities as inspiration for your next project as a maker
i have many moments of brain farts due to the amounts of bits and bobs that i collect
well collecting bits and bobs yeah is absolutely a central occupation for me obviously
and i saved them and i store them and i archive them and i catalog them all in the interest of
keeping them accessible for when i need them all that being said i am currently in a state
of feeling completely overwhelmed by how much [ __ ] i have i've run out of room in this building uh
this job gets smaller i'm i think i'm going to get rid of the pool table so that i can actually put a
work table in and a place i can have meetings around because i don't have that in the space
right now i have to take some of these costumes off the mannequins as much as i love looking at
them i have to get them into storage so that they're not sitting here taking up floor space
um and it feels like an even bigger yeah i'm so i'm currently feeling totally overwhelmed like i
walk into my shop and i'm like oh i'm sorry i walk into the display area of the cave and that's where
i'm like oh i keep the shop clean enough so that i don't feel that here that is really important
to me because when this place is all filthy and like overloaded and not quite functional
and that place also is that's when i feel super destabilized and actually i end up feeling quite
claustrophobic about the world um so my mitigating strategies for collecting stuff is uh multi-fold
one is like i said i work really hard to catalog stuff i work really hard to archive it
and to put things in places where i will not lose them i still lose stuff all the
time but a few years ago i implemented a storage technique that has served me
so well and it is this let us say that i pick up an object like this and i think oh i've got
to put this back but it's the only one i have and i don't have another one where should i store it
this is like this is the moment when you're about to put that thing in a place you'll never see it
again or you'll see it in like five years when you finally open that cabinet the question i asked
myself after wondering where it should go and before putting it somewhere is wait a minute if
i didn't have it but i had put it somewhere in the shop where would i look for it right now and then
i put it there i don't overthink that problem that has just your first thought is your best
thought in that regard because later on when you wonder where it is your brain's gonna very
likely go to the exact same place don't get too clever about storage every problem i've ever had
about losing stuff is because i got clever about storage oh i'll tell you one that just happened
i was just doing some um i was doing some machining and i needed to determine precisely
how big this hole was and i had i recently added uh gauge pins to my uh shop's infrastructure
and these are basically from 50 000 all the way up to 750 thousands i have a pin of ground steel
that is every dimension by one thousandth so fifty thousand fifty one thousands fifty two
thousand fifty three thousands all the way up to six hundred and fifty nine seven hundred and forty
nine thousand seven hundred and fifty thousands right and it's like five bins of these pins each
one one 000 bigger than the next and that might seem kind of nutty but when you want to determine
the exact size of a hole there is no better way you just sit there and like well that one fits
okay we'll go to the next one oh that one fits and you do it until it stops fitting and then the
one that you just put in before that's the size of your hole and i pulled out the 703 thousandths pin
and then the doorbell rang and i have not seen that pin for weeks i don't know what
happened to it i don't know if i put it on a table and it rolled off that table and rolled
under something but i've looked everywhere and i cannot find it i have ordered another one um
i'm not that yeah it is a constant battle uh storing your stuff oh the other thing that i do
like i definitely appreciate uh the philosophy that maria that marie kondo has brought into the
world of like looking at something and saying is this really important to me her terminology
i believe is does this spark joy just a fine metric to ask yourself about anything
um one of the things that happens in here is i might sometimes i collect something because i
really want it sometimes i've collected something because it was a great deal and i know how great
a deal it was and i just like oh yeah no i should just have that and then the next time
someone comes and they're like oh my god a goonies doubloon and the delight that i get and saying
you can actually have this one because i have two i picked up that one for
you know a real good deal a few a screaming deal a few years ago and i did it for just this moment
so i love throwing stuff out i love getting rid of stuff i love having garage sales but
most of all i love finding you know the intersection of somebody's enthusiasm and
the things that i have in my collection and bringing those two things together that is a
deep joy and that comes actually that comes from a a a specific childhood memory um as i've said
many times my father was a painter and artist he had a lot of friends who were artists so i grew up
going to lots of different types of art studios and lots of different creators labs and studios
and painting rooms and houses and shops and this was i was exposed to this from the earliest age
and i remember visiting a friend of my dad's and he had an african mask on the wall and
it was one of those masks that was um made from uh cut tin from oil cans
it's a very specific style of african art um it had marbles clear marbles for the
eyeballs it was really really beautiful and i don't think i was older than eight
but i remember being super compelled by this by this mask and i remember being like god it is so
cool look at these marbles for eyes and i did what any eight-year-old would do when you want to know
how possible it might be to obtain something like this i said where do you get one of these
as if at eight i would be he'd say like oh i got it at a thrift store in manhattan i'll be like oh
my good man thank you for that next time i'm in manhattan i'll drop by that same thrift store
i did so i said where do you get this and i don't remember what he said but i do remember about half
an hour later my dad and i were driving we got in the car we're driving away from the
guy's house and we're at the end of his driving when we hear him yelling he's running after us
and he comes over to my side of the car and he gives me the mask
and that blew my mind i knew that he was doing it because he could tell that i had
become really enamored of it and that that was good enough
for passing it on to me to be at steward for a while i am no longer that masks
steward i don't know where it is it might be somewhere in my mom's storage i'm not sure but
that is much less important than what i got from that interaction which was the generosity of
spirit of seeing someone's enthusiasm and seeing that you could do something to to feed that
and then doing that that's really really lovely i like stuck with me my whole life clearly
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