SED 10A: Ooops
May. 10th, 2015 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kerravonsenSo yesterday I did not post as I intended. Ooops. So this is for yesterday.
Yesterday I was sorting and storing my new Hama/Perler/Iron-Me/melty beads. One lot was a bunch of cool colours bought from a shop on EBay. The other lot... I swear, I get taken over by unrealistic optimism from time to time, and this was just such an occassion. I bought two huge bottles of mixed beads, thinking "Oh yeah, I can sort these out into their individual colours, no worries". Even though every time I do something like that (last time it was one kilogram of small glass rings) I swear never to do it again... I did it again.
So this week I have been sorting beads on and off. The two bottles were two different bottles - one was opaque beads, and the other was translucent beads. The translucent-bead bottle appeared to have fewer colours in it, so I managed to extract all the purple beads from the collection. My preferred method of sorting colours is a multi-pass one, you see. It may or may not take longer, but it is less brain-taxing. The brain-taxing method is to have an empty container for every single colour, and pick up a bead and decide what container it goes in, put it there, and move on to the next bead. One of the things that renders this impractical is that I don't know how many colours there are in the collection. Another is that I would have to leave all the containers out until the whole thing was sorted, and I have a house-guest, so that's not practical either, since we do actually need the dining room table for... dining at.
The less brain-taxing method is to decide on a single colour (or a category), pour out a portion of the beads into a flat container and pick out all the beads that match, put those in one container, and the remainder in another container. Then repeat. It can be quite quick, because your eye can be tuned to pick out a particular colour.
So for the translucent beads, I picked out all the purple ones. Then I turned my attention to the opaque beads, and decided to pick out all the dark ones. I decided on that rather than "pick out all the black ones" because there was also a shade of very dark brown and a navy blue that were rather hard to distinguish from the black. The exersize turned out to be multi-pass even then, because I fell into a sequence of (a) all the black, dark brown, navy ones, (b) dark purple, (c) royal blue, (d) dark green, (e) red, (f), mid-brown, (g) mid-blue. Which meant that the collection of "dark" beads was smaller than the collection of "light" beads, and also that it had specific colours in it. Anyway, that's one of the things I was doing earlier this week. So yesterday I decided to sort out all the dark colours (starting with the lightest of them).
But then, where to store the beads? I didn't really like the idea of putting them in plastic bags, but that's what I had to resort to, because I'd run out of my nice rectangular translucent plastic boxes. I still had a large 8-compartment box, but still had to put plastic bags in the compartments (three to a compartment).
Then it occurred to me that I might be able to make boxes to fit, using templates from this site, where you can give your desired measurments and it will create a box template for you! (Which then turns out to be too big to print on one piece of paper, but that's another problem). Ideally, the box would be transparent, but when I put translucency film through my laser-printer, it melted. Ooops. I also found that 120gsm paper isn't quite sturdy enough, while 285gsm card is much better. But the matchbox-style boxes I made didn't quite close up properly, probably because the cardboard was bent into a curve as it went through the laser printer. However, I taped on some flaps, which seem to have done the trick. I made a pair of boxes that would fit two to a compartment, but they were a bit big for the amount of beads I had, so I made another set of three that fit three to a compartment. I'm undecided as to whether to make more, because I'd still rather have (semi-)transparent plastic ones.
Yesterday I was sorting and storing my new Hama/Perler/Iron-Me/melty beads. One lot was a bunch of cool colours bought from a shop on EBay. The other lot... I swear, I get taken over by unrealistic optimism from time to time, and this was just such an occassion. I bought two huge bottles of mixed beads, thinking "Oh yeah, I can sort these out into their individual colours, no worries". Even though every time I do something like that (last time it was one kilogram of small glass rings) I swear never to do it again... I did it again.
So this week I have been sorting beads on and off. The two bottles were two different bottles - one was opaque beads, and the other was translucent beads. The translucent-bead bottle appeared to have fewer colours in it, so I managed to extract all the purple beads from the collection. My preferred method of sorting colours is a multi-pass one, you see. It may or may not take longer, but it is less brain-taxing. The brain-taxing method is to have an empty container for every single colour, and pick up a bead and decide what container it goes in, put it there, and move on to the next bead. One of the things that renders this impractical is that I don't know how many colours there are in the collection. Another is that I would have to leave all the containers out until the whole thing was sorted, and I have a house-guest, so that's not practical either, since we do actually need the dining room table for... dining at.
The less brain-taxing method is to decide on a single colour (or a category), pour out a portion of the beads into a flat container and pick out all the beads that match, put those in one container, and the remainder in another container. Then repeat. It can be quite quick, because your eye can be tuned to pick out a particular colour.
So for the translucent beads, I picked out all the purple ones. Then I turned my attention to the opaque beads, and decided to pick out all the dark ones. I decided on that rather than "pick out all the black ones" because there was also a shade of very dark brown and a navy blue that were rather hard to distinguish from the black. The exersize turned out to be multi-pass even then, because I fell into a sequence of (a) all the black, dark brown, navy ones, (b) dark purple, (c) royal blue, (d) dark green, (e) red, (f), mid-brown, (g) mid-blue. Which meant that the collection of "dark" beads was smaller than the collection of "light" beads, and also that it had specific colours in it. Anyway, that's one of the things I was doing earlier this week. So yesterday I decided to sort out all the dark colours (starting with the lightest of them).
But then, where to store the beads? I didn't really like the idea of putting them in plastic bags, but that's what I had to resort to, because I'd run out of my nice rectangular translucent plastic boxes. I still had a large 8-compartment box, but still had to put plastic bags in the compartments (three to a compartment).
Then it occurred to me that I might be able to make boxes to fit, using templates from this site, where you can give your desired measurments and it will create a box template for you! (Which then turns out to be too big to print on one piece of paper, but that's another problem). Ideally, the box would be transparent, but when I put translucency film through my laser-printer, it melted. Ooops. I also found that 120gsm paper isn't quite sturdy enough, while 285gsm card is much better. But the matchbox-style boxes I made didn't quite close up properly, probably because the cardboard was bent into a curve as it went through the laser printer. However, I taped on some flaps, which seem to have done the trick. I made a pair of boxes that would fit two to a compartment, but they were a bit big for the amount of beads I had, so I made another set of three that fit three to a compartment. I'm undecided as to whether to make more, because I'd still rather have (semi-)transparent plastic ones.
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Date: 2015-05-10 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 01:23 pm (UTC)