Uncontained

I like containers of all kinds but I just missed with my latest container. That's because I find it fun to put things in order. Alphabetical, numerical, chronological, or even spacial. Y'know big books have to go on big shelves no matter who their author or what their subject matter is. But that's a topic for another day because my books are hardly in any order at all. Besides by height.

This week I finally got a couple of portfolio cases that I've been meaning to buy. One that I've been meaning to buy for about two years now. As you can see my love of putting things in order is far from an obsession. It was a big forty inch by thirty inch basic black art portfolio that I bought. I need it specifically to store some large photos that I made. The photos are matted on twenty four by thirty six inch matte board. I've stored them for the last two years in a card board box that I've been meaning to replace with something more durable. The portfolio case is it. It costs about a hundred bucks and until now it just never made the budget.

The container I missed on is a fancy aluminum art case. That was more of an impulse buy. I've been putting my comic book original art collection in order lately. All the eleven by seventeen inch art has been put in mylar sleeves and all the art that is smaller than that has been mounted on eleven by seventeen inch paper and slipped into a mylar sleeve.

I thought the next logical step would be to get a nice eleven by seventeen inch case to put my original art collection in. I found an aluminum case on the Dick Blick art supply web site. It was slightly larger than eleven by seventeen inches in order to fit eleven by seventeen paper. Perfect. Or so I thought. When the case was delivered I opened it and went to place a page in it. Missed it by that much. The mylar sleeves, being designed to hold an eleven by seventeen inch piece of paper, are ever so slightly bigger than the aluminum box also designed to hold an eleven by seventeen inch piece of paper. It's a sixty dollar box too. Oh well.

I ended up putting some of my own artwork, drawn on eleven by seventeen inch pieces of paper, into the box. I don't usually put my own stuff into a mylar sleeve so I didn't have to worry about it fitting. It's a nice box but it was anti-claimatic when it didn't go to the purpose for which I intended it.

I also loaded some of my own art prints into an eleven by seventeen inch display portfolio. That's an inexpensive portfolio but it's nice and holds a lot of pages. I've had that portfolio sitting around for years doing nothing. I don't know why I never put anything in it but it sat around so long that I forgot I had it. Rediscovering it was it impetus for me to buy the new portfolio cases and put things in order. I also bought a second of the inexpensive display portfolios. I filled up the first one and still had some of my prints left over. Now they are all snug in their sleeves.

I've also been looking for a box to put my gouache and acrylic paints in. When I mix colors in those two mediums I put the paints into cubbies (little plastic containers). The cubbies then go into a box. I've been using a couple of card board boxes for years now and they are not very nice. Barely functional I'd call them because they don't stack well.

I bought a couple of cheap Tupperware-like trays with lids but when I got them home I discovered they were too rounded. The cubbies wouldn't stack right to the side of the tray and I couldn't get nearly the same amount of cubbies in as I could in the cardboard box. They took up more room than I wanted them too.

The trays also didn't go to waste. I replaced a shoe box that I used to hold tubes of acrylic with a couple of the trays. Tubes don't exactly stack efficiently so the curved sides of the tray don't matter. Another of the trays I brought to a party filled with candy. The kids dug it.

So I'm still looking for some boxes to replace my cardboard ones. Good squared sided stackable boxes. Not too tall either since the cubbies are short and any space above them in a box would just be wasted. Cubbies.. heh heh. That word always makes me laugh.