A poor night and another putter-y day

Oh, I'm so confused!  Yes, considering how much purging I'm involved in, and how much I'm dreading dealing with the bead cupboard, today I went out and bought beads.  This meant that those that I bought had to be stored, and this meant that I had to start getting ready to purge my bead collection.  I admit that I don't really know what's in the cupboard, although I have a rough idea. So today I started consolidating various beads into container stacks of like colours.  I need to know what's there before deciding on how  to approach the purging.

Here is the top half of the cupboard.  This is where all the seed beads and a few of the larger beads are stored.

The bottom half of the cupboard contains specialty beads, and various large beading tools

There are two shelves dedicated to towers of seed beads, most of which are size 10 or 11.  I prefer that like colours are kept in the same tower, but things have been confused over time.

This lower shelf contains a few towers but also quite a collection of tubes of beads.  Over the past few years I've opted to purchase a better class of glass seed beads.  I rarely use the older glass beads as I know I can't count on them being reasonably the same size.  While the less perfect beads may have their use, especially if I'm trying to colour match.  These tubed beads will not be discarded.  The towers behind them will be considered for purging.

This top shelf contains mainly smaller Mill Hill beads that accumulated during my embroidery days.  I don't have a lot of them, in each container, and will not be able to use most of them as they are just too small for my elderly eyes.

Finally, here is my collection of various "bead soups".  Whenever I finish a project, and have only a few leftover beads, those beads become part of one of my various colours of  "bead, soups".  These are a recent development in my beading world, and invaluable in my more recent work.  I don't care what size or shape a left over bead is, as long as it matches one of  my selected colours.

I started another bead soup today.  Prior to destroying older work, DH will pick off the beads for me.  There have been a lot of beads  redeemed this way lately, and many of them are not really worth the effort of trying to sort them out.  So as many as possible were sorted, but quite a few ended up in this mish-mash of various coloured seed beads and fancy sequins.  I have a hunch this soup is going to grow over the next while.

But the older sewing machine didn't get dealt with today.  Maybe tomorrow.