She opened her linen closet and smiled. Pillow covers, pillow inserts, throws, rugs, sheets, pillowcases, blankets, quilts, bed toppers, down duvets, lamps, and trays greeted her with a wild splash of seasonal color and endless mix-and-match options. She pulled out this and that, creating a terrible mess she immediately decided she would clean up later. Now was for cozy, now was for a change of season, now was the time for the domestic artist to create.

All artists have tools. Painters have an array of brushes, photographers have cameras and lenses, musicians have instruments, writers have notebooks and more notebooks, and post-it notes, and index cards, and scraps of paper, and pens. Quilters have fabric. Cake decorators have all manner of frosting tips. Cross stitchers have DMC floss. Potters have clay. Gardeners have seeds. Woodworkers have saws, files, and sandpaper.

Take any sort of artistic, creative endeavor that the creator engages in on a regular basis, and you will find tools. So many tools. The longer the creator has been at the task, the more tools they’ll have.

For a long time, the drumbeat in the homemaker world was minimalist, minimalist, minimalist. Pare everything back to your most basic needs. Then you’ll have peace and freedom and calm. You’ll have order and only what you need. This isn’t all bad. I spent many years studying Myquillyn Smith’s Cozy Minimalist mindset. When my chronic health issues were heavier, I decluttered my home. I learned to decorate with empty space. It helped my mind and body calm down. It made our home quiet. I decanted, removing garish, clashing packaging. The home quieted. Quiet is good. I cut back, way back on my pattern mixing in my kitchen, living room, and bedroom. I got rid of furniture. I gutted my home. It was a good move. It gave me a clean slate, and I sat with that clean slate for a long time. As my health improved, my creativity expanded. I went from only editing to writing new things. I was published. I started a podcast. My creativity gushed up. I expanded and shrunk and expanded my closet, reengaging in the fun of dressing-up. I wasn’t bound by such a tiny energy budget that decision-making had to be reduced to almost nil. I could think about putting this with that and that with this. And in my home? In my home, I wanted stuff. I wanted to soften the space with abundance. I wanted to mix and match beauty and scruffy. I wanted my ranch house in Texas to have just a hint of an English cottage and just a smidgen of Scandinavian folk art. Neither of those things are minimalist in the least.

To do this, I needed tools.

The difficulty with the Minimalist perspective is it creates a sense of cold and a sense of deficiency. I remember reading in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō that you didn’t need this or that because you could always borrow it from your sister. Now, I think there is value in a homemaker community of all of us having different things and then coming together with our different tools. I’ll bring a coffee carafe, you bring the silver bucket for drinks, and you bring the extra folding chairs. There is a beauty in this type of support. But there is also a peace and calm that comes from not having to coordinate so many people and things all the time because you have the tools you need, you have the stuff. When you are a strict minimalist, you develop a sense of deficiency. You don’t have what you need beyond the basics. It may be fine for you and your dog, but add in a spouse, children, friends, and community and suddenly you need more. You need more than one ladle. You need more than one tablecloth and one set of plates. Your home is no longer serving you because you aren’t living in a state of scarcity, but your tools are scarce.

Side Note: In Marie Kondō's later book, Kurashi at Home: How to Organize Your Space and Achieve Your Ideal Life, she walked back many of her most extreme points from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up. Even she couldn't live up to the minimalist ideal she’d set forward.

Minimalism often creates a cold environment, which only works if nothing lives in it. No plants, no animals, no other adults, and absolutely no children. Is this really living? I think this is why Cozy Minimalist was so popular. It started to bridge that gap. It led the way out of the cold and back into warmth. A home without life isn’t a home. By its very definition a home must have life to shelter. Sheltering life requires tools.

We are Domestic Artists. We create spaces for life to flourish. This creation requires tools and our tools are stuff. Knick-knacks, nature, ceramics, fabrics, lighting, pantry supplies, office supplies, baskets, containers, hangers. Managing these things, putting them to good use, is our work. Minimalism only works if home isn’t our work—but home is our work.[1] It is our art! And we must have good tools so we can serve our people and create beauty.

Now, we’re all probably asking the same question: how do we not turn into mass consumerists or hoarders?

We practice the virtues—prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Obviously, the two big helps here are prudence and temperance. What we all need to do is individually look for our boundaries. Boundaries are going to be things like budget and storage space. Our ability to care for our stuff is going to be a limiting factor. If you start to have more stuff than you can store and more stuff than you can maintain, you’re going to want to pull back a little. If you find yourself trapped in the addictive need-of-new, you will want to return to a habit of temperance. We can all get trapped here, where each shift of the trends has us redoing every square inch of our homes. Don’t buy into the lie that happiness can ONLY be found with a whole new look. That’s a materialistic trap. Self-soothing with a new thing can also be a trap and a misuse of our income. Even thrifting can get out of hand if it is too much. Part of our work is to make sure the space we’re tending isn’t stressing people out. If things are constantly knocked off flat surfaces, if flat surfaces can’t be utilized in a moment of need, if people can’t sit on your couch, or walk through your home, if husband and kids are on edge because they might break something, we, as the homemakers, need to step back and re-evaluate our tools. A painter doesn’t paint with a power saw. A woodworker doesn’t carve with a cross-stitch needle. A quilter doesn’t quilt with clay. Homemakers create cozy not chaos.

Take some time—maybe even gut your home and quiet it down first—to see what the needs of your specific people in your specific home are. Being a domestic artist isn’t just about constantly buying new tools. It’s about buying the right tool for the job. The right tool for me may be a new pillow cover or a pitcher. It might also be realizing that I have exactly what I need and being content.

The art of stuff is our work, ladies! How exciting is that! How broad, how useful! We get to go out and gather in the little things our people need. We get to look at a space and ask if it is doing the work we need it to do. Is it sheltering? Is it too big? Is it too small? Is it warm? Does it need a different light? More light? Less light? We get to dream about how to make it more and more welcoming to all the living things in our lives. As abundance grows in popularity, and for good reason, let’s not put it down as rampant consumerism and materialism. It may be that many women have realized that their creativity in the home, their ability to tend their people, doesn’t pour fourth from sterility but from plenty. Take one look at nature and remember that God doesn’t work from a point of minimalism but of overwhelming abundance. Let’s do the same!

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[1] It’s funny the things that come into fashion in a world where there are largely no homemakers. If you are trying to have it all and do it all you have to be a minimalist. You can’t tend with the tools of stuff because that takes a dedicated homemaker.

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