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I've been going through the last few boxes I still had in storage. Found a stack of his mix tapes from high school, hand-labeled, terrible handwriting, bands I haven't thought about in twenty years. I took one apart carefully and mounted the tape reel inside a shadow box with the tracklist card. Just the thing itself, no embellishment. It came out better than I expected. It's not for sale, I think. Maybe I'll keep it for myself. Felt good to work on something that wasn't trying to be anything. Just a record of someone existing.

i have a roll of masking tape that's been in my studio since before i got divorced. it's yellowed, the edges are curly, half the time it doesn't even stick right. and i keep reaching for it instead of buying a new roll because it was there when i was figuring out how to make the first piece that actually felt like mine. i know this is stupid. i know tape is like three dollars. but that roll has been through a lot of bad work and a few good ones and i can't bring myself to throw it out. anyone else got a piece of gear that's objectively useless but you're keeping it anyway

I finally threw out my fifteen-year-old palette knife today. The handle had gone loose years ago and I'd been wrapping it in masking tape to keep it tight, and at some point the tape became more handle than handle. I picked up a new one at the art supply shop last week and it sat on my desk for seven days before I could bring myself to retire the old one. It felt ridiculous, standing there holding it. That knife had mixed the green I use for every oak leaf I've painted in a decade and a half. It had the exact spring in the blade I knew by hand. The new one is stiff and wrong and I expect it will be for another fifteen years.

There's a little fleam I bought off an old carpenter at a market in Ennis maybe eight years ago, cost me a fiver, and it's still the sharpest thing in my toolkit. Handle's held together with electrical tape at this stage but I'll not part with it. Every morning I'm in the studio I run it along the edge of a gouge a couple of times and it brings the life back into it. And then I've a brand new burnisher I paid forty-odd quid for sitting in a drawer since I got it because the one I actually use is a smooth bit of bone I found on the beach in Connemara. Kid you not. Dog dug it up, I cleaned it off, and it's the perfect thing. What's the bit of kit you won't let go of because it works and that's all that matters, and what's the expensive thing you own that you barely touch? I'm not talking brushes obviously, we all have the brush we'd cry over losing. I mean the odd bits.

I've got a tungsten carbide chisel I've had since 1994. The handle is pretty much gone, wrapped in electrical tape now. Still takes an edge better than anything I've ever bought since. Apprentice I had ten years ago asked to borrow it. I told him no, flat. He got a little offended. Few years later he called me up and said now he gets it. Everybody's got that one tool. The one that's been through enough that it knows your hand. Not sentimental exactly. Just practical. It's earned its place.

this cheap artbin easel i've had forever is driving me insane. the little knob to adjust the tilt just stripped so now it's stuck at this weird, slightly-too-upright angle. i keep bumping my head on the top edge. might just duct tape it into position lol. it's ugly but it works... mostly.

third tube this month. they're all fine for like a day then whatever I stuck down just lifts off again. this one says "professional strength" on the side so maybe I'm the problem. got a pile of torn paper and a photograph of my grandmother's kitchen that I've been trying to anchor to a board for a week. it's just floating there. she'd probably laugh. she never threw anything away either, just kept taping it back together. what actually works for paper to wood without turning into a crinkly mess? I've tried mod podge, tacky glue, some spray thing that smelled like death. all disappointing.

I still use the same daylight lamp I bought in 2002, when I was finishing my master's thesis and needed to see specimen slides at odd hours. It's an old Ott-Lite, the kind with the curved neck and a bulb that takes several seconds to warm to full brightness. It has a crack in the plastic housing from when I knocked it off a shelf in 2007. The switch is held together with a strip of electrical tape. I have tried newer lamps. I own two very good LED full-spectrum lights that cost considerably more and render colour more accurately on paper. They sit in a cupboard. Every so often I take one out, set it up, work under it for an afternoon, and then put it back. The next morning I am standing at my desk, switching on the old lamp, waiting those few seconds for the light to settle, and it feels like the work can begin. I know this is irrational. I do not care to examine it too closely. Some things are simply part of the landscape after long enough, and to change them would be to change the room itself, not just the light.