"What SAL’s are you participating in this year? and If you are participating in the Olympic Stitching Challenge, what challenge are you accepting? What are your goals?"
I partially answered these questions on January 7 in the initial blog of the year but I will restate:
The only SAL I have on schedule this year is WIPocalypse. However, I am collecting the bands from the Linen & Threads Mystery sampler and I reserve the right to take on that, or any other SAL that comes along if my stitching mojo returns!
If I accept an Olympic Stitching Challenge (and I am not sure yet) it will be the "Endurance Race" adn teh Elizabeth Almond "Save the Stitches" blackwork sampler.
My primary goals are to a) get my stitching space organized and b) to get back into the stitching groove.
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So let's start with my primary goal: Cleaning up and reorganizing my stash! This is going to be a long post and photo heavy so I apologize in advance...
Back on January 7, in the final paragraph of my post, I blogged about the mess my craft space was in, and how I hoped that, in 2018, I would make some progress in getting it all put back together and neatened up. This is my January progress report on that organization.
I started out gangbusters on January 1 and kept it up for a week before I fizzled out somewhat, but I did make progress, slowly but surely.
To start with, the dining room table, where my computer lives (and so where I blog and, therefore an extension of my crafting space. Here are the before pictures with the corresponding afters and explanatory captions where needed:
BEFORE: My dining room table with tax records, bill paying essentials and laptop were I blog.
On January 1, I set to work on that box to the top and right of my laptop. It contained charitable solicitations which were, for the most part, duplicates of ones I had already paid... I filled a kitchen trash bag (which you an just make out at the bottom left of teh after photo) and emptied that box. I didn't even sort. I just emptied! This took roughly an hour... and was relatively painless:
Before close-up
On January 3, my husband and I worked on getting these framed pieces of stitchery off of the table and into plastic bags before storing them in the basement with our other framed pictures.
Before - stitchery stacked on table.
Bagged up stitchery accumulating on the living room sofa
Stitchery on shelves in the basement
After...
On January 6, I cleared various receipts, sorted, and bagged them into manila envelopes according to tax category. Benefit of doing this? Two checks found that needed to be deposited!
Before - receipts to be filed
Receipts filed
Found treasure!
Finally, on January 7, I tackled the area to the left of my laptop which held bills to be paid and various bill-paying requirements (new checks, deposit slips, envelopes, etc.), membership cards and discount coupons, and miscellaneous "stuff". The result: a cleared workspace so I can do my taxes, pay my bills, AND blog.
Before
After!
So that was basically less than 24 hours in one week. Still to be done... box up last year's taxes (that banker's box on the left of the table behind the laptop in the photo above and move several boxes from the corners of the dining room to a storage location (TBD). Then all that needs to be done is tidy up the tchotchkes and the dining room is serviceable again on relatively short notice (sure, I'd have to move a lot of studs and Charlie would have to move his puzzles but you know what I mean)!
Boxes of tax data from past years
misc. stuff in a corner
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Next, my stitchery space, which encroaches on my paper crafting space more than it should, given how little I've been stitching this past year and a quarter!
The before pictures are not of the whole area because it is way to big to get in one photo. Besides, I am really only tackling this one step at a time!
You've already seen how I dealt with my framed stitchery that was living on the dining room table.
In my basement stitching area, there is a lot of stuff that lands on my cutting table and never seems to leave. Here is the before, and as you can see, I have roughly 12 inches by 30 inches of work space on that table!
I started there, on January 2, with beads and buttons and charms and the like. Here are the close-ups of my progress:
misc bags and bins of beads and buttons
tubed beads, bagged beads sorted, and button - from left to right
After: top shelf left, buttons on top of beads bins. Blue bin holds bead tubes.
Next, there was that bin of needlepoint wool in front of my stitchery cabinets:
If you look behind it, there is an area labeled polyfill and believe me, it was FILLED with polyfill! It also held my needlepoint blocking board and some extra-long rolls of needlework fabric, some in tubes and some not. On January 2, I set about clearing that corner and getting as much of those yarn bins out of the way.
nook cleared
contents of nook
nook after
Let's just hope I don't need to block any large needlepoint pieces in the near future because that blocking board is WAY in the back! But I'm hoping that, when I get finished here, there will be a better place to put that blocking board!
On January 4, I set about finding a place for all those finished pieces that need to be finished that were stashed in a bin under my cutting table (under the black bag labeled Misc. UFOs.). I found a lidded storage bin in the basement and set about gathering all the finished pieces in one place:
filled bin
space for???
This did clear a space for something else but the bin still needs to find home...
On January 5, I tackled the mess around my sewing machine:
I attacked this in stages:
To the left of the machine, I cleared out the area, consolidated all project bags in the black 31 Tote and place the tote on top of my Bernina case:
To the right of the machine, I cleared out the area and found other places for most of it. All that remains is my old singer in it's case:
And finally, I tackled the surface of the machine table:
Before
After
Much of the stuff that was on top of the Singer and the Bernina table ended up in a reorganized top shelf of my quilting supply cabinet:
or in a bin in the door:
The fabrics in this cabinet and in the one on the other side of my sewing machine need a major sort but that will come later...
And finally, on January 19 and 20, I started on the daunting task of sorting floss. AAARGH! It was a total mess... and still is but I'm getting there.
If you remember, the DMC floss that I have is n zip-lock bags on rings in these sterlite baskets, stored by color number and floss type (nylon, rayon, metallic, varigated, etc. all have their separate rings):
The rest of my floss is in different containers, labeled by manufacturer. Anchor is in a Sterlite bin on rings, GAST and weeks and similar threads all have their individual Artbin cases, left-over kit threads have their own Artbin cases, and some silks are in special boxes. And all were/are scattered throughout my cross-stitch cabinets.
On that infamous cutting table, the floss that had been pulled for projects and not put back as well as newly purchased collections (example: DMC's new colors) still in their packaging. I started going through all the project bags and sorting according to manufacturer. The boxed collections were put into the cross stitch cabinet #2 on the bottom shelf, still in their shipping packaging, to be dealt with later. Kit left-overs were placed in their respective Artbin cases. DMC (some of which was already bagged in large ziplock bags by 100 color numbers) and speciality threads were bagged and set aside for future sorting:
under and behind blue box is card boxes for Caron silks
Bottom shelf left DMC collections, right Anchor Shelf above left more DMC collections
ArtBin cases
speciality (left) and DMC (right) to be sorted
Now that is not ALL the organizing I did this month --- there was, of necessity, some papercrafting organizing done as well --- simply because the two areas are overlapping in both storage and mess (I hope to have my paper crafting organization progress on my Carol Stamps blog on Tuesday...)! It may look as if I have tackled the easy bits first (probably true... I mean, I didn't alphabetize my beads or arrange by color; ditto buttons; and I still have those four cabinets to empty out, sort, and reshelve). Still, I think I made some progress on all fronts and and am encouraged enough to keep on this task in February..
