Three on Thursday: Lately

One
I’ve been desperate to start working on a Girl Scout quilt for my daughter (it’s her first year as a Daisy Scout!), but my sewing machine is not playing along. I attempted to modify some Build A Bear pajamas to fit a dragon’s tail (we may or may not have gone to buy the White Fury the day it came out last week :-)), and the fabric got jammed. I managed to get it free, but since then, the machine won’t sew anything! I’ve tried to troubleshoot myself, but to no avail. My parents, who are also my sewing machine experts, are going to come look at it this afternoon to see if we can get it going. In the meantime, hit me up on my Options post and let me know what you think I should do about the Quilt That Lingers. 🙂

Two
Speaking of Girl Scouts, it feels that most of my life for the past two weeks has been about Girl Scouts. We have been going door-to-door selling cookies, and even hitting up people at our local businesses as we do our errands, and finally my girl has reached her goal! And since I am the troop leader, I have also been registering the girls for upcoming events and preparing for our next meeting. I am tired. 

Three
I have once again turned into a KonMari tornado (this is about the third time this has happened – this time the Netflix show and my desire to make cleaning my house easier got me going), and we donated quite a few things to a local church that has a food pantry and a free shop for those in need. We are off to the library today to donate some books as well. I’m not done yet! 

Joining in with Carole this week – go over to her blog to see who else is participating! Also, my comments work now! 🙂

Three things: Organizing the craft room

A while back, I wrote a post about KonMari and crafting. I’ve had a bit of a love-hate with this method (I regret some of the clothes I got rid of in my initial zeal after reading the book), but I do love the folding techniques and the feeling of space it opens up. My craft room (everywhere – not just the closet) has gotten out of control, and the first thing on my to-do list this year is get it back in shape. Here are three little parts of the room that I’ve worked on:

One
Our memory boxes. We keep several acid-free photo boxes full of things we’d like to keep – mostly cards and our daughter’s drawings. My husband and I went through all of these this week, and got rid of A LOT. We had kept basically every card we’ve given to each other for the pasts 12 years, and we decided it wasn’t really necessary. We kept ones for special occasions (like our 1st anniversary) or more personal ones. The rest of them went to recycling. I also ordered a school memory book with pockets (which has been on my list for a while), so we can separate out our daughter’s school work and keep it all in once place.

Two
Buttons. I asked over on Instagram for suggestions regarding button storage, but the answer ended up coming from my dinner table! My husband suggested threading together the matching ones so I could take them out of the bags or off the cardboard. My daughter suggested two containers – one for matching ones and ones for singles. I loved both ideas, found a divided basket and organized those buttons! (before and after in picture above)

Three
Embroidery floss. My previous embroidery floss storage was all of it together in a Ziploc bag – which meant a lot of mess. I got an embroidery floss organizer for Christmas, and every time I find more embroidery floss (where does it keep coming from???) I take the time to wind it and store it properly.

Head over to Carole’s to see who else is doing a Three on Thursday post!

Can KonMari and crafting live harmoniously?

So I know that the whole The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up fever is kind of over, and I myself read the book a couple of years ago. But the ideas in it are still kicking around my mind. Especially because lately I’ve started to feel overwhelmed by the house again.

I did what I would call a half-attempt at KonMari right after I read the book. I ruthlessly culled things out of my closet (which I now regret – I find it so hard to find new clothes I like!!). I blitzed the bathroom cupboards to the bare minimum (no regrets – except for the one time it was very late at night and I would have paid money to have kept the out-of-date Afrin I had for my stuffy nose). I went through my books and donated quite a few to the local library (which was REALLY hard for me to do. But surprisingly, I don’t miss them). Even my yarn closet was not immune, and I took a large bag to knit night and shared it with knitting friends I knew would appreciate it (I still feel OK about that one, too).  

So with the mixed results of my efforts, I lost steam. I never addressed anything that belonged to BK (it feels kind of mean to take things away from a 3-year-old? And even a little still now that she’s 5? She doesn’t want to get rid of anything.) I never made it through my paperwork. I also wasn’t ruthless enough to have space in my craft room to give everything a home as I should have, and I didn’t look at anything that wasn’t yarn in that room either.

Now that I am feeling freaked out by my house, I’ve been doing what I dubbed “hour blitzes.” I’ve been tackling one small area of the house a day, purging, cleaning and reorganizing. I’m now down to just “craft room” on my list. And that’s going to take much longer than an hour. I took one look at the closet last week, and walked straight out of the room and drove myself to Starbucks.

I spent some time pondering how to even go about it. Because I think the nature of crafters is to hold on to lots of odds and ends – because you never know when it will be useful. 

Real life is not pretty. This is just a portion of my craft closet – the portion I’m willing to show. 🙂

Right now, if my daughter comes up to me and has a random craft idea, I can produce pretty much everything we need straight out of my (cluttered and slightly disorganized) closet. If my husband asks for some string to tie something up, I’m going to go grab that ugly ball of cheap acrylic and give it to him. I’m not using that skein of yarn for anything right now, but that doesn’t mean I won’t find the perfect project for it next week. If I need to practice a sewing technique, I’m going to pick up those small bits of leftover fabric. The fear of having to go to the store (and waste money!) every time someone has a need has kept me from getting rid of ANYTHING in that closet, because I can think of a potential use for almost everything in it.

Have any of you KonMari-ed your crafting supplies? How did you do it? Do you have any regrets?

And if you have kids, did you also KonMari their stuff? I’d love to get rid of some toys up in here. 🙂