Spring Cleaning

Hi everyone! How is your week going?  Mine is crushing me! Right now I'm trying to cram 5 days work into 3 days and get ready for the upcoming holiday.  It's madness, I tell you!

Today I'm introducing a new short series, the Spring Cleaning series.

How happy are you with the state of your sewing area?  Do you have trouble finding things?  Are there some times when you just want to throw everything out and start over?  I totally get that!  When we moved, I boxed up about 20 years worth of sewing stuff and moved it.  We moved quickly, so there was no time to sort or ponder, just move it.  When I opened the boxes at our new house, I was happy, but quickly became overwhelmed.  What was all this stuff and where did it come from?  Why did I still have this?  What does this gadget even do? 

It took me 6 months to work through everything in the boxes and get to a sewing room that I like and enjoy using.  This series is an attempt to share some of the things I learned while doing this and maybe help a few people get to a better place in their sewing areas, too. 

This task is so big that it has to be broken down into smaller steps.  For the next few weeks, I'll take one topic at a time and share all my wisdom (which is meant ironically, of course!) along with tips and tricks from others, with lots of links to helpful articles, too. I'll also have suggestions for passing along treasures you no longer want and organizing the ones you keep.  And of course, lots of pictures!

When I started my epic cleanout, I made a few rules for myself.  These were very simple:

     1. Cleaning out was the goal, not reorganizing things that I would never use again.  I wanted a sewing space that was useful and full of things that made my limited sewing time easier and more fun. Plus I wanted to be able to find things when I needed them.

     2. Everything I kept had to be useful or pretty.  I wouldn't keep anything just because I had paid for it, no matter what it cost.

     3.  Anything that I was getting rid of had to go to someone (or someplace) who could either use it or appreciate it.  This meant that donations to Goodwill or other thrift shops were a last resort.  (I ended up not taking anything to Goodwill, which was a win for me.)

     4. If it didn't work for me, it didn't work, no matter how great it was for someone else.

I hope you'll come along and join the adventure!  Right now I'm thinking that the last day we'll have a linkup of some sort for you to show off if you've done any kind of organizing or cleaning out.  And it's possible that there will be some giveaways and other things too.  Here's the schedule of topics for this series:

          Today--Intro
          April 19-- Books
          April 26-- Magazines, patterns, and other paper
          May 3--  Notions, rulers, and thread
          May 10--Fabric and batting
          May 17-- Scraps
          May 24-- The Big Finish

If there's anything you'd like to see covered in this series, please let me know in the comments!  No promises, but I want this to be as useful as possible for everyone, and I always benefit from new ideas, too!.

 Hope you're having a good week, and I'll see you back here next Wednesday to get started!

Spring flowers, just because!

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