making progress

I think it must be true that to tidy up properly, first one has to make a greater mess! It’s certainly true in our house; WM is tidying up his study/library and one can hardly move in there! This is what my family room looked like a week ago after we started on my sewing room.

  

Thank you to all who responded to my dilemma about the tub of fabric. Many people said that they would open it and sort the contents; three said they would go one step further and photograph the contents then put them back. That was a really good suggestion; however, there were literally hundreds of pieces of fabric in that tub (ranging from scraps to yardage), squashed down and locked in so tightly they couldn’t have moved if the tub were tipped upside down!

Here’s the tub with just the top of the contents taken out:

n the end, I decided to open the tub and sort the loose pieces of fabric into rough colour groupings: white and off white, black, grey, purple, blue, blue-green, green, yellow and lemon, orange, pink, red, brown and “low volume” beiges! I also ended up with a pile of fabrics that were mostly florals but some abstract prints that couldn’t be grouped by colour. This is what part of my sewing room floor looked like last Wednesday morning.

As some of you would know, I sort all scraps bigger than 1” square into colour groups so the pieces of fabric and the associated bag of coloured scraps have ended up in drawers.

What’s in the tub now? A lot of the fabric in the tub had been sorted into groups packed in individual zip lock bags so I left those and put them back in the tub. I also put any large pieces of fabric (a metre or more) in the tub. When I’m looking for backings that will be the first place I look.

so back to my sewing room…

Here are before and after photos of the wardrobe (closet):

There’s space on the top shelf for storage of completed quilts and knitting projects until the time comes to donate them. The red bag on top of the drawers and the plastic bag on the top shelf hold metres of fleece bought on sale for making warm ponchos for disabled patients and/or bed blankets for the local animal shelter. The tub with the bright yellow lid holds scraps of batting. Two of the three boxes on the right are completely empty – I’m trying to decide whether to fill them with miscellaneous "objects” that I don’t often need or to fit another set of drawers in there! Those drawers are very useful; the ones in the wardrobe hold stash that belongs to the community quilting group, the ones in the corner near my ironing board hold my private stash (yes, it’s small)!

The bag on the floor is one of the two bags of scraps detailed in my last post. The quilt on top of the drawers is my Country Houses quilt which is supposed to be the next UFO in line – when I remember to buy more batting! The cylinder beside it is actually two sheets of Teflon to protect my iron and ironing board when using adhesives for appliqué! The white cord in the left foreground leads to my cordless iron!

Other parts of the room are still untouched but it’s so much fun to be in here now that I don’t want to tidy, I want to sew!

I need to spend some time sorting out the storage of my knitting yarns but I’d rather be quilting!

I wonder if tidying my yarn stash will wake up the desire to knit!