Crap to Craft Room

My craft room is a hazzard area. I'm not kidding, I can't even walk through it safely. It's like a hurricane hit it. The room is not the happy place it used to be. Here, let me show you what you see when you first walk in:

There's an antique school desk there, under the purple quilt. A bunch of foam, misc junk and clutter. The "walkway" veers off slightly to the right, this way is blocked. I'm a bit embarassed to post these pics online, but it's only to show how much better it will be and so that I'll remember ground zero after it's all done.


This is farther into the room along that left wall. I have one shelf of yarn (not enough space), the blue plastic drawers are full of quilting threads that I used for longarming, the white plastic bins contain sewing supplies and scrapbooking & photos underneath. The black plastic ones are quilting supplies, projects and fabric. And then a box of stuff, an easel along the wall.

The room used to be quite organized and a joy to work in. While making dinner, I used to nip in and do a few chain stitches to a quilt pattern, cut some squares, oggle patterns, whatever. It's a sad, sad, room now.

How did it get this way? It took a couple of years of neglect. At first I started to store boxes for our annual garage sale in the closet...which cramped my stash of fabric. Then, I started storing overflow when guests came and we had to clean up quick. Some of those bags and boxes got a little lost and found their way into the closet, under the craft table and finally, lining a walkway. I also lost interest in quilting but didn't want to just give away the stuff because it's good quality and hey, people would pay for it on ebay. The fabric, books, magazines and supplies are all stored there even though I don't really use it. Plus the scrapbooking, painting, longarm quilting, knitting and now weaving things. The place became a storage area, then a disaster area.

I've also had a full time job and less and less time to take care of the house, much less an increasingly cluttered craft room that makes me exhausted just looking at it. The door stays closed unless I'm desperate for something.

Enough is Enough.

First step was to get rid of the bulk of scrapbooking supplies. I've made a grand total of 3 pages in the last 10 or so years. Reality needs to set in sometime.

Second, I got rid of furniture that does nothing to help. I put the school desk into the guest room which actually looks nice in there with all the books. Next, I pulled out all the quilts and half finished quilts piled on top and put them in the guest room closet (thankfully the guest room is in great shape, no clutter). This made some empty floor space next to my yarn.

Third, get some realistic storage solutions. I bought more of those wire cube things at Target and spent an afternoon listening to knitting podcasts and assembling the thing.

See all the nice storage spaces? My hubby actually things we need more. I don't think so, but do you think that I may not looking at all of this realistically yet?

Here's where I've left it. I set aside 3 rows for yarn, each categorized by fiber types. I can already see some yarn that I want to get rid of. It's great, each time I clean an area, I can put the yarn "away" on the shelf right then and there. I have a spot of misc. small things in the basket on the lower left, a spot for knitting bags, for half finished things and projects in bags, for patterns that I find randomly in piles, for hopelessly tangled yarn that I hope to untangle and even a spot for coned weaving yarns. The right section will house temporarily, different crafts. One so far has scrapbooking (the little that I will hung on to), another quilting.

My plan is to continue sweep through the room and clean up the clutter on the floor. I'll post pictures as I go.

About the quilting supplies. I do think that SOMEDAY I'll do more of it, so I don't totally want to get rid of it all. However, for now I'm accumulating the quilting fabric in a spot near the closet to see what I have. After that I'll sort through and thin out the stash.

And then...someday I'll be done and can tear down that wallpaper and paint it something really nice and then tear up the carpet for some laminate flooring.