Getting Organized

Does anyone else measure their creative endeavors in terms of movies and TV episodes? As in, "I quilted three NCIS episodes yesterday, and crocheted the extended edition of Return of the King the day before that." No one else? Just me then... well, okay. We moved my old TV into my quilting room, so I generally turn something on while I'm working.

Yesterday, I folded fabric for two entire BBC Miss Marple miniseries. Why??

The state of my quilting room has been giving me fits. It's a relatively small room, and has been pulling double-duty as both a library and a quilting room. Inside it are stuffed five bookcases, a desk, three folding tables, an ironing board, several rolling carts of drawers, and a makeshift design wall. (There is, thankfully, a closet, which is filled with two more carts of drawers, four gigantic plastic buckets of yarn, two buckets of finished projects waiting to be given away, piles of fleece, and... fabric. Stacks and stacks of quilting cottons which have gotten totally out of control.)

(Please note how the bookcases become a secondary design wall when necessary.)

I decided to read Caroyln Wood's Organizing Solutions for Every Quilter and actually do something about the mess that was my quilting room rather than just complain about it. I woudln't say that many of her ideas are new--I've seen them implemented while reading other quilters' blogs, but it was a great place for me to start. And I began by folding fabric. Hours and hours of folding fabric. (The good part--I had forgotten about some of my fabric, so it was almost like going shopping all over again!) That folded fabric is now in nice, organized stacks--some of which fit nicely into my newly-aquired hanging canvass shelves (yay! more space!). The rest will have to fit (somehow) back into the (very limited) closet shelving. Neatly, this time.

The next step will be acquiring pegboard and hanging my most-used quilting implements within easy reach. (And, of course, training myself to actually put them back when I'm finished with them.) And then will begin the slow and agonizing process of clearing out the non-sewing nonsense that hangs out in the corners of this room, which was the catch-all when we first moved in, and never quite recovered.

It's going to be a process, and I'm sure I'm going to want to tear my hair out more than once... but I'm looking forward to the finished result. Whenever I happen to get there.