As part of getting back into a normal routine, I decided that I need to start posting more Tuesday tips, because I have a lot of them I want to share! And hopefully they'll be useful to someone out there.
In the week before Christmas, I had a burning desire to get my crafting space into better order. I get that way every year, usually in the depth of winter, but I guess it came early for me this year. I just want to sort through and pare down and make my space more efficient and pleasant to be in. Since I spend a very large chunk of my time crafting every day, I need it to be easy to access and I also want it to look orderly and cheery. For whatever reason, if my space is messy, I have a hard time actually working on my projects. Is that just me or is that a woman thing?
So one of the biggest things I did in my pre-Christmas organizing spree was to move my yarn stash out of my closet and into my crafting room so it's easier to access. After all, I need to get to my yarn on a pretty frequent basis. In case you're new to the blog, here's how my yarn stash looked before.
It was sorted by color and stored in milk crates, then stacked right inside a very large storage closet in my computer room. It was out of the way there, but also kind of a pain to get to. If I wanted a color that was in a lower crate, I had to take all the other crates off first. And if I needed something from the back of the closet, I had to move a whole stack out of the way and squeeze my big butt through. It was annoying, to say the least!
I'm not one of those people that dreads organizing. In fact, I really love organizing. It might be because I'm a Virgo and Virgos are supposed to be very well organized and tidy. It might also be because I'm mildly OCD! But whatever the case, I love sorting and ordering and thinking about how things could be more efficient. I have two problems with organizing, though. The first is finding the time to actually get around to doing it, because it usually takes several days at the very least, and I'm the type that dumps everything in the middle of the floor in the beginning of the project, so I have to do it at a time when I'll be ok living with a huge mess for three plus days.
My second problem is that I have a tendency to want to buy my way to better order. I grew up poor, so I don't know where this comes from, but for some reason I feel like I need fancy organizing apparatuses in order to be truly put together. For this project, I spent probably a week looking at possible things I could buy to organizing my yarn. I went back and forth between buying a new book shelf and buying a cube shelf and baskets. However, I really want to cut down on my consumerism and the false belief that new things will solve my problems, so I decided to challenge myself to use what I already had on hand and buying as little as possible for this project.
It ended up being a fun challenge, actually. What I discovered was that I already have a bookshelf that's the perfect size to hold all of my milk crates! The book shelf is in my studio already, so it would be easy to access it. I could pull out a crate, grab the yarn I want, and stick it back. Easy!
I'm sorry to say I didn't get many pictures of the process, but it was basically a big pile of crap in the middle of my tiny studio floor. I decided to reorder all of my shelves in my studio, get rid of as much as I could, so that I could clear off my old bookshelf. Here's what it looked like before.
It used to hold my crafting books, my scrap fabric, my journals and notebooks, and on top is my collection of 90s cooking and crafting magazines. I took everything off and sorted through it. I ended up getting rid of about half the books in the process, but I kept everything else. It got new homes in spots where I purged other things I don't need (like lots of scrapbooking supplies I don't use anymore). Here's what the bookcase looks like now.
Now I'm going to be the first to admit that this is pretty ugly. The bookcase is old and the shelves are sagging, and the crates are not very aesthetically pleasing in the least. However, it's way more useful and that's a huge bonus! I plan on covering the crates in the near future to make it look nicer and to also protect the yarn from dust and sunlight.
There's a cool tutorial over at Sew Many Ways that I plan on using to help me cover my crates when I get that far. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures!
For anyone interested, this bookshelf is a super cheap Walmart creation. It was gifted to us as a housewarming present 11 (!) years ago, but I looked, you can still find them for between $25 and $50. The top two crates are cheapy Sterilite crates I got for $3 a piece, but the rest are authentic milk crates which I like a lot better because they're a lot sturdier and also they're a standard size. You can buy those in Home Depot right now for about $7 a piece.
Well, that's all for today, everyone. I hope you're all having a great Tuesday! Happy crafting!
