Author: Pat

Things in bins, bags, and piles are finally decluttered and organized. There is still a lot to go through – precuts, patterns, tools, and the “who knows what” stuff that hides in drawers but – I’ll get to it – eventually!

It’s a relief to get all my kits and projects out in the open and listed. Some have been started while others are either fabric groupings I put together with a specific pattern in mind or, store purchased kit. The small scraps and strips that I’m keeping (from the baskets pictured at the bottom of this post) are also stored in the same cabinet.

The cabinet is in my laundry room and I intend for it to be temporary, even if “temporary” translates to a year or two. I’m not going to pretend that I won’t chase a new squirrel but I really want to focus on things stored here.

The reason you’re seeing two photos is because I couldn’t capture the entire cabinet in one shot.

I still have a long way to go but I’ve started focusing on one task a day. Yesterday I moved some batting to the bar under my quilt frame. I’ve used quite a bit the last few months but that should begin to slow up. More tedious and/or larger quilts but I definitely won’t be quilting as many. I’ve had some of these projects on a bucket list for quite a while and it’s time to say “no” to some things so I can say “yes” to others. I also want to plan quilts around the scraps I’m keeping. I’ll still make quilts to donate but, I’m setting boundaries and not letting it consume my entire quilting life like it did this year.

Moving the batting yesterday allows me to store the stuffed animals in that spot. Easy access for quick delivery if needed but out of the way.

My friend Robin had the wonderful idea of using vacuum seal bags to store 40 stuffed animals. It’s a fantastic solution to a temporary problem! The puppy in the second photo was shipped vacuum sealed just like the red package behind it. There are 9 huggable stuffed animals inside that small package, and they fluff up beautifully, even after being stored away like that for a couple of months.

Tomorrow, I’m anxious to move the 6 quilts for a Veteran’s Day event, along with 50 little quilts for the December donation, plus a few extra quilts I plan to donate this year. The shelf under my long arm is a much better place to store them now that the stuffed animals have been moved. It will be such a relief to clear the quilts off the bed in my guest room/home office!

Next week, I’ll go through additional items in my guest room/home office. I was hanging onto a few things thinking our guild was going to have a “yard sale” that had been postponed until the fall but that never happened. I’ll decide what to keep & where to put it and, what to let go of & where to donate it. I really want to restore that room to its original purpose and not being used as an extension of my sewing room!

I’m also enjoying the process of piecing my pixel quilt top a tiny bit at a time and cutting scraps in the evenings. While I don’t have anything to show for those projects yet, I’m happy with my little but steady progress!

I can’t help but sing the last line of this commercial! LOL

I managed to sort through my scrap and string storage. My focus was on how I use them, not on storage.

I emptied one cart of drawers and, surprisingly, half of the second cart. I knew that if I kept the empty cart, I’d just fill it up again rather than think about what I was keeping and why. Normally, these inexpensive carts are a bit wobbly. My husband riveted sheet metal to the back to stabilize them, so I like using them. I just had more storage than I actually needed. I asked a friend who likes to use scraps for her leaders/enders if she could use the empty cart, and she said yes so I dropped it off to her yesterday.

The carts were always intended to store strings by color, but I thought my future included making a lot of string blocks with friends so I was tossing larger scrap pieces in as well and those quickly filled the drawers.

Flattening the strings and stacking them neatly also helped reduce the amount of space they consumed. The fourth drawer was temporarily holding some possible quilt bindings but I decided to add them to my scrap bins and use with 2 1/2″ strips instead so that drawer is empty now too.

This cart contains scraps that are smaller than quarter yard but at least 5″ wide. I decided to only keep batiks or scraps that read as solid so the three bins that once held a lot of mixed prints are now empty.

These are the fabrics I removed from the scrap and string storage. I’ll go through them a little at a time. It’s going to take a few days because I need to be intentional and realistic about what I decide to keep.

I enjoy making coordinated scrap quilts with contemporary designs and I also love spectrum quilts, so the blue bin on the left are keepers.

It’s the bin on the right that will be tricky. Tomorrow I plan to go through my inspiration photos and choose four scrap quilts I’d like to make. I’ll print pictures of those to keep them in front of me with four of those drawers from the sting cart about. I ‘ll add fabrics that will work with each design and the drawer will limit how much of those I keep too. I know one drawer is more than enough for a quilt top!

It’s unrealistic to think I’ll make more than four scrap quilts next year. I have a “top 12” list of quilts I want to make, some ideas for precuts I own that I’d like to get to, and no doubt I’ll want to mix in a couple of string quilts. All those projects will generate even more scraps!

I have a couple of other bags of scraps that I need to go through at the same time. Wish me luck! &&

Still at it. Nothing very interesting happened today, but I’m sharing so I can look back in a week or two and remind myself of the tiny improvements that are adding up day by day.

I used to work with a friend named Sharon at the post office. She passed away suddenly in her early 50s, shortly after learning about her rare blood disorder. The world never felt the same without her in it.. We were complete opposites, and perhaps that’s why we bonded so well. She regularly reminded me that “something is better than nothing,” a perspective I often struggled with as I leaned towards “all or nothing”.

Today I found myself reflecting on a conversation where I had asked her if it frustrated her to see me charge headfirst into obstacles. She replied with a warm smile “absolutely not”. She said she’d always admired my passion for things I chose to pursue and wished she had the same determination. I remember being surprised she valued my approach to things just as much as I valued her patience. As I thought “gee, I didn’t get much done” I could almost hear her say “something is better than nothing” and I felt better.

I consolidated the fabrics from the first cart, purged a few short strings, and took out some that didn’t belong there in the first place – mostly 2 1/2″ strips. Tomorrow I’ll begin working on the second cart.

These fabric will go into a bin for now because I haven’t yet decided where I want to keep them. A few oddballs on the left and remnants of a UFO, Surf and Sand, that I finished last summer on the right.

I’m not at all a fan of storing fabric or scraps in bins but I need to keep my focus on deciding what to keep—yes, no, maybe. The “maybe” fabrics tend to cause distraction so they’ll have to live in a bin until I cycle back around to them at the end.

I’m not ready to go through tools yet but these two caught my eye. That pink thing is a binding wider. It’s handy to wind the binding on and then put it on the floor and let it unwind as I’m stitching it on to the quilt. There’s just never a good place to put it and, letting the binding twist up out of my lap is easier than digging this thing out.

The white thing on the right is a stand for using thread cones at your sewing machine. I never seem to feed the thread through the eye at the top properly and it’s annoying when it gets stuck there. I don’t want to keep either of these things so they’ll go on the de-stash table.

This is order I intend to follow as I go through everything in my sewing room… and I do mean EVERYTHING! It could change but it’s good to have a plan.

• Strings
• Scraps
• Pre-cuts
• Kits
• Tools
• Other “stuff” in my sewing machine cabinet and cutting table drawers
• Books / Patterns

I organized the fabric on my shelves but didn’t check each piece to decide if I should keep it. I might do that later, but I want to first sort through the items that are harder to manage and easier to donate.

I don’t intend to turn my sewing room into a reality show with daily episodes detailing every little thread and forgotten fat quarter! Honestly, the biggest transformations will probably happen this week—after that, I’ll give you the grand finale when everything’s finally in place.

Take a gander at the photo that makes me smile just looking at it! My fabric shelves are organized and effortlessly accessible once again.

This morning, I quickly took the items I set aside last night to the quilt bee and passed them on to a couple of quilters. It was a bit chaotic so I didn’t stay there very long. I’m glad I went because it showed me that placing things on the de-stash table at a guild meeting, like I’ve done in the past, is much easier. I’ll pack a few things to take there on Saturday.

The easiest task was bagging the stuffed animals and fitting them on the newly cleared shelf while I had the timer set for 8 minutes waiting for dinner to finish. A nice pan of yellow summer squash, onions and sausage. Perfect end to a rainy afternoon.

This last photo shows the result of the most time consuming work – sorting through strings and deciding what to keep (or not). I wheeled it to the living room and spent time on it while watching TV. That worked well so I’ll be going through a little every night until I’ve finished both carts. (Which I’m hoping to pare down to just one.) Through the process of purging and consolidating, I was able to empty four drawers. I’m going slow because I’m carefully making sure that what I’m keeping is what I’ll use.

I had been saving everything in hopes of inspiring some volunteers to help me make donation quilts with them. They tried making a few blocks, but clearly didn’t enjoy the process. Time to pack up the excess and share it with quilters that I know would love to have them.

Fall is officially here, the season when our house turns into a quirky version of a theme park, where pumpkins and plastic snowmen seem to play hide-and-seek and taking turns coming out to strut their stuff. 🙂

I usually put my quilting ambitions on ice until the new year rolls around, but I’ll whip up a couple more Huggables – because my head might just explode with ideas if I don’t set some of them free. There’s also my burning desire to make the Prism Flight pixel quilt from the pre-cut kit by My Fabric Addiction . I’ll be happy to work on it at a snail’s pace or in the case…I suppose a caterpillar would be a better analogy.

I’ve got a ton of fabric and a bunch of other stuff all prepped up for sewing. But lately, I’ve been craving something totally different, a fresh start.

Aside from my denim jeans quilt, I can’t remember making one other quilt this year that wasn’t a pre-determined donation project. My bucket list quilts are patiently waiting in project bins but even those don’t particularly feel appealing. Time for a reset to just make something fun for no particular reason other than “why not?”.

Let me show you the thing weighing me down… as depressing as it is.

I took these pictures this afternoon, and honestly, it’s hard to believe the state of things. Messy fabric piles on shelves, and another pile needing to be put away if I could easily reach where it should go. The stuffed animals are counted and organized, but they hardly look staged for anything. As for my cutting table, it’s overflowing with more “stuff,” and I found myself once again wondering if I’ll ever figure out what to do with it all. Frankly, I’m tired of thinking about it.

On the long arm table, there are a few bags of scraps that, sure, I have ideas for, but do I really have a suitable place to put them or even the time to actually sew them up?

There’s hope! And after looking at the photos and wanting to cry, I suddenly felt a surge of enthusiasm to deal with all of it. Weird, right?

In this photo of my long arm frame, you can see I’ve cleared out the stuff that was on the shelf beneath it. It’s the pile you see on my cutting table and the bags of scraps on the long arm table in the photos above. The pile of stuffed animals on my sewing machine table and chair? Those are there because I felt the first step was to get EVERYTHING that could be relocated or maybe even purged off the floor! – Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

First priority was deciding where the 50 stuffed animals I plan to deliver with the huggables are going to live for the next couple of months. The shelf below the longarm was the best, most out of the way place to put them.

Once they’re gone, I’ll be able to stage a few finished quilts on that shelf rather than stack them on our home office/guest room bed. It means a few bags of scraps will have to go and maybe even a few projects in bags. I’m not sure yet but it’s one of the things I’ll be deciding – sooner than later.

I’m not going to wait until January 1st to declutter. I plan to be finished by then.

I think I was more creative when I had only one set of string drawers. Why did I ever think I needed to expand storage rather than just give some away to another string lover?

There’s no hurry to downsize or haphazardly get rid of stuff. I’ll take my time tackling one stack of fabric, one drawer, and one piece at a time.

Yes, fabric prices are rising but hoarding from fear of scarcity isn’t the answer. Just as “how to do I organize all of this?” isn’t the question.

I decided my word for 2027 is going to be “Journey” and I don’t plan to begin it with excess baggage.