Progress on a Disaster Area

There is actually progress occurring on the house front again. Having been inspired by

golden_meliadesdiscussion of organizing her work room, I finally waded into the disaster that is going to be my sewing room. In addition to being unorganized (as opposed to disorganized, which is different) it has also become the repository of everything that a) needs to go to the attic because that’s where the hatch is, and b) things that I don’t know what else to do with. "B" is a decidedly slippery slope that I want to nip in the bud sooner rather than later. It so happened that Sunday afternoon we ran to Costco to gas the car and pick up some things that I’d run out of, and I found a bamboo "rug." It’s 5’x8’ and is thin slats of bamboo attached to a non-skid backing with a nice fabric edging around the whole thing, for $45. I bought it to put under my drawing board. My chair will still roll on it, and if I drop a paint brush full of paint, it hits the rug, not my wood floor. Mind you, the floors need refinishing, but why make them worse?

 On the way home it occurred to me that it might be just the thing for my sewing room. The wool rugs I’d been eyeing at Ikea were about the same size, but twice the price. Also, bits of thread and yarn and pins and such will be easier to sweep up off of the bamboo than off of a wool rug. I did some measuring, and determined that two of them will be just a touch small for the space, but very workable. The desire to try it out NOW provided the necessary impetus. With Bob’s help, I hauled everything on the floor out of the room and temporarily dumped it into the spare bedroom. This is a bigger project than it sounds – the floor was averaging knee deep. The spare bedroom is now just... gone. Disappeared under a hurricane of stuff. Oh well. Then I rolled out the rug, and it looked great. Once that was determined to be a success, I started organizing the stuff that was on the shelves.

You see, when I was first unpacking and stashing stuff in that room I just put anything that was going on a shelf onto whatever shelf was closest. So it all landed higgledy-piggledy. Sunday night I got the supplies and tools for the quilting and the embroidery sorted out and got a good start on the knitting stuff. Last night I pretty much sorted out everything else, and not surprisingly determined that I’ve got too many hobbies. But everything on the shelves was sorted into like kind categories, the wonderful sewing table my mother gave me got cleared off for the first time since it came in the house, AND I pulled three boxes out of the spare bedroom and put away all the stuff in them. I’ve got two ancillary boxes going: doesn’t belong in this room; give away. I’m anticipating a wholesale divesture of "stuff" and random fabric. I stopped working last night when I realized that most of what is left to be dealt with is fabric in some format – on a bolt, rolled up, folded, in a box, etc.

So.

The next project needs to be to sort the fabric that is already rolled onto bolts and is shelved. I want to have it sorted into categories by fabric content and right now it’s just stashed wherever it happened to land. At the time, the goal was "get it off of the floor," not "organize it." Tonight I’ll start pulling it down and sorting it properly onto the shelving units. While I’m at it, I’ll install the damn cross-braces too... I figure that’ll take all evening, especially if I try to sticky roll off the worst of the cat hair. If that gets done, then I can begin to assess what to do about the loose fabric. It would be helpful to have more empty bolts since that is my preferred method of storage, but I’ll make do. I’ve already decided that the shelves I’ve already got when filled with fabric are really as much "stash" as I ought to have at any given time. So I’m going to pick through what I’ve got and when the shelves are full, I’m done. At that point I’ll need to find an SCA event to start up Second Chance Fabrics again. I’m going to be giving a lot of stuff away, but whatever I can sell is cash in my pocket.