A confession and a new project

A Confession

We’ve been cleaning and organizing at our house lately. This includes my craft area. I’ve known I have a lot of materials, both yarn and fabric, sitting around waiting to be used but I wasn’t aware how much. It’s been spread out (and still is) and now I’m faced with two 66 quart, one 72 quart, and two 64 liter totes (Really Useful Boxes are only in liters), and three or four baskets and boxes full of yarn and fabric. Excluded from these are the yarn bought for making things to sell, which take up two small totes and a shelf in our library closet as well as scrap and leftover fabric and yarn. As you may have remembered from an earlier post, I rarely buy material unless I’m buying it for a specific project. This means that all those totes and bags are filled with unfinished, or more often not even started, projects.

I made a list of all the projects that contributed to my horde and I was rather shocked at the result. I realized I had yarn and fabric for 52 crochet projects and 42 fabric projects (2 of the latter are quilts). So here comes my confession: I have 94 projects worth of yarn and fabric. Yes, you read that number right. 94 projects I bought materials for with every intention of completing and then not doing so.

A New Project

I know what you’re thinking, “Margaret, how in the world can you add another project to the works?!”

My answer is I can because this project doesn’t involve buying new materials. Since we’re in the cleaning and purging mindset I put my foot down and declared to myself that I was going to get rid of the backlog of projects I’ve developed. To motivate myself to do this I’ve created a project called “Project Clean Queue.” I’ve made rules up for myself and everything. My goal is to get all my backlog projects done by December 31, 2017 since it was a little too ambitious to try to finish by the end of this year. I plan on finishing three crochet projects and three sewing/quilting projects each month.

I also added 5 crochet projects and 1 sewing project to make a total of 100 projects done by the deadline. These extra projects are not only rounding out the number, but will also provide smaller goals for me to hit along the way. I made a rule that I can’t get materials for one of these projects until after I finished with 10 of the backlog projects.

I made other rules, too, but I won’t bore you with those. I set up a framework for keeping my materials queue cleaned out after I’m done in hopes that I won’t let myself get this bad again.

I will be periodically posting my progress and using you, my blog readers, as accountability partners.

I’ll end my post by starting to post progress with pictures of my Branson wrap that I finished as I was making up the rules for my project:

 

How big is your stash? Does it need purging, too?