"What SAL’s are you participating in this year? and If you are participating in the Olympic Stitching Challenge, what challenge are you accepting? What are your goals?"
I partially answered these questions on January 7 in the initial blog of the year but I will restate:
- The only SAL I have on schedule this year is WIPocalypse. However, I am collecting the bands from the Linen & Threads Mystery sampler and I reserve the right to take on that, or any other SAL that comes along if my stitching mojo returns!
- If I accept an Olympic Stitching Challenge (and I am not sure yet) it will be the "Endurance Race" adn teh Elizabeth Almond "Save the Stitches" blackwork sampler.
- My primary goals are to a) get my stitching space organized and b) to get back into the stitching groove.
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So let's start with my primary goal: Cleaning up and reorganizing my stash! This is going to be a long post and photo heavy so I apologize in advance...
Back on January 7, in the final paragraph of my post, I blogged about the mess my craft space was in, and how I hoped that, in 2018, I would make some progress in getting it all put back together and neatened up. This is my January progress report on that organization.
I started out gangbusters on January 1 and kept it up for a week before I fizzled out somewhat, but I did make progress, slowly but surely.
To start with, the dining room table, where my computer lives (and so where I blog and, therefore an extension of my crafting space. Here are the before pictures with the corresponding afters and explanatory captions where needed:
Next, my stitchery space, which encroaches on my paper crafting space more than it should, given how little I've been stitching this past year and a quarter!
The before pictures are not of the whole area because it is way to big to get in one photo. Besides, I am really only tackling this one step at a time!
You've already seen how I dealt with my framed stitchery that was living on the dining room table.
In my basement stitching area, there is a lot of stuff that lands on my cutting table and never seems to leave. Here is the before, and as you can see, I have roughly 12 inches by 30 inches of work space on that table!
On January 4, I set about finding a place for all those finished pieces that need to be finished that were stashed in the bin under my cutting table (under the black bag labeled Misc. UFOs.). I found a lidded storage bin in the basement and set about gathering all the finished pieces in one place:
On January 5, I tackled the mess around my sewing machine:
To the left of the machine, I cleared out the area, consolidated all project bags in the black 31 Tote and place the tote on top of my Bernina case:
And finally, on January 19 and 20, I started on the daunting task of sorting floss. AAARGH! It was a total mess... and still is but I'm getting there.
If you remember, the DMC floss that I have is n zip-lock bags on rings in these sterlite baskets, stored by color number and floss type (nylon, rayon, metallic, varigated, etc. all have their separate rings):
On that infamous cutting table, the floss that had been pulled for projects and not put back as well as newly purchased collections (example: DMC's new colors) still in their packaging. I started going through all the project bags and sorting according to manufacturer. The boxed collections were put into the cross stitch cabinet #2 on the bottom shelf, still in their shipping packaging, to be dealt with later. Kit left-overs were placed in their respective Artbin cases. DMC (some of which was already bagged in large ziplock bags by 100 color numbers) and speciality threads were bagged and set aside for future sorting: