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So 2010 is almost over. A few days before Christmas, I cleaned up my sewing table - to the point that it was unrecognizable as the same miserable mess of drafting paper, elastic cord, homeless zippers, one million thread spools and lint that it'd been all year.
I almost don't want to begin sewing again, just to keep it looking the way it does now. But I have an owl to make for a friend's birthday, and I think I might want to sew a fleece robe for myself, so..... hello again, mess.
I have two big organizing tasks to do for the new year. The first, which I finished this week, was to refresh the art wall in the kids' playroom. Their old art wall boasted masterpieces from as far back as 2008 - almost entirely Emily's, because she was essentially the only functioning artist then.
To do this, I had to clear out the art basket (thing into which all the artwork from school, the kitchen table, church etc is dumped) and sift through pieces like these:
Took me two days - why? Because I wasted time getting sentimental and nostalgic over each piece. They eventually did get sorted - some into folders for storage, some into the trash, and some onto the three new art walls.
The second task is to - eeewwwww - clean up my sewing closet. The current situation is reprehensible - I have the space, but no system. Everything is everywhere else. I have never organized my fabric in a visible way before. All of it was in giant opaque tubs, and whether it saw the light of day again depended solely on my very dubious memory. I know how I'm going to organize it (and by "organize", I mean "make visible") but it's daunting. Worse - there's probably ugly fabric from my teenage past in there too - I'm scared about having those pop out at me and bathe me in shame forever.
But don't let me regale you with tales of my lousy housekeeping. Let's look forward to the new year! What new projects/skills/techniques/fabric-buying resolutions have you got? I'm going the same way as my 2010 resolutions:
- Do not pick up knitting.
- Do not pick up crocheting.
- Do not pick up wool felting.
- Do not pick up quilting.
- Do not buy any more filthy camera bags from garage sales from which to poach hardware, because we all know they will stay under the sewing table for months, fighting for space with the spare Singer (does it even work?) that we refuse to throw out/donate to Goodwill because we're paranoid that the Pfaff will die during a massive thunderstorm and we will be left without a means to finish the wretched Halloween costumes and will have to resort to the glue gun, which should really only be used for Supreme Cardboard, most of which is also under the sewing table, along with the rolls of newspaper that are half-finished drafts of who-knows- what pattern for who-knows-which kid.
Yes. By my calculations, that should leave me enough time in 2011 to make a few cardboard things and sew a few toys. Maybe even clothes. Some of you might call this narrowist crafting discrimination and close-mindedness. I'm calling it survival.