Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Organization


I've been organizing my sewing room.  We rearranged some rooms last year, and truthfully,  everything was dumped in there because we were cleaning for some event or other and it now looks like a bigger version of the former junk room. We don't need a junk room.

This is not acceptable, so I have been cleaning and organizing and creating a better space for the quilt studio.  When my sister and I went to Michaels before Christmas, I came across some plastic boxes that were approximately the size of shoe boxes.  I asked her to get those for me, not really knowing how I would use them.  I love them, and they fit the shelves perfectly.  I wound up filling all of them up.  I went out today and bought some more.

The picture is a small set of drawers made out of cardboard. I bought it a long time ago - 15 years? - probably from a Current catalog. Each drawer holds about a ream of paper.  I thought it would work great for a project I was working on, but it didn't work for that.  I have tried to repurpose this box a couple of other times.  It just looks so useful.  You can see the words where I tried to come up with a system to organize paper. That didn't work either.

But I think I may have found a real use for it.  I have been looking at Bonnie Hunter's scrap saver system. She says to cut up your scraps into usable pieces instead of keeping them in random sizes. Cutting them ahead of time keeps them from getting all wrinkled, and makes you much farther ahead when making quilts. Cutting scraps is a tedious process, and if you can make it a part of the cleanup of the first quilt, it will make it easier.  So anyway, I am using these little drawers to hold my cut up scraps. 

The liberated part of me doesn't like sticking to these limited number of sizes (if I can get 1 3/4" out of a scrap why should I cut it 1 1/2?), but overall it looks like it is going to work just fine. The box can hold a lot of pieces, but the relatively small size of the overall box means that I need to use the scraps up and keep the fabric moving.

1 comment:

Michele Bilyeu said...

I used to have some cardboard shelves and used them for years and years. I even had one that held shoes. Thanks for the memories but I had to laugh at 'that's not acceptable.' I'm usually pretty neat, but the last few days you cannot walk through my loft sewing space. Chaos is reigning as I try to pull together a project. You make me want to get it back to shape a bit faster!