Warmth & Smiles

I love it when you have one of those days where all you feel like doing all day is smiling (and in my case, giggle). It also helped that the sun was out for a change and it was warm, a great day for productivity so decided to spend some of the day sorting and cleaning up my stash. 

As every crafter would know, sometimes things in the studio get a bit too cluttered and you just have to bit the bullet, and some times be a bit ruthless, and just have a big clean out and organising day.

Often, like many people, I have this bright idea for a project and I start pulling things out. The trouble is, I often get distracted by another project (or two or three), and forget to put things away, leading to this great big pile of wool, yarn, beads, paper and other micellanious craft supplies all piled up on the table. Great for inspiration in small doses but very overwhelming sometimes. I think sometimes too that when it does get over whelming like that it tends to prevent effective creativity, and it also indicates a serious craft addiction!

So like everyone I have tried a few different approaches to my overwhelming stash. Here are just a couple of the things that I have tried to help "sort it out":

• I made a promise with a friend that neither of us were allowed to buy any more stash until we had used most of it up - that lasted all of about two days (the first time!), one of the first signs of a serious craft addiction! Subsequent promises have however lasted up to two weeks, so some progress has been made.
• I only purchased things with a project in mind and not just because I liked them - this works most of the time, but if I really liked something I found I was searching for a project as an excuse to buy it! Not exactly the idea.
• collect up the bits and pieces for a project and put each project in it's own bag, with details of the proposed project - this was hugely effective, except I have a couple of bags that I didn't get the chance to add the project details to and I am now left wondering what it was I was going to make! 
• I talked to people and went in search for project ideas to try and use up the stash I already have - this worked effectively too, except I now have piles of bags with projects in them and not enough hours in the day to do them all! The other thing was, I also kept running out of bags!

I know there are a few other ideas out there to deal with a growing or overwhelming stash and I would love to hear from you about how you deal with too much stash.

One of the positives of cleaning up and organising stash is that I often find things in my sorting out that I forgot that I had. The good thing is I often get re-inspired to do something with it, the bad thing is in the process of being re-inspired I get distracted and get very little done.

So after spending some time sorting and cleaning, I decided it was time for some craft, especially since I was re-inspired to do something. So I have been doing a bit of crochet work on another "yarn eater" rug (my scrap rug pattern, also called Catherine Wheel) from when I did a workshop on it at Woollies Group. I think next I will do a few rows on my shawl from last month. Happy Crafting! :)