I mentioned in a recent post that my studio is suffering from some disorganization. There are a lot of different ways to address the problem. The right solution will differ for each person, and the best right way is one that leads to maintenance, not just a one-time fix that quickly degrades. After all, if you go through a Marie Kondo-style process and immediately begin refilling your space and life with unnecessary stuff, you didn’t actually fix anything.
Okay, well, my problem isn’t that bad.
Even so, I feel a need to get all the stuff in my rolling drawer units out in the open. To be clear, I will KEEP virtually all of it. But I need to see it, so I know what’s there and can decide where it goes, or how to proceed.
There are nine drawers. Let’s take a look.
Drawer 1: Maple leaf blocks of various sizes; freezer paper template for Garden Maze cornerstone block; crayon instructions plus crayon-colored muslin from family vacation 10 years ago; quick penciled outlines of family members hands, same vacation. Keeping for now: the maple leaf blocks, even with no plan or motivation to use them; Garden Maze template; crayon instructions. Getting rid of those muslin pieces. The fabric quality was poor, and the family has more grandkids and different adults. It was a good idea for a project but I never loved it enough to execute. Also recycled the penciled hand outlines, similar reasoning. I’m not sentimental enough to keep them just because.
Drawer 2: Stencils, paint brushes, relief forms, and oil Shiva Paintstiks; Painstiks instruction and design book; test designs from Painstiks workshop. Keeping it all. Putting the crayon-on-fabric instructions into this drawer. Will review how I store all my art supplies that aren’t quilt-specific.
Drawer 3: This drawerful began with intention to create an art quilt, a specific project that didn’t happen and probably won’t. I have moved fabric into it and out of it. Right now the majority of items living here are red scraps. A lot of red scraps! The rest is some red and white parts, a copy of the Constitution, and seven blocks that I didn’t quite finish. UGH. I read a thought this year about organizing that said if you can do something in two minutes or less, you should go ahead and do it, rather than put it on a list. UGH UGH UGH. It didn’t take only two minutes, but I did go ahead and finish those seven blocks, since they were just 9-patches. Then I pulled a piece from the red scraps big enough to make five more blocks. And I pulled from stash some blue and some beige, to make hourglass blocks. This will move toward being a quilt for the VA hospital.
Drawer 4: Bags, mostly plastic of various sizes, mostly with zip-tops, and a few paper bags. You never know when you might need a bag.
Drawer 5: Parts. These are orphan blocks of various types, and leftover pieces of binding. I dig through them now and then, and sometimes find something useful.
Drawer 6: Scraps. (Unfortunately, it’s not all the scraps. As noted, most of the red ones are in Drawer 3, there is another mighty pile of scraps on top of my cutting table, and I’m afraid of what I might find when I get to Drawers 7-9.) Most of them are roughly sorted by color and stuffed in zip bags, something I did this year to make my life better. I do use scraps in quilts, but at this point in my life, I’m not into making scrap quilts. That means they have a very long half-life. They stay as is.
Drawers 7 through 9, and some other things: These are the ones that scare me. I’ll tackle them next time.
Catbird Quilt Studio 