Whipping That Craft Room Into Shape

 It's Springtime and this is the time of year when I get the urge to a.  Move to another part of the country and b. Reorganize my craft and sewing spaces.  Well, since we probably won't be moving anywhere at this point in time, I decided to concentrate on the second urge.  Now that I have three spinning wheels, my little craft room is getting a tad crowded.  Plus I have a tendency to not keep things totally squared away every day.  I'm not a slob, mind you, but over time..little transgressions can mount up into a disorganized mess.  It's rather like our lives, isn't it?  At any rate, I've decided to whip my craft room back into shape.

The first place I am concentrating on is my worktable.  I actually cleared out quite a bit of junk yesterday and did some much-needed dusting.  Today I'm picking up where I left off and working on organizing the smaller bits of scrapbooking papers and embellishments and getting them into storage boxes and labeled so that I can easily find what I need when I'm doing traditional scrapbooking or card-making.  You'll notice that the duster hasn't moved far away.  I have no doubt that its services will still be needed.  And I found one of the candy bars from Mika's shower so I have that handy in case I need a little sustenance.

My closet in the craft room is a total disaster.  It looks bad but actually, I don't think it is going to take a lot to get it whipped into shape.  I'm thinking that I might want to put some pegboard along the back of the closet to hang some of my spinning tools, including the bobbins which are cluttering up some of my open shelving in the main room.  I crammed some of my fiber stash in the bookcase when I was making room in the guestroom closets for our son and his family when they visited.  However, now that they have left, I really could reorganize, especially since I can now reclaim the guestroom.  I suspect I could find a better place for my exercise hoop.  It's obviously not doing a heck of a lot of good sitting in my closet.  Oh, I have some ideas for this space and I think it will look much better once I implement those ideas.

Lest you think "poor thing....stuck inside on a nice spring day having to organize"...well, don't feel too bad for me.  I am one of those strange people who actually enjoy organizing.  In fact, I can really lose myself in such an exercise.  I think that's why I always enjoyed secretarial work and working in a library.  I always LOVED filing and organizing.

Speaking of filing and organizing, here I have a great system all set up for filing photographs and over the winter months, I've pulled out photos at various times and then just stuck them on top of my organizing boxes, being too lazy to open up the boxes and refile them.  Bad Dee!  So that's another spot that I intend to tackle and whip into shape.  I even have old photographs from the 1800's in those piles and cartes d'visites and here I've just piled them on top of each other.  I really do know better.

So today I'm going to put on some music, open the windows and get busy.  I'll try to document my progress on the blog.  Maybe it will help get some of you inspired to do some "spring organizing."  Mainly though, it will help keep me accountable.  I've also done some Web surfing to get some inspiration for better ways I can do my craft organizing.  I've found some neat websites that I thought I'd share with you.

Carol Younge Has a great list of links to folks who have posted pictures of their organized sewing and quilting rooms. 

Over at Prairie Home Quilts, they've also come up with another list of folks who have posted pictures of their sewing spaces.

Sewing.org features a different sewing & craft room each month.

You can also find neat ideas by going to your favorite blog host such as Blogger or Wordpress  and search for "organizing craft rooms".  Ravelry , which is a free site for knitters, crocheters, and spinners  has entire groups dedicated to those who are organizing their rooms, along with great pictures.  Check out the groups "Organized Knitting Club" and "My Craft Room."

Until tomorrow, I'm off to do some organizing.