Come on Baby, Light My Fire!

My Kindle Fire was scheduled to be delivered today so I decided to do some productive work while I waited for the UPS man.  I've been meaning to tackle the closet in our spare room upstairs.  It has gotten so full with suitcases, fabric, Christmas presents, and off-season clothes that I could barely walk into it.

My linen closet in the bathroom upstairs is full to the brim so I've been stashing some sheets for the twin bed in our spare room in here, too.  Plus there are still some of our son's things in it.

See, I told you.....no room to walk in THIS closet!

Oh, and let's not forget the quilt batting that has been stashed in here as well as Christmas wrapping paper from LAST Christmas.

The first thing I did was move the suitcases out of the closet so I could walk in there, as well as put the Christmas presents temporarily in the other room.  Then I grabbed some boxes and some garbage bags.  Next job was to sort through the hanging clothes and remove clothes that needed to go to Goodwill.  That helped quite a bit.

I sorted through my fabric and neatly folded the larger pieces.  The smaller pieces were put into some clear little bins with lids to go on the top shelf in the closet.  I also dragged my son's guitar amp (why I still have this in our closet, I don't know) and put it way back in a corner of the top shelf.

The batting was arranged up on the shelf as well, next to a tub with lots of quilt blocks for a big reproduction  Civil War quilt that I've been working on forever, it seems like.

The final result was a fairly neat closet that I can walk into and easily find things in.  And before I could rethink anything, I lugged the bags of clothes and the box of other donations down the stairs and out the door where I loaded them into my car and made the trip to Goodwill to donate.

Look at that!  It's the carpet.  You can actually see bare carpet with nothing scattered all over it.  Wow!  I WILL confess, however, that I did have to put a few Christmas presents back in there to hide them from curious eyes next week when the family arrives for Thanksgiving.  It's a big joke in our family that EVERYONE knows where Mom's hiding place is for Christmas presents but hey, if they look, they lose the fun of being surprised.  Besides, it has a nice sliding door that I can conveniently shut.

Just when I was finishing up, I heard a truck pull up outside.  I looked out the window and yippee-ki-yay!  It was UPS.  My Kindle Fire had arrived.  Guess you know what I was doing this afternoon.  I'll give you my first impressions in my next post.

Did Hell Freeze Over?

OK, I know it's not Spring because my calendar says "November."  I'm pretty darn sure that I'm not pregnant and ready to go into labor so that rules out the extra burst of energy that pregnant women get right before that trip to the hospital.  So I can only conclude that hell must have frozen over.  How else to explain the fact that I got a sudden urge to clean out my pantry closet and my refrigerator?

Before I started, it was a jumbled mess in here.  This pantry is really quite an inefficient pantry because the shelves are so deep.  Sure, you can put a lot of things on the shelves but you just can't see what you have beyond what is in the front of those shelves.  And I'd gotten lazy so had just been throwing things in there and then kind of forgetting what I had.

I went through things and threw out a lot that was long past it's "Use By" date and then set about organizing what was left.  In the process, I was able to take the canned goods that I'd been storing on our table in the kitchen and move them into the pantry.

We don't eat at this table and it really has become just a "catch-all" place.  I had been putting whatever canned goods I was going to be using for the week's menus here on this table.  Plus when we got our gas oven, we lost some storage space in the bottom drawer of the stove so we'd been storing the broiler pan and griddle on this table, too while we tried to figure out where we were going to put it.  Now that I've cleaned out the pantry, I can fit it all in there.

Next stop was the refrigerator.  I had been getting pretty tired of all the containers of leftovers clogging up the fridge.  My method of eating leftovers is to eat it each day until it is gone.  That's not how the Commander does it.  He "contains" it and then forgets it.  So I fix something different each evening.  Plus I was tired of looking at jars of food that had been in there for ages.  I'm telling you, I was ruthless.  I dumped a lot of jars of pickles down that drain....so much so that the vinegar smell was making me choke and my eyes burn.

 I also found some real winners among the "expired" foods.  Here's one that I purchased in April 2008.  Sheesh!  Obviously I wasn't doing much cooking requiring pesto sauce.  I think the winner was a can that had an expiration date in 2007.   It's gone now.

And that's the extent of today's clean-up.  If it is feeling a little cooler out your way, just consider the possibility that perhaps hell really HAS frozen over.

I Can See a Work Surface

How about that?  I've made some progress on cleaning up and reorganizing my craft room.  I've tackled and tamed the work table so that now I can actually see a work surface.  A nice clean expanse of table always makes me want to sit down and do some scrapbooking or other crafting.

This is what the work table looks like standing back from it.  I got rid of some extra stuff that was cluttering up the shelves at the back and repositioned some of the boxes that hold my different matting papers for scrapbooking. Then, of course, I labeled all of the boxes so that I can see at a glance what each box contains.  I moved the phone off of the makeshift stand (which was a leftover organ bench half-jutting out from under my table) and put it on top of one of the blue mini-drawer units to the side of my table.  I have an extra-long cord on the phone so I can move it down onto the table surface if I need to or bring it over to the computer desk, if I want to talk and compute at the same time.

I also tackled the closet in the craft room.  I decided not to use pegboard.  The Commander doesn't like to nail any more things into the wall than he has to so, for now, I'll see if we can make do without it.  Instead of putting my bobbins on pegboard, I found some wicker baskets and have separated the bobbins according to which spinning wheel they go with and put them in the baskets.  I put those baskets on some of the open shelving on the other side of the room.  I'll show you that side as I get it better organized.  I also cleaned out the top of the closet a bit and relabeled the containers on the top so I know what is where.  I cleaned off the top of the white shelving units.  I found a cute Easter bucket and am using that to store my larger straight needles, with my interchangeable needle sets stored behind the bucket.  My circulars are hanging to the right, out of the picture.  I sorted through the drawers and put like things together and then labeled all the drawers.

Finally, I took a bit of a break this morning to work on the Kathleen T. Carty square in the Great American Aran Afghan book.  It's always a mystery to me how some of these squares are going to actually come together.  When I got to our afghan class last evening, we were tackling picking up the stitches around the inside of the outer edge in preparation for knitting the center of the square.

First, I hadn't knit with DPNs in a long time.  I've been using circular needles and the Magic Loop method for quite a while now and have really gotten spoiled.  I felt like I was all thumbs.  Then, after we picked up all those stitches, the next thing the designer has us do is bind them all off.  Say what?  I asked our instructor twice, just to make sure I was hearing her correctly AND understanding what the pattern seemed to be telling us to do.  It just didn't seem to make any sense.  However, I'm finding that if you just take it on faith and follow the patterns in this book step by step, somehow they mostly DO come together and look like the pictures.  For those occasions when I just can't seem to figure out what in the world the designers are trying to tell me, that's when I'm extremely glad that I'm taking a class with other knitters and tackling this afghan in a group.  It's nice to have an instructor that can give us little "heads-up" tips for those "landmines" that seem to abound in some of these squares.

And I am so loving the fact that we are basically knitting up one square a month.  I'm not feeling rushed and I can really take my time as I continue to master some skills that I normally would not have had the confidence to try on my own.  Plus, I really like meeting with the same group of ladies each month.  They are like a support group and a cheering squad all rolled into one.  Even though I've knitted for over 50 years, I've never been a very adventurous knitter so I've tended to stick with types of knitting that I knew I could easily do.  This afghan has really forced me to stretch outside of my comfort zone.  That's been a good thing.  And I'm so delighted to report that I'm feeling VERY comfortable with knitting cables now.  In fact, I'm enjoying knitting them.  Who would have 'thunk' it, as my mom would say?

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.