This is my craft room before the major organization job. I know your probably wondering how I even did any work in a room like this. It wasn't that bad last fall when I went into full production mode to make items to sell at the Christmas craft shows but after Christmas I took a break and just kept the doors closed..well, until last week when I opened the door and thought I have a hoarding problem. Time for an intervention. I thought that since we are having such a long cold winter/spring I may as well use the indoor time to revamp my room. Little did I know it would take me a total of 12 hours to give it a thorough cleaning. I went through every box...you know the ones where you just throw stuff in because its convenient at that time. I sorted through everything, all the bits and pieces of left over sweaters, the boxes of small craft supplies, papers, patterns, paints, paint brushes, shopping bags full of this and that etc etc. I found so many things that I forgot about...those things that are picked up at a yardsale because it could be made to make this or that. So I purged. I recycled 4 large blue bags of cut up sweaters. Two large plastic bins for our spring yard sale and funny enough only a small grocery bag of garbage. I try to recycle everything so if it was plastic, fabric or paper it was recycled. I was actually pretty excited about cleaning (not something I normally like). Its so welcoming now to walk into this room.
I have a lot of sweater/fabric to make mittens, dog sweaters, hats etc. Normally I hang my sweaters but once they are cut and cannot be hung again I just folded them the best I could and put them on my metal shelves. The only problem with this is that when you decide to pick out a piece of material the whole stack comes tumbling down and if your in a hurry and in production mode like me, I just grab the fallen stack and cram them back onto the shelf. I decided to take a trip to the dollar store and found these "pop up" laundry hampers. These work great because they can expand and everything stays in its place. I can take one down, pull out my material and put it back on the shelf. At a $1.25 I bought a few extra for just in case. To fill up in between these baskets I have collected a number of plastic zippered bags that come when you buy new bedding. These fit perfectly between the baskets and hold smaller pieces of materials that can't be folded. I also find that the extremely large Zip Lock bags work well to hold supplies but are harder to stack on a shelf.
The wood shelves I already had in the room. The bottom table/shelf is an old 1970's bar which is turned around. Above it I have wooden shelves rescued from my old office and the other wooden shelf is the top of a hutch which came when Jack moved in. We have no room for it upstairs so its part of this room for now. The wooden table is an old table I rescued from a yard sale. It opens up with a flip up centre piece which makes it about another foot longer. Just perfect for cutting out my crafts.
And this my friend is the awesome thread holder my son made me for Christmas. I love handmade gifts and every year my son works away in my workshop like a little Santa elf. I asked for something I could display my thread on and he came up with this invention. Pretty amazing. I can see all the colours at a glance. It goes with another thread holder he made me as another present two years ago and I have that mounted on the wall in front of my sewing machine. That one I use mostly for bobbins and to display vintage thread in the wooden spools. Just love them both!
Now that its all done I can't wait to start sewing/painting again.
This is my craft room before it underwent a well deserved spring cleaning.
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