De-stashing and re-creating my craft space - Pt 3

Y'all, I don't think I've ever been more proud of myself in any of my attempts to clean and/or organize my craft room and supplies than I am right now!!

I say that because I am FINALLY able to de-stash, I'm really starting to feel a breath of fresh air about what I still have in my supplies/room, and am getting super excited for my goal, and the fact that I'll actually be reaching it SOON!!!!


As a reminder, this is where I started after we moved in to the new house...

A little bit of progress in, and I'm starting to see floor, and more importantly.. can get to the closet!!

 

I went ahead and started putting stuff in the closet that I'm keeping, or at least, to set aside until I can gather all of a hobby/item to sort through, and while waiting for hubby to make me a shelving solution.

Even more floor open, yay!! Also, you can see an empty large 3-drawer Steri-lite that I've cleared out of give-away fabric...EEEK!!

Here's the shelves we figured out. I used hubby's chop-saw to make the boards and the braces, and then painted them, for hubby to attach to the wall.

I figure for now, this is a good enough way to store my spare Aida (cross-stitching fabric) still in their tubes, and my knitting looms, just like they were in the old closet:

Even more open floor space, and more cleared out drawers. We can start seeing less of those Steri-lite containers in fact, as I continue clearing them out of stuff I'm not keeping and/or stuff I've decided to organize differently for storing:

Look! Open space!! ZOMG!! 😂

This is the closet as of writing this post right now. Notice I moved my 2 french horns off the top shelf (definitely was wasting space); the boxes are what's left of my fabric I'm keeping, including a whole box alone that's project fabric for my mom's requests... 

I've also gotten ALL my embroidery floss organized into 2 of the containers I use, but the box to the right and everything on top is in some way related to my cross-stitching, so I still need to figure out the best way to organize that bit of stuff (printed patterns, extra fabric scraps, foamcore and frames for framing finished projects, etc). 

I also haven't quite figured out  my replacement bead storage since I ditched ALL 4 of the hardware drawers I had on the pegboard before (WHOOOP!!):

This is now where I'm at; although the 2 boxes with hearts in the middle, and the bag to the left are all Care Bears I plan to try and sell on Ebay (they're the only ones in my collection I saw on Ebay sold for anything, so I'll give it a shot myself!!). 

The box to the left of that is actually a serger, practically NIB that a friend gave me years ago and I've never used; the last of my extra fabric on top. The fabric I will put in one last box to put in the closet on the top shelf, and the serger I want to take out and put in the travel sewing case I have (you can't see as it's in the corner under the foam pieces, but example of what it looks like below). 

And this is the floor space I have as I walk in, and around my two sewing tables! Sooo exciting!!

Again, my goal is to have just the 2 sewing desks in the room, and on the opposite wall, have the ability to display all my finished art pieces, maybe finished cross stitches, and whatever else looks nice up there to be able to really enjoy what I've made!! It'll also be the wall with my art table (below), with the wall to the left in the corner, next to the closet door, being where I want to have a few shelves and can store all my spare canvases, brushes, paints, and all other painting supplies!

This is the table I want for my art wall/station, that I can also use to cut bigger pattern pieces for sewing, and can do puzzles and such on!!

In all this de-stashing, I've given away a LOT of crafts and craft items I finally decided I won't use anytime soon, and/or would be better put to use otherwise. I also bagged/gave away a LOT of the jewelry I've made over the years, if I felt I wasn't going to wear it anytime soon. To get an idea of nearly all I've given away, here's a picture I took of most of it...





There's 2 15-gallon trash bags full of fabric, plus another couple smaller bags, there's 2 bags full of yarn, there's a bag or two of jewelry and/or beads, perler beads, bottlecaps I'd been collecting to do a resin sealed table, but changed my mind for now, there's stickers, papers, foam puff stickers, and a bit more random stuff thrown in to these bags. There's also a home decor bolt of burgundy damask-style solid pattern fabric that I don't even remember where I got!!

There's also the pile of boxes and such of Goodwill give-away:



As well as all the Steri-lite drawers I gave away, the 3 bookshelves that were in my closet before that just didn't fit in this one, and a little 2-shelf in regards to furniture.
All in all, I believe I'm nearly there, and all that's left is simply getting my art supplies shelved/organized, the table, and then just working through the desk supplies I have (couple of boxes of pens, notepads, stickie notes, tape, etc), getting my keychains squared away, the 2 boxes of photos I have stored away to do a memory book some day, and a few other little things, and then I can simply focus on  last pass organizing in my closet, and can finally start crafting comfortably again!! 😁

I'll share final pictures once that's all done, but now I can start sharing all the crafts and projects and such I've done over the last year, as I catch up from my hiatus!!


Craft ya laterz!!

De-stashing and re-creating my craft space - Pt 2

Now let's hop over to the new house and what I've been working on in regards to organization, shall we?

First thing's first.... PAAAAAAAAAINT!! I got to paint my walls finally, since it's our house!! YAY!!

We were both soooo bored with white walls, which is typically what you have when you're renting someone else's house. so the first thing we did (after having a little 4th of July hurrah, caveman-style with lawn chairs and no furniture or appliances, 😁) was to paint nearly every wall/room in the house!!

I'm excited about the front bathroom, and that will be another post, but my craft room especially super excites me!! Why you ask...??? 

Because it has glitter in the paint!! 

Not to mention I HAD to re-paint my craft room because it used to have this...



Don't get me wrong.. it's cute? Except it was poorly done where you could SEE the pencil outlines around half the flowers/leaves/birds, and it had really rough edges... blah!!

But now:



Aren't these such super fun, bright, colors! It's just kind of hard to photograph the glitter, but you'll be able to see it here and there in other pics, I promise!

I'm also super excited for the fabric I got for my curtains of the window that's in there.....

Wanna see? Of course you do! See how well it goes with my wall colors!! 




Don't you just LOVE the colors and the print together?! And that print is just hilarious, I couldn't resist! I gave my hubby options, and he told me I had to get that one, and I couldn't agree more! 

Anywho, the room itself is a good size, with the closet being right in front of the door by way of a turn on the wall, so I will have wall space to decorate or not right as you walk in, but then you turn to the right to get to the room. This is how it is laid out; pardon the painter's tape, this is still in the process!!





Problem with the room, the only one really, is that the closet is NOT a walk-in like the last house was, which means I will have to figure out what to do with the lack of storage space and how to organize my stuff super efficiently!! EEK!!


This is pretty much what my room looked like once I got ALL my stuff in there from the old house...



Yup, I couldn't get in there AT ALL.

Yup, there are things in here that don't belong, but we just didn't know where else to put them at the time. 

Yup,.... this is absolutely nuts!!

As soon as I could though, I started going through the bags, the boxes, the stacks.... and started putting aside anything and everything I felt I could live without. 

See, with having this problem for soooo long, I've finally just gotten to my breaking point, and am DONE with the constant stress of being cluttered, having to clean up/organize, or just not feeling motivated, or like I could simply go in my craft room and, well, CRAFT! I know I've said this before, but keep reading!!

My goal? To de-stash so much that I can store all I'm keeping in my closet here, and have my sewing table, my mother-in-law's sewing table, and then a craft table that I can fold out or fold in as needed, with that being the main table station I use for my art, and my canvases/paints/brushes being the ONLY supplies really stored out in the open, so the only exception to the closet rule. 

In order to get to my goal, I have to take this:




And fit everything (but art supplies) into this:





I definitely have a hefty task ahead of me, but I'm already making such great progress!!

Here's a sneak peek....

My entire stash of regular size perler beads I'd collected over time....

And what I ended up keeping; basically only 1 fully packed (condensed where I could) each of each color, with extra black, white, and gray of course, and only 8 or 9 of the boards!

Then there was my yarn supply, which was about 3 overflowing reusable bags from the grocery store, all dumped out...

These are the skeins I kept:

These are the skeins I decided to get rid of!:

This is only a sampling of what I have set aside for give-away, and how I'm doing it; gathering all my supplies in one place of a certain hobby/kind, then doing a quick decision of keep/give-away. 

So far, it seems to be working, and I don't miss the yarn yet!!

I'll leave you with this for now, and will show more of my progress, as well as the growing pile of give-away piles as I keep going!!

Craft ya laterz!!

De-stashing and re-creating my craft space - Pt 1

Over the last 7 years, we rented a 3-bedroom house where one of those rooms was my husband's office (since he works from home), and the other was my craft room. 

Having lived at the same house that long, and knowing my affinity for learning new crafts, wanting to make sure I'm supplied craft-wise, and not being willing to get rid of any supplies EVER for fear I might need them... some day.... maybe.........

You can only imagine that my craft room got CRAZY over-crowded and full of just too much STUFF!!


Some examples of how messy my room was at the old house are below...

There's plenty of other pictures I've taken/shared in the past, but this just gives you a sample of the mess I can get to, and then have to clean/organize up.

There's also full other blog posts here, here, and here...........Beware, there's some pretty gnarly pictures in those posts, but you can only imaging how much more stressful it was for me to actually have to live with that, and how unhappy I was that I couldn't ever craft anything!!

You can also tell I've gone through many times of clean attempts, and I've had versions of organization in the past...... But the biggest thing to notice is just the sheer amount of STUFF I have!!

Also, I seem to have had an addiction? to those Steri-lite plastic drawers for most of my storage solution... yay? I had the 3 large 3-drawers for most of my fabric (there was still overflow 😕), there were the 3 small 3-drawers on top of the 5 4-drawers, and then of course, the hardware drawer organizers that were attached to the pegboard....


So when my hubby and I purchased our first home (YAY!!) this summer, it was super frustrating to have to move all this.. junk... to the new house, but I have grand plans on how I will be storing, organizing, and handling my hobbies in the future!

Stay tuned for part 2................

Craft ya laterz!!

Why is staying organized so gosh darned hard?!

I always let my craft room get so messy I can hardly walk around in there. Then I spend hours cleaning it up, only to let it get messy all over again within a matter of weeks, sometimes days! I have the understanding that being crafty and having as many crafts and hobbies as I do, my room is bound to get messy once in a while, but I just can't seem to really understand why and how my room gets as bad as it does, as frequently as it does!

I spent 3 hours in my room one night some weeks ago and another 3 hours the next night for example, and still did not quite done. I felt closer to getting fully organized than I have ever before. I even went and bought yet another plastic sterilite drawer organizer to put in there so that I can reduce the number of shoe boxes I use for things. In particular, my perler beads. Would you believe I have enough perler beads to fill 2 shoe boxes and they're overflowing AND there's more that were ordered and I'm just waiting on them to get delivered!! It gets a little old trying to carry around 2 shoe boxes whenever I want to work on anything perler related, especially since one of them is starting to fall apart it's been so full for so long.

I got to a point in my room where it was clean again, and was looking good...

See, doesn't that just look nice and neat!? That bottom right drawer btw? Yeah, that's the perler bead drawer, STUFFED full!

Only problem is, fast-forward to Halloween prep and party.. cleaning the living room up of all the boxes and things I ended up not using to decorate and you get this:

Yeahhhhh...... my room seems to end up the end-all, be-all place where things get dropped if I'm not sure where to put them for now and/or don't have the time to really be careful about setting things aside in its proper place or put back together properly. I feel like most everything has a place and I try to keep it all in its place, but it just keeps getting to the point where I can't get in there and either decide to be lazy and don't do anything, or I get the supplies out and go to another room like the living room so I can sit with BF and watch tv while crafting.

Like the other night. I had to work on a clutch for a friend but didn't have the time or patience to clean my room to get to my sewing table so I just grabbed my machine, pedal/plug, ironing board and iron and used the kitchen table. Not quite the best solution but I did have plenty of space, got to watch the big tv in the living room while working (BF was out with his brothers and I fell to a guilty pleasure of a horribly silly reality show... "Say Yes To The Dress!"). Somehow though right when I was on the 2nd to last step, sewing around the whole outside of the lining and outside pieces and over the zipper before the flippity-flop to put it all right side out, my needle got to a point where it kept hitting.... something....and I broke 3 needles!!! THREE!! The first two were while I was going over the zipper, but when the 3rd broke over just the few pieces of fabric, I got so frustrated I turned the machine off, picked up my beer and just resigned to the sofa.

It definitely helped being in a common area when BF decided to take a look and helped me fix my machine. He took a look at my machine and found that for some reason, the needle was getting dragged back a little from the vertical drop it's supposed to do and was stabbing the metal plate below it! There was a visible hole from one of the hits too!! He took the plate off and took it to the garage where he quickly drilled at the side of the hole to widen it. Once he put it back on, I was able to finish the clutch! YAY!! He totally saved the day and my sanity!! Thank you, BF!!

While this was awesome that he could help me so easily, there's still the actual matter that I shouldn't have been in the kitchen to begin with; I should be able to work in my room at any time on any project and not have to spend hours cleaning first, or worse, move to another room altogether!

Like always, this type of situation gets me to dreaming... I dream of our future home where I can put holes in the walls (more than my current pegboard which is all I'm allowed currently to lessen the fixing when we move out) and have more permanent fixtures up so I don't have to use all the sterilite containers I use now. Of being able to paint the walls and not struggle to try and find creativity in a white box. Most of all, I dream of having a space that I feel proud of and comfortable enough in that I WANT to keep it cleaned and organized and I have no problem being able to keep it that way and that just breeds creativity and action!

Here are some ideas of rooms I love elements from and want to use for inspiration:

I love the idea of the big central working space with little shelves in it for frequently used items, but ease of getting to the rest of the room...

Artful Leigh Craft Room

I love that everything has a place, and everything is in its place...

And I especially love the corner/wrap-around desk and she has her sewing machine in the corner where there's the most room...

This room I like bc it's got all different kinds of containers that are all organized as well as coordinated with the same kind of label. That and like the one before, everything has a place and it's all in there!!

Unfortunately, there's no source on this one that I can find.

Yet another with great organization but with half everything behind closed doors, the rest in easy to see/find containers..

Inspired : Papertrey & Nichole Heady

I am just soooo envious of these gals getting their spaces organized and looking so good and I look at my room and just wonder how or IF I can ever hope to be that organized. I keep trying and trying, I'll spend hours cleaning up, organizing, trying to go through old items and clearing out things I don't think I'll ever use, but it's just never quite enough.

Do any of you have this same problem? How do you try to keep your space clean? What kind of steps do you take? Is it easier to clean up after every project or dedicate a day of the week to clean up after the whole week? Let me know in the comments!

Craft ya laters!!

Happy New Year!! - 2013

Happy New Year everyone!!! It's a new year and that means ... new goals!

I don't usually make New Years resolutions, but I think maybe I should this year. I've been trying to build up to doing so many things that I feel if I just lay them out, then it'll be easier to go along with them. That'll totally work, right?? Most of my goals this year actually have to do with my jewelry/crafts/business. There are maybe a few that aren't, but most are definitely geared towards getting my butt in gear about my crafts and jewelry.

First things first: Clean that craft room!!

**WARNING!! - Things in the following pictures may scare the weak-hearted. Please take caution while viewing....

 Straight ahead, the box that's half open? Yeah, that's my friend's Christmas wreath I'd borrowed and taken down.... I just hadn't quite gotten the box closed yet. The big tubbie it's sitting on would be a mix of mine and my bff's Halloween decorations I never got a chance to put away. The box by the Joanns bag would be kitchen dishes and things to use for Christmas to put food on/in I borrowed/nabbed from my mom.

On the floor, that's the 2nd butterfly punched paint chip art piece I promised you guys last post that I never quite finished.... Then there's the little wooden shelf that I was using to work on some clay pieces one day with a friend before the holidays exploded. My sewing table on the right is right by the door, therefore, has become a sort of catch-all sadly.

This is supposed to be clean enough to do clay and resin on and/or possibly plug my laptop into that monitor to use for references when working on said clay and resin projects.

 And a better idea of the mess that is my sewing table...**siiigh**

So there you have it! My horrible mess of a craft room! This would not do! This is not a space that promotes a healthy, creative mind! I haven't been able to make anything more than simple holiday decorations since maybe Halloween? No wonder I was in such a funk!!

This last weekend, I told myself I would get in there and do what I should have done ages ago and really, shouldn't have to do at all if I'd only learn to pick up regularly.... But on to the half-reveal!!

 This is after about 4-5 hours of solid work picking up, re-arranging, cleaning, etc on Saturday. (Hey look! There IS a floor!! OMG!)

A nice view of the 2 new Sterilite drawers I got. I was lucky enough to find the same kind as I already had before. I use these for a majority of my non-fabric craft supplies and this is before I'd decided what to fill the other half of the drawers, but I'll highlight those in a bit.

I spent another 4-5 hours in my room on Sunday but I was unable to finish everything sadly. I did however get about 90% done and now my craft room looks like this!:

 TA-DAAAA!!!!! Doesn't this look MUCH better?? **nod nod nod** I am kinda proud of myself, but the sad reality is it should never have gotten this bad in the first place! I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted things arranged which is why I already had the drawers I did, and the hardware drawers above my sewing table house my beads and basic jewelry making supplies. The pegboard was built by my loving boyfriend and is fantastic since before, I only had those on my desk taking up space, or even on the floor! :(

My room isn't 100% yet, but this is where I left off Sunday night.

Since I've recently gotten into making loom knitted scarves, I had to store my yarn in a safe, clean place so I bought one of those hanging shoe organizers and I love it! It even has a little side pocket on the top 2 shelves that I can put my tools in!!

 These are my loverly Sterilite drawers and I love them!!! I also love my label-maker. It is the most awesomest of awesome tools!! I have labeled the drawers as to what is in them, and all that's really left to clean are the stragglers. The last few things that you can never really determine where they need to go, are always the last to go somewhere!! My goal in this is to make sure they don't just get shoved somewhere, but are actually organized and put away with like items where I can easily locate them later.

You may ask why I showed you all this. You may ask, "Aren't I embarrassed by all this?!" Simple answer is: yes. I am extremely embarrassed by this. I've never been a spotless kinda gal, even when I was young I had trouble keeping my room clean. But with as many crafts and supplies, you have to understand.... it's just plain HARD!! 

This brings me to my goals/resolutions, and if any of you have similar problems, these could be for you as well?

- KEEP ORGANIZED!! - This may be hard, but it's necessary! Goal = monthly spot checks through my craft room to make sure that I have given myself ample resources to keep my crafts organized, and make sure I do a sweep to make sure everything is in its place

- CRAFT OFTEN - This should be fairly easy, but I have sub-goals to help myself along the way = 
         - Monthly craft challenge - to be explained in next post ;)
         - Keep up with holidays, and try to make things relevant to them at least 3+ months ahead of time. This can't start yet, but maybe 4th of July things could be first?
         - Determine a certain number of things I want to add new to my Artfire store, BeadsbyCelleste every month so that I have fresh stock and attempt to make new sales.

- FINISH PROJECTS I START! - This is definitely something I have a big problem with! I start things, and once I get as far as realizing I pretty much have the procedure down, there's a good chance I drop the task and go on to something new! Goal = monthly checks on what I haven't finished, and make a conscious effort to finish as many, if not all, of these projects. I think maybe even designating a certain area in my room that I could put these projects so I can maybe go straight there and see what needs to be finished. This is definitely inclusive of all the curtains I promised my mom years ago as well as finishing the curtains I started for my brother (along with pillowcases for throw pillows for living room). 

- BLOG MORE - I really want to start keeping up with this thing better and I want to get so good at updating that you guys can actually expect a post schedule!! Wouldn't that be fantastic! :p

There are probably a few more things I should add to this list, but I think this is good enough to start with. I may add anything else later...

I'll catch you guys later!