Organizing, organizing....

Taking advantage of the long weekend to get myself back into sewing...not that I'm actually DOING any to speak of, although I have worked a bit on the mauve New Look blouse I cut out in... September?  I have decided I'm going to put the second sleeve on it and then bag it until spring.  I mean, you never know, I might get serious after Christmas and lose some weight (or, God Forbid!  Go wild at Christmas and gain some that takes up permanent residence) and the thing not even fit when the weather warms up and it's suitable to wear.  So I'll hold off on the hems and the buttons and change the thread and get on with other stuff.

As I've lamented of late, part of the reason I'm not sewing is that there is just too much unorganized chaos around me. (or, for the SHEs and FLYbabies, C.H.A.O.S.). Chaos and clutter are something that this Tigger can completely ignore...up to a point.  I hit the 'Oh, that's bad!' point back in the summer, I think, and it's been bugging me, but it took the approaching holiday season to make it hit the Unbearable Point.  So.  Yes.  I'm working at it.

One of the organizing things that needed doing was putting away the fabric that had meandered into the house in the past few months.  As always, there was more than I realized, so putting it away also involved some redistribution among the storage boxes.

And, as I was doing that, I pulled six pieces of fabric that I really, really am going to try to turn into garments before long. I need the clothes, the black and the gray (actually a black-and-white mini-houndstooth) are wool, with moth damage, and need to be made up and worn; the bin the cotton blend black-and-white suiting should go in is full so there was nowhere to put it and the knits are colors for choir in the next two months.

And the budget needs me to sew some so that I can move money from the 'clothing' envelope to the 'fabrics and notions' envelope, if you get my drift.


I already feel my my familiar 'Oh, which pattern?' infinite loop trying to kick in but I am determined to get these sewn so hopefully when the time comes that I can actually cut them out I'll have the intestinal fortitude to just pick a pattern and go with it. ;-)


 But, as I was putting the fabric away it came to my attention that I had been neglecting the stash documentation, so I whacked some swatches as I was binning, then came down and spent a couple of hours matching what was in the swatch box with what is in the Access file.  It's not done yet, and I missed some swatches, but I've made some good progress and weeded out all the records of stuff I'd sewn but not pulled. Even with that, though, the stash is outgrowing my box.  Another reason to sew some stuff.

Finally, I went through my nearly 5-years-worth of Burda pattern magazines and pulled the instruction booklets out to put in the zipper bag with the pattern sheets and reboxed the zipper bags, so they're in a bankers box with a lid that kinda sorta fits (I think I'm going to get a plastic file bin so the lid WILL close...)  I've decided not to renew this year; I have plenty of patterns to keep me busy and I'm beginning to think I need to concentrate on basics for a while.  I may come back 'round to trendy at some point in the future, but right now trendy is just distracting.

So there's $90 that won't be leaving the bank account. ;-)

The next area on the declutter list is the computer room/office area.  I'm not really sure when I'll get around to actually straightening out the sewing cave.  But that's not terribly public, so I can grit my teeth and deal with it for a while.   I gotta get some order around the desks...