Thinning it all out

I wiggled my way into my studio this week. I desperately needed to put away everything after taking two Nancy Crow workshops and teaching six classes at the NQA show. Everything had just been piled in there helter skelter, some by me and some by sweet hubby.

I started by clearing the walkways, and then I needed to make room for the wheeled crates that I use for teaching supplies. The best place for me to store them is on the bottom shelves of my bookcases. The crates are collapsible, but I figure I might as well store teaching materials in them and save myself packing again and again. Here is what the bookcases looked like after working for several hours. Can’t hardly tell anything has been done, can you?

When I started earlier in the day, you couldn’t even see the bottoms of the bookcases because there was too much stuff stacked on the floor in front of them. There was definitely no room for those three crates, but now they actually can be put where they belong. Then I organized the three short shelves directly above. More teaching supplies went there. That’s when it occurred to me that I should take a picture. Why is it that we are all so interested in other people’s studios? It doesn’t even matter if they are big or small, messy or clean. It’s just fun to see, don’t you think so?

Next, I began thinning out the books. I looked at them one-by-one as I moved them over to the right hand side of the upper shelves. I had other plans for the left hand bookcase. I piled the extra books in a plastic bin, thinking that maybe I can sell them, and the bin was soon overflowing. You can just barely see it in the bottom right corner of this picture.

Yes, I even decided to get rid of most of my magazine collection. I hope to find new homes for all of the American Quilter and Quilter’s Newsletter Magazines. At this point, I’m still keeping my Quilting Arts magazines.

Below are all the books and magazines I’m getting rid of. It’s hard for a pack rat to do, and I come from a long line of pack rats. It felt good.

DD#2 is going to record all the titles of the books so we can try to sell them. Her sweet hubby even helped me organize the magazines by year. His mom is not a pack rat. I could learn a lot from her.

I had two good motivating factors to get this done this week. First, I needed to clear away all the clutter because my friend, Beth Schillig, came over yesterday to take a look at my sewing machine, George, which I bought through her. I was having tension problems. Wouldn’t you know that I had the bobbin in backwards! I felt better, though, when she said the foot control wasn’t working correctly either. The foot pedal was really touchy. If I wasn’t really careful, the machine raced away from me. She made a phone call, and they’ll be sending me a replacement.

Afterwards, we went to see the Aullwood Art Quilt Exhibit, which is about 20 or 30 minutes from my home. It is a small show in a beautiful location. It was nice to walk among the quilts and examine them up close. Beth was in the first Nancy Crow workshop I took, so we chatted a bit about color and design.

The second motivating factor was that I wanted to put all my solid fabrics on their own shelves, away from the batiks and prints. Truthfully, there’s not really room for them in the other fabric cabinet anyway! That’s the reason I needed empty shelves. I never really collected solid color fabrics before I took the Nancy Crow workshops, but I want to continue exploring the different things she taught us, so I want those fabrics out and easy to get to. No picture yet. DD#2 needed to borrow my camera.