Three and a half years ago, I set up my spare room. It was part closet, part dressing room, part spare bed, part craft room. The closet was stuffed to the gills, full of my clothes, purses, and scarves, but also stacks of cardboard moving boxes of random things and miscellaneous craft items (purchased and inherited). I had made my day bed myself, building in three storage bays underneath, and they were full of shoe bins and bags of fabrics that never ended up becoming clothing or upholstery. I had a full craft cabinet, with every sort of glue, glitter, ribbon, or sketch pad one could want, and bins of paint and brushes (separately) on top of it. The desk for the sewing machine is packed with notions and fabrics. And I had a giant tackle box that was my sewing kit for decades, always taking up awkward floor space. With all of these storage opportunities, I still had double the craft supplies than I had space to store them. Boxes were stacked in the middle of the floor and Hobby Lobby bags gathered dust on the periphery.
I’ve been psyching myself up for months to sort all this junk. A few months ago I cleaned out the closet and sorted everything by size, so only the things that currently fit were hanging up and accessible. I moved some of the boxes out and glanced through them, but never finished emptying them. There were two stacks in the way, no matter where I needed to be in the room. It became such an emotional drag that I stopped policing up after my crafts, making it infinitely worse. Today I went to Walmart to load up on plastic storage options, and I set into sorting. I got a pack of eight identical shoebox tubs and put like with like: beads, embroidery floss, glitter and glue, ribbons, wood tools, yarn crafts, and so on. There is so much, and just this afternoon I got a new box marked “2011 craft drawer” from my daughter’s garage. This is a huge job. If it is done in a week, I am gonna want a medal. Heck, I will probably make myself the medal, covered in sequins and Swarovski crystals.
Thank goodness I took a break from it to go have dinner and game night with the kids. The mental break was welcome. We played my favorite game, Quiplash, with the breathtakingly funny results. But first we played a new one called Hot Seat that started with me telling the story about me getting in a slap fight in the middle of the cul-de-sac with a neighbor I hadn’t met before that moment. (The point was no one was supposed to know which one was the one I wrote, to my prompt of “what’s the trashiest thing you’ve ever done,” but the daughter I was defending instantly started laughing, forcing me to tell the whole story.)
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