January Declutter

 Last June I did a big declutter with my girls, They decided to do a declutter again this month. There's no way I can keep up with the number of things they are decluttering, so I decided to go a different direction. My freezers are FULL, both the one that's part of my refrigerator, and my upright freestanding freezer. I make a lot of freezer meals, so it's not like it's all weird forgotten food, though there are a couple corners of the freezers that are, like the bin of frozen vegetables, not sure what's at the bottom of that! I can't really reorganize until I get the inventory down. My walk-in-pantry needs a good clearing out as well, when food was so scarce in 2020, DH went shopping and brought home some interesting canned goods. Anything I normally bought is long gone, but a few of the odder things are still there, and it's time to use those up.

 I've also been a mission to use up some of the gluten free flours I don't use very often, and not to buy any more of those. I'm trying to make myself a list of 6-8 flours I need to keep on hand, but right now I likely have 30 different GF flours, starches, gums, etc... Baking yummy stuff gluten free is totally doable, but it tends to take a lot of different ingredients. I can make a really nice loaf of traditional bread with five ingredients. To make DH's favorite GF bread, I use at least 20. 

Also, since it's the beginning of a new year, my sister and I were both thinking about how to tweak our craft rooms. She decided to do a complete flip of hers, where I just had a few changes I wanted to make. I decided a couple months ago that I wanted to move the ironing station into the fabric room. Things were so busy around the holidays, and I was rushing to get deadline stuff done, so I didn't have the time to do that until now. Monday I moved the ironing station, and it fits even better than I expected in it's new spot. I can even easily plug and unplug the iron! 

Now I had an empty spot in the sewing room. I had debated on moving my vintage machine to that spot, but it's fine where it is, so there wasn't a reason to. I started looking around at my messy sewing room, and really started thinking about WHY it's messy. I realized that a lot of what was sitting around was the bins I use for current projects. I have been thinking about asking DH to make me a set of shelves specifically to fit my favorite type of project bins. For stalled or long term projects I used closed project bins, but for stuff I'm currently working on (and I'm always working on multiple projects) I like open bins. I like being able to toss all the parts to a project into an open bin, and then I can clean up quickly in case I need to switch to another job, like mending or something. The thing is, I didn't have a place to put open bins, so they were always all over. 

Now, someday I'd like to have DH make me some shelves exactly to my specifications, and I'll buy a few more of my favorite bins, and then I'll be able to use my open bins like drawers in their custom shelves. Someday, but that day isn't now. DH has been really busy, and wood prices are sky high again, so it's just not fair to ask him to do that right now. 

I looked online to see if I could find something ready made that would fit my purposes, and nothing I found was quite right. If I wasn't going to get just what I wanted, I didn't want to spend any money, so was there another solution? Since I've been an empty nester, I've been careful to not fill up all the empty closets and dressers with stuff. The only things stored in my guest room closet are guest related things, air mattresses, a cot, a pack and play for babies, extra pillows, etc... BUT there was something in there there that wasn't being stored, it was just part of the closet. 

When we first bought this house, one of the first things we did was buy closet organizers for every closet, and rearrange how things were stored in them. As rooms changed purposes, we moved the units from the closet organizers around the house to what made sense at the time. I never get rid of any closet organizer pieces, I just rearrange them. For example, in DH's office, which used to be a bedroom, we completely uninstalled the center tower, took out the closet bars, and moved a big set of shelves into the closet which far better utilizes the space for what he needs in his office. In the grandkid room, I moved several shoe shelf units into the closet so I could store toys for them in easy to grab bins. We have a five bedroom house, so we've also got a lot of closets. We've rearranged the closets multiple times over the years, just switching up which closet organizer pieces were where. Well, the guest room had all the extra pieces we weren't currently using, and those I could repurpose!

It might not be pretty, but I did reconfigure the extra closet organizer pieces into something that would hold my project bins. I'm sure I'll be tweaking how they are arranged on here, but I just wanted to see if it would work at all, and it will!

If you are wondering what that stack of purple on top is, here's a sneak peak...

It's the attic windows blocks for my youngest granddaughters I Spy quilt! I finished all 80 blocks this week, and now I've got to cut the sashing.

I've also been working on the mystery quilt. I'm not caught up, but I'm making progress. I've got clues 1, 2, 3, and 5 finished now. I'm finding sewing up the gazillion QST's from clue 2 boring, so I'm using them as my leaders/enders on everything else I sew. I'm still not sure if I have enough cut, because I'm not counting until I finish sewing what is cut. Today I finished strip piecing the connector units for clue six, so tonight I'll press and sub-cut while watching TV with DH. I'm betting clue seven that comes out tomorrow will use all those QST units from clue 4, and if I'm right, I'll have to get moving on those! 

If all of that were not enough, I'm also back to sub-cutting men's shirts for several projects. My spot in the living room doesn't have a machine set up right now, I've got a small ironing board on my sewing table, and a cutting mat on a TV table next to that. I have several projects in mind for shirts, and I know once I have those cut, I can divide the scraps into Scrap User sizes, strings, crumbs and trash. My sister gets all the crumbs, but I'll use the scrap user sizes and strings. I have been wanting to get back to string piecing for a while now, it's such a stress reliever! If my deadline quilt list doesn't fill up, I should be able to donate time to that this year. I love only having two quilts on my deadline list!