Hello and welcome to Apatchy’s 2016.

Are you sick of seeing blogs with free printable monthly planners (too late January’s almost gone)? Or advice on how to achieve your goals for this year?  What about ideas for organising your creative craft room (and what else would a craft room be if not creative?)? And then there’s the comprehensive storage ideas to maximise space (which means minimise your cash by buying ‘storage solutions’ to load up the beast that has become your stash).

Ok so I’m being sarcastic and I know it’s easy to be side-tracked from your goals – technology alone offers so many distractions (I’m talking about the hours you spend on Pinterest or surfing the net for inspiration). As it happens I have mapped out my goals for 2016. I thought about it very carefully and settled on a three-phase approach to improving life. The first aspect was ‘to create an orderly life’ (the others are health and creativity). I had broken those goals into manageable segments and wrote to do lists and so on.

Surprise, surprise an extreme makeover for the whole of the Apatchy space was on the cards. The first job was to clear the storeroom (junk room) which was at the point where, if you opened the door, something may have fallen on your head.

So everything came out of the room (and the photo above is about halfway through the process so it was actually much worse).  Furniture was re-located, walls, ceiling and floor scrubbed and ta-da – a clean slate.

Somehow in the clearing of this area a cunning plan suggested itself – why not make that room the craft room I had been complaining of not having for years? Indeed the light was adequate and the space was not huge but should be sufficient for a table, a couple of shelves and the odds and ends that come with this quilting life.

At this point I have spent three weeks going through my stash and have religiously culled, donated, tossed, filed and labelled all of it. Cupboards have been re-purposed and tubs are colour-coded. I wanted to have all my supplies together rather than spread through various rooms of the house. Unfortunately the metamorphosis of this room led to collateral damage to all the other rooms to the extent that even the garage was affected and we couldn’t park cars there for several days.

Things are still not quite there yet but the light at the end of the tunnel is now a soft glow in the distance.

One of the problems with this exercise is that I needed assistance – and Luvvy was there. Now the problem with this is – the husband is the natural enemy of the stash. And while his help was appreciated he now knows the full extent of the stash. This can’t be good. There was some discussion about how several children could have been sent to private schools with the investment in fabric. And there were prophecies such as “if you live to be 95 years of age there’s no way you’ll even use half of this”. And then the teenager-in-residence assisted the discussion by suggesting that the television series ‘Hoarders’ may be interested in doing a show here. Unbelievers just don’t get the zen of stash building do they?

Those of you who know me well will also know that the minimalist approach to life is not one to which I ascribe. As quilters, many of us are used to the wonderful pastime of collecting fabric and for some it is an obsession.  Imagine if you actually owned a quilt shop! For this activity though, I went through each tub – each fat quarter, each piece of yardage, each kit and each scrap. As Marie Kondo taught us in ‘The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up’ I asked myself “Does this bring me joy?” If not out it went.

Now there may be one or two items that might well stay in the bottom of the bin until the next great de-cluttering and I’m not exactly sure when I will use all of those tubs of fabric and I may not immediately have a use for the multiple tape measures I found during the exercise but I was very virtuous and only used the tubs and shelves that I had. Most of the surfaces are now tidy but I have added so many items to my to-do list the simplified life is a long way off. Luvvy is still not convinced.

Someone once suggested to me that if we spent as much time sewing as we did trying to organise our sewing supplies we would be a lot more productive (thanks Deb). That’s true and one casualty in this whole exercise has been creativity.

The creativity part of my 2016 goals has not yet had a chance to shine – in fact, apart from a craft room there hasn’t been any creativity whatsoever. I did toy with the idea of challenging myself to make handmade gifts for everyone this year but since No 1 son had his birthday last week it seemed to be a moot point. At least the health is a little better. With all that exercise re-arranging rooms surely I must be much fitter.

How are you going with your 2016 goals? And don’t forget to let me know the status of last year’s UFO list. And this year’s.

I’m looking forward to classes starting again on 2^nd February and hope to have everything ‘just so’ by then. (Don’t forget that this year there is no Wednesday evening class.) I hope you’ll like the results when the ‘reveal’ shows the new space – well the old space re-arranged – because the fabric room and classroom also had a little mini-makeover too. Oh and there’s more fabric because there’s been parcels arriving this week. And some new ideas too. And even more fabric…bring me another tub!

Until then happy quilting

Kaye