Guest Blog: Organizing Your Crafts

Posted by Christine on August 18th, 2009 at 03:14am

This post comes from Stasha at www.shondratasha.com, a crafter just like you. She works on multiple crafts at once and has finally figured out a way to stay organized. Here is her story:

I will confess to being what my family calls an ADD crafter. I have trouble working on one project straight through from start to finish. As a result, I have multiple projects started at any given time. I’ve learned that if I’m not organized, nothing gets worked on and crafting becomes a chore instead of fun, relaxing me time. The first step in my organization was to list all my projects in an excel spreadsheet.

Creating my list showed me I had some habitual places where I stopped on projects. Backstitching is one of my downfalls, so are new techniques and running out of supplies. I now had a starting point to re-evaluate my crafting style. With cross-stitch, I started backstitching as I finished the stitching for that area instead of saving it for the end. Since backstitching makes the stitching “pop” I find myself a bit more motivated to work on my pieces longer than if I was just doing the stitching alone.

Another thing I’ve done is to organize my crafting area so that I have “workstations.” I have an attention span of about 30 minutes and I end up jumping from project to project. My room is set up so I can do that. I have a station with my sewing machine set up and the quilt pieces are ready for me to pick up and work on as soon as I sit down. I can then move to the ironing board and press the pieces I just finished or I can move to my couch and either hand quilt on a project always set up or I can cross-stitch on something set up on the frame waiting for me. The next station is my cutting mat where I can cut the pieces I just pressed and have them ready for the next time I sit at the sewing machine.

I’m lucky to have an actual room to use for my crafting, www.tinyurl.com/stashroom but if all you have is a box, organizing it so a project is ready to go at a moments notice will give you much more crafting time and enable you to grab a minute or ten without having to look for everything in order to start. After all, if you have to find all the pieces how much will get done when only a few minutes exist for me time?

Tags: craft room, crafts, organizing, workstation

Under Guest Post Tags: craft room, crafts, organizing, workstation