The Great Craft Room Organization Project of 2012

Kara, from Me and Elna (formerly of My Other Car is a Crane) and also the Director of Marketing and Sparkles for Hitched and Stitched, has some peculiar hobbies: collecting more dishware than she can possibly use, dancing to Motown songs in the middle of crowded shopping centers, and texting me pictures of the insides of bathroom stalls. But for me, the most baffling of all her hobbies is organization. Its like a drug to her and she has reached the stage in her addiction where she seeks out new and possibly dangerous sources to feed her habit. Call me an enabler, but I just couldn't resist her requests to let her come over and organize my craft room. I think it was her pleading, puppy dog eyes that got me in the end. So we found ourselves at my house taking everything out of the closet and other hiding places to be categorized and tamed. Before I knew it my craft room looked like this:

I don't have a proper "before" photo, so this will have to do - although it wasn't quite this messy before we started pulling everything out of the closet...

At this stage - with everything pulled out and barely a path to walk, I was curled up in the closet, rocking myself and desperately trying to find my happy place. Kara, on the other hand, was high off the organizational fumes in the air. She was literally giddy - speaking in an old woman British accent and trying on storage boxes as hats.

I kept waiting for her to wake up from her stupor and realize that cleaning someone else's house sucks even more than cleaning your own house - and to leave me with my room turned inside out. And then it would be my problem again and she would be free. I expected this because its exactly what I yearned to do. But the longer the project went, the giddier Kara got, and eventually all the work paid off. Here's the proof!

Every cubby has been reorganized and reimagined - Kara even refolded all of my fabric into neat piles.

I've had these embroidery hoops displayed with fabric for years now but it was time for a fabric update!

A view from the command center.

Kara insisted we rainbow order the thread and tidy up the ends, which used to be a tangled spaghetti-like mess. She was right!

Apparently, my bulletin board was laid-out all wrong, so Kara rearranged it while I worked on the embroidery hoop change-out.

The ironing center. Kara reeeeeealy wanted me to collapse the iron and store it in a closet but I was unmoved. We are a family who uses the iron a lot (so maybe I've been known to iron my pajamas from time to time), plus - you have to use the iron a lot when you are a sewer. I stand by my decision - it makes perfect sense to keep an ironing board in a craft room!

I am IN LOVE with my new and improved craft room and I cannot thank Kara enough for her motivation and help with this project. I can confidently say it would NOT have happened without her! I still have a couple of things to do (the white stacks are framed photos that used to hang on the walls and need to be repositioned) but I already feel so much more like spending time in here than I did before. There's no telling what amazing new crafts might be born in here!