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Simple Rules for Crafters

I've been a crafty person since I was a small child. I love making things, learning new crafts and skills, and trying stuff out. But that can really play havoc on a household. Just about everybody knows the perpetual crafter whose projects are all over the house, most of them damaged from being left out in an unfinished state. In every house where I have ever helped anybody declutter, there has been at least one box full of random bits and bobs for making stuff from.

Crafty doesn't have to equal messy, and it certainly doesn't have to equal disorderly. If you want to make things, being organized about it will actually help you make more things, and enjoy them when you do.

Several years ago I sat myself down and had a nice long talk about all the sewing pins in the couch, and how I wanted to live my life. I came up with a set of simple rules for craft projects.

  1. I buy materials for a project I am about to start, not for possible future projects or because I like them. No stashing!
  2. I keep materials with the patterns/diagrams for the project. I have a bunch of canvas grocery bags that are useful for corraling a project, or if it's something big like sewing a dress, I keep everything on the table where I'm working. We have a large house, so I can afford to take over a whole table every now and then for a project, especially because I have the next rule to help me get it done faster.
  3. I work on one project of any type at a time, no matter how tempting starting another one is. Which means that if I'm knitting something and want to start another project, I have to finish the knitted thing first. This is to keep UFOs (un-finished objects) from proliferating around the house.
  4. I work in one place on the project (though sometimes that place is anywhere there the knitting bag is) and do not carry materials or patterns or anything to another place for any reason, so I don't end up losing bits and losing ground.
  5. If I get bored of a project and decide to stop, I throw it away or give it away to somebody who does want to finish it. If I'm not prepared to do that, I stop working on anything for a while until I'm ready to finish again.
  6. When a project is done, it either goes to the intended recipient or gets put on the gifts shelf for a future holiday gift (or gets worn or used by me!). I had to take a good hard look at the things I was making and whether I wanted them or just wanted to make them, and ended up dropping a lot of projects because while making them would be fun, having them was not as interesting to me.

Don't get me wrong: these rules are hard to keep to. But it's worth it to me to not have stashed supplies poking out of every corner, and to not be stuck with pins on the couch when I want to read a book, and mostly to have the satisfaction of finishing a project rather than having two hundred half-done things lying around. I find I get a lot more done this way than I did with the Old Way (start everything as soon as you get the idea, work until you're bored, then toss under the bed and ignore for ten years).

To get started, I had to de-stash a ton of fabric and yarn, and throw away or in a couple cases give away projects in process. I also gave away a bunch of things I had finished, like a pair of ball gowns I had hand-sewn for fun, but never wore, which I donated to a charity auction. Some other projects that I definitely wanted to finish I lined up in order and finished one by one.

As far as difficulty in decluttering, craft items are a hard one. It's hard to accept that you're not going to finish everything, or even that you don't want to. But if you make some rules like mine that are acceptable to you, it really will help you be a better crafter.

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