Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Kicking Out the Clutter: Combining Decluttering with Craftiness




One of my favorite bloggers has recently started a 'Kick Out the Clutter' initiative.  I thought it was a neat idea, and I decided to finally take some action this weekend.  I finally threw out some old cardboard boxes I'd been saving; some were for items that I thought I might need to return whose return date is long expired and the others were just good cardboard boxes I thought someone might need if they were moving.  After they were gone, I couldn't believe how much space was freed up!  I'm still on a pretty big sewing kick, and so I combined my next decluttering project with a sewing a project: a memory quilt.  I had planned to do this with high school t-shirts, then undergrad t-shirts, then law school t-shirts...you get the idea.  But it just never got done; partly because I couldn't decide which shirts to use and partly out of sheer laziness.  Well, this weekend I picked twelve of my white, grey, and red shirts from my entire University of Alabama experience and slaughtered them with a pair of shears and a rotary cutter.  I saved only squares from the back and any small design that may have been on the front, and this was what ended up on the cutting room floor:
 

I considered saving what was left for scraps, but I don't like to use jersey material unless of I have to (i.e. when making quilt blocks out of it), so I tossed the pile.  And It.  Felt.  So.  Good.  I didn't really get started on the memory quilt yet (I'm finishing up a quilted sewing machine cover right now), but I did clear out a heck of a lot of drawer space simply by getting rid of the parts of the shirts I didn't need anymore.  I'm not sure what my next Kicking Out the Clutter project will be since I could just walk in my front door and pick a corner or surface, but I hope it feels just as satisfying as this one did.

No comments:

Post a Comment