Phase Two of Lockdown

Well, I haven't written a new post in a few days, I've just been publishing previously penned ones. I have to admit that in the last couple of days I've been feeling a bit low. Maybe it was the absorbtion of terrible news on a daily basis taking it's toll, the thought of another three weeks of lockdown, plus the constant feeling of being completely helpless and useless, but I took a couple of days to get things into perspective and now I'm back feeling a lot better.

I've decided that I'm now going into Phase Two of Lockdown and I am going to get more productive. I was inspired by the book I'm currently reading, called Second Hand, by Adam Mintner. It's basically a book about excess stuff and how a whole global industry has developed to deal with it worldwide.  Initially, it focuses on what happens to all the stuff that we throw out or send to charity shops and where it ends up in the world.  It is very interesting and it has at last motivated me to tackle the sewing room of doom which is currently awash with stuff, much of it stuff I will never use.

At the moment, this room is a bit piecemeal and ad hoc. I want to streamline it to make it a more appealing place to be.  It has become a dumping ground in the last few years, since I've been working and not had the time to craft and sew, so I want to try to bring the space back to life again and make it somewhere that I want to go and work on craft projects.

Anyway, on Friday night after supper, as there was very little on the TV, I decided to go upstairs and get stuck in. It was pretty onerous, as there was fabric and stuff everywhere.

I began by clearing a space in front of the fireplace. My intention was to put a bookcase from LB's room here, that she no longer wanted.  I couldn't bring myself to throw it out, so found room for it here and transferred all of my sewing and craft books from the alcove shelves onto it, so that they would be easily accessible. 

This also freed up some alcove shelves to hold all of my boxes of fabric on one side of the room, which in turn freed up room on the shelves on the other side of the fireplace to get a bit creative with all my sewing and craft notions.

I intend to put these two small sets of drawers (that LB has also discarded) on these shelves, once I've painted them with some chalk paint, to make them a little prettier. I intend to use them for pens, pencils, scissors, craft tools, stamps, etc. and have a really well organised craft/sewing space.

I spent a bit of time tidying and clearing the area around my sewing machine, removing anything that didn't need to be there. This created more space for just sewing, which should make life easier.

I also went through a few drawers full of fabric and decided to declutter some of the ones that I am unlikely to use.  I filled a whole box with fabric, which I'll probably take to a Give and Take event later in the year. I'm sure I'll fill another box before I've finished going through it all.

The fabric I decided to keep I divided into soft furnishing fabric and dressmaking fabric and gave each a separate drawer.  There is still a drawer to go through full of quilting fabric, but I imagine that I might keep most of what is in there for future use, as I am still quilting.

At 11pm I called it a day and went to bed, happy that I'd made a start and feeling like I now had some sort of sense of purpose over the coming few weeks.  I can't control what's going on out there, but I can control what I decide to do to make my home environment a better place, so I maybe I just need to focus on that for a while. Sometimes, that's all you need to change your mind set and lift you out of a dip. I'm hoping it will sustain me for the next week or so at least.

I didn't take a before picture I got stuck in, but here's a short video of how things stand now with a lot of work still left to do. It was impossible to show you what I'm dealing with in a picture alone.

I will show you the difference when it's finally done: