Hi I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and online program, today we’re talking about how to organize craft projects. This is different than organizing craft supplies, we’re going to talk today about how we organize the projects that we have purchased supplies for and how we actually accomplish them and get them done. You may be one of the people that I’ve seen over the years that has many UFO’s in your house– unfinished objects– whether it’s the wadded up needlepoint project you have in the bottom nightstand drawer or an easel with an unfinished painting on it, these things haunt you and they bother you and it feels so much better to finish what you start.
First let’s talk about preventing this problem in the first place. If you’re the kind of person that gets distracted by shiny objects and tempted to do all kinds of new creative things, that’s fantastic, I think you’re a wonderful creative person, but you should probably put a stop to all the new projects for a while until you’ve finished the ones you have. That way you’re going to feel a sense of completion and you’ll feel better about all of your crafting.
If you are going to take on a new craft make sure that you really commit to it by signing up for a class immediately. Don’t just buy all the supplies and bring them into your house and put them away with the hope that someday you’ll sit down and have the time to figure out how to do it. Make sure you commit and get someone to teach you.
Another thing you can do if you have a lot of UFO’s laying around, hire someone to do it. You can get on Etsy and there are people that will finish your projects for you. Or you can ask an employee at your craft store and see if they know somebody who is very good at that craft, or there may be a bulletin board in that store. You can find somebody to get that done so you don’t waste those supplies. Also you might take that project and put it into a “while you wait” bag. This is a bag that you bring with you to a ballet lesson or a doctor’s appointment, where you can use that found time to work on these projects and get them done.
Another thing you can do is if you get very realistic with yourself about what you will and won’t finish, you may decide that you’re completely finished with a whole line of crafting. Donate that to Goodwill or if the supplies are very expensive and you want to recoup the cost, sell those supplies on Craigslist.
As you’re managing the projects you do have and you’ve decided which ones you really want to finish and you want to continue to maintain and work on for a while, I would suggest using what we call project drawers. Here I have a unit from ClosetMaid. They have all these different colors of fabric drawers that go in here. So you could put nine drawers and you could have nine projects going on, or as I have here, five drawers. What you want to do is limit yourself to only this number of projects that you predetermine and anything else, you can’t take on a new project until you’ve finished the ones in your drawers. That keeps everything all contained, you can pull this out and take it somewhere else to work on, and it looks nice and it is a really good way to contain what you’re doing and have a visual of what all is being worked on.
Another thing you might want to do is get to the root of why you are not finishing these things. Do you need help with the instructions? Are you stuck? Did you make a mistake and you don’t think you can fix it? Figure out how to do that and move forward. You don’t want to have all this unfinished business around your house haunting you, bothering you, tugging at you. You want to enjoy your crafting and especially enjoy the completion of it.
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