What Makes Your Heart Sing?

My eldest daughter (the knitter) came over Saturday. She came to help me clean and organize my sewing room. Let me just tell you, if you are struggling to do this, enlist the help of someone who is not emotionally invested in your stuff. It really helps. When it came to keep or toss, she asked me, "Does it make your heart sing? If not, get rid of it." That was so very helpful to me. We filled a big black trash bag full of stuff. Here are the after pictures:

 Look how neat it all is! No clutter piles. We went through every pile of stuff and either found it a home or got rid of it. She asked me how long it's been since the ironing board was folded up. Haha!

 My cutting area hasn't been this clean in a long time. She made me move stuff that wasn't used for cutting, to de-clutter the surface.

 We moved all of the stuff that was just tossed over here due to pure laziness on my part. Any horizontal surface can be a victim of this with me.

 She dusted this area and removed some items to make it more useful to me.

 And with every area, she asked me "What is this for? What do you do here?" That's a great approach to organization people. I told her the narrow box with the safety pins needed to stay here. I toss pins in it as I quilt and the narrow box keeps it steady. The other end holds the feet for the machine. She kept it, but cleared out some bobbins, which now have their own small basket and found another one of my boxes to hold threads I am currently using, as well as my thread snipping scissors. I love this.

 And now, all my containers of threads live in this basket, which was formerly full of so many different things that made no sense at all.

And under here, some project boxes and my DMC floss. That's all that is there for now. It used to house 10 years of Quilters Newsletter Magazines. I am assigned the task of going through them to see if I want to keep any of them. I have special notebooks to put the ones I want to keep in. Truthfully, there are probably less than 12 issues that will stay. The rest will either be donated, given away, or recycled. I feel lighter already. If any of my readers are looking for a specific issue, let me know. These date from mid to late 1990's to early 2000's.

My final project for the big clean up is to go through all my scraps and organize them. I think this will be by color in the wire drawers I have. The small scraps will be filed in my bins. I can do this a bit at a time over the next couple of weeks as I feel able. Small projects.

This room is so clean, it makes my heart sing! And now I feel ready to be creative again. Thanks M. You make my heart sing too. :)