Hello!

Hello, my name is Katherine, and I'm a craft addict.

I'm a yarn addict. 

I'm a fabric addict.

I'm (apparently) a recovering sticker addict.

After quite the snowstorm this past Wednesday night, which was so massive I even got to share the experience with my cousins over 1,000 miles away in Louisiana, I found myself with two unexpected days off. Since my husband has been on spring break from grad school this past week, it seemed like we'd have the opportunity to just cook together and relax a bit. Except, not so much, because I decided that Thursday morning would be a fantastic time to begin to organize ALL THE THINGS.

So, I've been cleaning and organizing during my lovely, snow-induced 4-day weekend, and it would appear that, amid the mess in our dining room and my sewing room, I have managed to accrue a ridiculous amount of craft supplies, including 6 file boxes of yarn. 

Yes, that's right.

6

BOXES

FULL

of 

yarn.

Not little boxes - Banker's boxes.

And another full Sterilite bin of yarn. 

And, I think, 7 bins, of fabric.

And a hundred or so odd skeins of embroidery floss. 

And hundreds of sheets of stickers.

How did this happen, you ask? 

Well, I've never met a ball of yarn I didn't like, a cute fabric I didn't want to "hold onto until I can think of a project for this," an object I couldn't repurpose, or a project I could remember to finish. This past year has been kind of eventful, so I dropped the ball on organizing the place.

Also, I'm pretty much the resident "craft lady" to everyone at my church and to all my friends. You know the one - the one EVERYONE thinks of if they have ANY spare art or craft supplies. ANY.

Half a knitted blanket? (I crochet.) Check.

A half-sewn shirt cut from a pattern leftover from the '70s? Check.

A box of wire unraveled from a hundred spiral notebooks?

Unwanted dolls to repair?

Mom's old teacher sticker collection?

Every button Grandma ever collected?

Check, check, check, annnnnd...

 Check.

Okay, the vintage sticker collection belonged to my own mother, and it (and my childhood sticker album) were one of the things I held onto after I lost her a few years ago while I was in college. And the things I'm given are largely very useful (like extra crochet hooks!), though some might sound silly at first mention, but you get the point.

Now, I didn't mean to turn my lovely 4-day weekend home with my husband into an organizing frenzy, I promise. 

We'd been having a bit of a Harry Potter marathon in the evenings, while he did some reading for class, some research, or sent e-mails for the journal he works for at school. I, meanwhile, have been working on crocheting some gifts for family members. I thought I had a few more brand-new balls of kitchen cotton yarn in my stash that I could use up. I definitely found those. And an entire file box FULL of cotton yarn. (Must remember to LABEL boxes on our room-divider shelving unit.)

It was probably when I counted the 40th ball of the same brand of cotton yarn into the now-organized box that I realized it was time for a challenge. 

It's pretty plain that I've been neglecting the abundance of supplies I already have, in favor of running to the store to buy whatever yarn or other supplies I need for my latest project. 

It's time to place a moratorium on shopping for a little while. 

This blog is going to be about just that. 

While I may send my husband to our local Michael's from time to time (specifically, they have a tag punch I've had my eye on, and I have a gift card to use up), and there is some fabric I am already planning on buying for those gifts for family members - and I will mention if a project involves a new purchase - I want this blog to chronicle projects made in a massive attempt to de-stash my house.

I want this project to last a year, but I think it best to commit to smaller periods at a time. 

So begins my first month of my big home de-stash.

Let's see how this goes.