Giving Up On Color-Coding My Ribbon Collection and Actually Organizing My Craft Room

I have decided to participate in Organizing Junkie's 52 Weeks of Organizing in 2011.  I'm actually super-excited about the project.  Each week, on Friday, Laura from I'm An Organizing Junkie will host a link-up where bloggers can share their most recent organizing project.  According to Laura, there is "no project too small."  Since very small organizing projects are usually all I have time for when school is in session here, I look forward to having a place to celebrate even the smallest of accomplishments!

The project I'm focusing on this week, though, was a really big project.  Several years ago, I quit my small Creative Memories business and dumped all of my remaining inventory in my craft/scrapbooking/sewing room.  Over the years, the room just got messier and messier until I had to risk tripping over something and hurting myself just to get to my stash of wrapping paper.

Now, every once in a while, I would work on organizing in my crafting room - a delightful room which I feel absolutely blessed to have which is attached to our bedroom.  I would work in there for an hour or more and get extremely little accomplished which was very discouraging so I wouldn't be motivated to organize in there again for quite a while.  In the meantime, I wasn't doing ANY scrapbooking, sewing, or decorative painting.  I just kept thinking that I would get back to doing those things "once I got my craft room organized."  

Sadly, years have gone by while I have waited to get my crafting space perfectly organized.  While we were on holiday break, I finally realized that I would never have time to get my space absolutely, perfectly organized.  You see, I was tempted and seduced by lovely pictures of other women's crafting spaces.  Pictures of ribbon organized by color displayed in adorable glass jars became the goal and I lost sight of the real goal for organizing my crafting space.

The real goal for organizing my crafting space was simply to clear the clutter so that I can actually create something in there!  The idea of my perfect craft room became the ultimate stumbling block to doing all of the wonderful, relaxing things that I want to do in my craft room.

I finally let go of my "perfect craft room" dreams and focused on making a pleasant, relatively clutter-free, very usable workspace for the hobbies that bring joy to my life.  So, I worked consistently in my craft room over break and I worked realistically with the goal being to make a usable workspace.  Rather than color-coding my ribbon collection and arranging it artistically in lovely glass jars, I simply gathered all the scrapbooking ribbon I own and put it in one big drawer.  I followed a similar grouping plan with all of my other supplies.

So, now my craft room is neat, welcoming and highly usable.  In the future, if I want to do further organizing of any of my supplies, I certainly can but the further organizing is no longer holding me back from using the room.

I even had space to move my sewing cabinet back into the craft room from the school room.  My daughter indicated that she would much rather work on sewing projects in the cheery, cozy craft room.

From this big, extended project that actually dragged out for several years, I learned that organizing is really good but too much micro-organizing can be a stumbling block to more important goals.  I may do some of those micro-organizing projects in the future (like color-coding my ribbon collection) but I'm no longer waiting to get everything completely, perfectly organized before starting on some creative projects!

To read about what other bloggers have been organizing recently, visit Week #1 of the 52 Weeks of Organizing.