Christmas in May

You can tell if I've been crafting because when I do, my craft room is clean.  I'm really good about working in a neat area and cleaning up after each project.  However, an extremely messy room is a good indicator that I have not been doing anything creative.  The space ends up being a total dumping ground for junk and things I want to get around to doing when I have time (HA!) and it's just terrible.  Based on my lack of posting this year so far, I'm betting you can guess what sort of state my craft room has been in.

Last Sunday, I told my husband I wanted to take a "personal day."  I went into my disaster of a craft room that hadn't seen any love in literally months, and I got to cleaning.  One giant bag full of trash, four bags of miscellaneous crafting supplies given away via my local Freecycle, a bag of paper and stickers to my neighbor's daughter, two boxes of stuff for the Goodwill, and a week later, my room is finally clean.

I did the bulk of the work on Sunday, cleaning and reorganizing for about seven or eight hours.  I did the final small tasks during the past week, a few minutes here and a few minutes there. It was a long process, but one that sorely needed to be done because my storage was bursting at the seams!  

It feels so good to have so much gone!  Gone are the remnants of yarn and cheapie skeins that I didn't really love and for which I had no plans.  They were given to a woman who makes hats for preemies in the hospital.  Gone are all the fabric scraps that were too small for any sort of cohesive project.  Gone are the cards I made literally a decade ago but never used.  Gone are the supplies I've had nearly as long that I haven't touched in years to two different ladies who are just starting out with scrapbooking.  Gone is the pile of brass embossing stencils that I had never, ever used.  Gone are the half finished projects that I know I'm just never going to get around to finishing.

There was, however, one half finished project that I knew I wanted to tackle:  My December Daily album... from December 2011!!!  Isn't that terrible?  It has sat on the corner of my work table for almost a year and a half; just this huge pile of patterned paper, stickers, and photos waiting patiently for me to get to them.  Well, since my room is cleaned I figured, why not today?  I sat down and worked all night until finally, FINALLY!!!  It was done.  

It's not as fancy as some, or in a great album, or anything like that.  It's very "me" though, and it's DONE.  That's good enough for this girl!

Rather than photograph the pages individually, like I've done for other projects, I decided to make a video like I did for the Gratitude Album that I made a few years back.  Pardon the shakiness - I broke my little tripod and haven't gotten around to getting another one yet.

I'm thinking I may do a room tour video if time and my little people permit.  Just something to show how my room is set up and what I do for storage of certain items.  I've been watching those on YouTube and I love getting to peek into other people's spaces!  In all honesty, those videos are what inspired me to get up off my butt and clean my room, so thank you to everyone who posts those!  I love them!