Partly in avoidance of the Herculean task of picking winners from the epic field of #sob18finishers and partly from wanting to cut out next sewing projects and having to face the fact that I literally can no longer function in my out-of-control sewing room, I made the decision over the weekend to hit pause on EVERYTHING and begin the other Herculean task I’ve been avoiding: dealing with my mess.

Almost two years ago, I posted a little tour of this room of mine. We’d been in the house a little over a year and the wall-sized shelf I had vowed not to exceed capacity on had started to fill in. Soon thereafter, piles began forming — on the table, the floor, the ironing board — because there’s nowhere to put everything. It crept into other rooms of the house. When we tore up the middle of our house for our bathroom remodel this spring, as I’ve mentioned, everything got dumped into the guest room, and the piles of things that had overflowed from my workroom into the guest room got moved into our bedroom. It was, as they say, a shitshow. With the bathroom finished and sparkling and magnificent, I could no longer bear that our bedroom was a storage room. So with most of the contents of the bathroom and coat closet having gone back where they belonged (with lingering piles that needed dealt with and the guest room still in disarray), I once again pushed the giant pile of fabrics and the enormous basket piled high with yarn and abandoned WIPs and who knows what into the guest room, and I spruced up our bedroom (for the first time ever, basically) while extending the guest room’s status as wholly unusable. And still there were the piles on every surface of my sewing room.

Enough.

So Saturday I opened the can of worms and began to face the contents. I cleared the guest bed of everything else, removed all of the fabric from the shelves and its other hiding places, then laid it all out of the guest bed for sorting. And so it began. Already I’ve made a world of progress! And in the meantime, I’ve continued to mull my narrowing of the SoB prize contenders. So I’ll have that for you tomorrow. The room will take longer to sort out, but I promise to let you know how it turns out!

Happy Labor Day to those of you for whom that is relevant!

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