Before & After

It's hard to put your fabric away when you don't have any place to put it. My bookshelf is stuffed, as you can see.

It was pretty clear the only thing to do was to move the little scrap bins. But where? Both of these bookshelves were stuffed too.

But when I looked more closely at this one, I realized the shelves were full of old music CD's.

So I cleared the bookshelf and everything on it, and piled the CD's in a big bin.

Then I dusted and washed the bookshelf, adjusted the shelves...

and moved the little bins over.

All the mugs that had stored things like pens, tools, notepads and other stuff were dusty, so I put them all in the dishwasher and ran it. This is the stuff that was in the cups and on the shelves.

Then I consolidated all my extra business cards and notebooks, and arranged things on the bottom shelf. Those things were mostly on the bottom shelf before I cleaned it off.

After the dishwasher had finished its cycle (btw, the best piece of cleaning advice I ever saw is this: If it fits, put it in the dishwasher) I put all the pins, pushpins, measuring tapes, lint cleaners, pencils, pens, tools and other doodads back in their places. It all looked great, until I looked over at the other bookshelf.

Sigh.

So OF COURSE I had to clean and reorganize that one too.

This looks So Much Better, and now I have another shelf in the stash for fabric, so instead of sewing, which I am not interested in doing right now anyway, I can finish putting away the fabric that's all over hell.