I did it!

 I started cleaning the studio a week ago, on Saturday June 6. I worked my way around the room and left the bins for last. This photo was taken on Wednesday June 10. I was done everything else, and the bins were left.

On Thursday I started with the bin for Light fabrics. I had already made several quilts with fabrics from this bin and I felt it was pretty well picked over. I was ruthless, applying the rules I listed in yesterday's post to determine what I kept and what I tossed.

By the end of the day on Thursday this is what I had left. I put the "Maybe" stuff or things I knew I wanted to keep in the bin on the far left.

By Friday morning I had got the fabrics I would keep down to one large bin. A friend had come by to take the quilt batting and the bag of notions and trims. I had packed some orphan blocks to send to Julie.

I had set aside some things to donate. so Friday morning I loaded up the car and did errands, dropping the donated items to Savers. I had a lot of errands to run, so I did them all, and then paid all the bills and did the usual housework.

I had two other smaller, sweater box sized bins that stored orphaned blocks and extra pieces that I didn't use in quilts. Not shown here are dozens of purple HST's from the Amethyst quilt and blue long rectangles from Needle in a Haystack as well as leftover blocks from Pizzazz. 

Orphaned blocks were everywhere, not just in the Orphan bin. Getting them out of that bin required a lot of hard thinking. WHY was I keeping them? If I was willing to discard fabric I knew I would never use why was I keeping tumbler blocks from the Easter Basket quilt I made in 2017?

In the end I applied the same rules to the orphan blocks as I did to the fabric bits. But some seemed so basic I bagged them and will bring them to my class next week and as if there are any takers. If not, they'll go in the trash or to the recycling center that accepts craft supplies.

It took all day to sort through the very last big bin, and I pressed and put fabrics in the stash, the little bins and the medium bins, sorting all by color and size. What I had left is shown above, one deep sweater bin, and it's in this bin because I simply couldn't jam any more fabric into the other bins.

So this is the way that side of the studio looks now, and remember, the bookshelves and the bottom two shelves of the stash have been blocked by the giant bins for the last four years, so you can imagine my delight that the task is done.

The UPS guy brought this on Friday. It's the backing for the Field of Dreams quilt. I have three weeks before they come to replace the floor in the studio, and that's plenty of time for me to complete this quilt

So that's a really big job done. I will have to remember to "complete the task" when I finish a quilt, and put the excess fabrics away instead of throwing them in a pile to be dealt with "later." I have learned that

"For Now" becomes "Forever," and like the dishes, they are much easier to do if I do them right after dinner than if I let them sit until the next day.