I finally cleaned my craft area!

It's been a long time coming, and when I say long time I mean MONTHS. As my craft stash has grown, so has the mess it leaves every time I try to make anything.

See?! It was a mess. There were scraps of paper and spools of ribbon everywhere. I found some in boxes, under papers and some were even just laying on the floor. As you can see from the pic above, I have ribbon in 2 spots. On the right on top of my storage drawers and then hanging on a rod in the hutch.

There's a better look at the hutch in all its ribbon and paper glory. Paper all lined up on top and ribbon spilling out below. I couldn't find anything I wanted to use unless I dug through for at least 5 minutes and even then sometimes it was a crap shoot.

And then there's this little nugget of crafting goodness. The TV tray. It pretty much collects odds and ends I'm too lazy to stand up to put away because it's more than an arm's length away and I'm in the middle of a project. The sad part is that most of the time whatever gets put there stays there. I'm apparently too lazy to clean up after the project is done as well.

What took months to pile and accumulate took about 5 hours to clean up. I started working about 1pm and finished for the night around 5:30 when I had to start cooking dinner. I started back up this morning and put the last little bits in their places. That took probably about 30 minutes.

Here's the finished room:

Note that I don't have ribbon spilling from the rod anymore and the TV tray isn't piled quite as high (some of that stuff has since found another home, so no worries). Everything is also placed neatly into a box that is labeled with the contents. I even sorted through my paper so it wasn't all willy-nilly.

And since I know you're wondering about all that glorious ribbon, here's how that area cleaned up:

I organized it by type. All the thin, plain, double sided satin ribbons are on one rod. All the medium, patterned, different types of material ribbons on another. All the large, printed or plain, in various materials on still a few more (they fit fewer spools per rod since they're so wide). I even have a rod for extra, unopened spools of ribbons I already have an open spool of. In the front little tray are the smaller scrapbook ribbons.

So there you have it. How 5-ish hours of cleaning can turn a major mess into a more organized chaos (is a crafter's space EVER really neat? I think not).