mission impossible: sewing room clean-up

Do you ever get to a point where you just can't take the disorganization anymore?
I had a little sewing night with friends last weekend and had to get my stuff together to take to my friend's house. WHAT A PAIN!! I couldn't find the things I wanted to take as I was searching through piles and making a bigger mess. Ugh. It was painful.

Here's what my sewing space looked like earlier this week:

messes always look better in black and white.

And I started grouping things together the other day. Pincushions, patterns, fabric, WIPs, mending, etc. Here's my fabric. Well, some of it.

Then I started folding it all yesterday and organizing by print. Have you see this method for folding fabric?  I LOVE it.  And now I want to take pictures like Darci did of her polka dot stash!

Do you have a fabric twin? I think Darci is mine. Every time I see something new in her photostream or on her blog, I die a little inside! Dieing of cuteness and adorable-ness. Like these pictures of the Denyse Schmidt fabrics you can buy at Joann's!

Here's to hoping I'll get my act together and then finish up some WIPs I have going!  I might be selling off some of my stash too, sooooo, stay tuned.   Nothing like pulling out all your fabric to realize you might just have a wee bit too much.  On the other hand, I've got all sorts of new ideas....

sew & tell - march and april bee blocks

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Oh, I had such high expectations for this week.  SO many things I wanted to get finished - sewing projects, organizing projects, cleaning projects...  But well, I only really got a TON of laundry finished (still need to fold some) and basically just survived the week.  My kids were both sick and then I came down with a severe case of hay fever.  Which pretty much knocks me out.  Good thing my midwife told me today that I can take Claritin!  And is it really non-drowsy? Because I promptly took a two hour nap as soon as I got home.

So I'm hoping to get to work on the baby quilt some more this next week, and I have grand plans to buy more fabric for other bedding coordinated things.  I can't wait!

I needed to get Dana's block done for my virtual quilting bee for March.  She asked for traditional stars and sent out some gorgeous Anna Maria Horner prints.  I knew I wanted to do an Ohio star, but I was worried about cutting the pieces out wrong and then running out of fabric.  So after I got over my procrastination, I ended up with this:

And I really, really like it!  I'm excited to see all the blocks put together.  It's going to be gorgeous.  This is the tutorial I used, but I tweaked some of the fabric placements.

For April, Amber asked us to help her do scrappy dresden plate blocks.  She did all of the cutting for us - I know!  How nice!!!  I realized I procrastinate a lot of projects on the cutting alone.  If all I had to do was sew, I'd be SO productive!

I loved how easy this was to put together (even though it looks hard).  She also just let us topstitch everything down and not worry about raw edges on the circle.  I just love it.   The tutorial was REALLY easy to follow.

Oh yes, there's one more little project that I've been working on.  Someone showed me this post a LONG time ago, and I knew I wanted to use the same idea to get my ribbon under control.  The problem was I couldn't find these kind of wooden clothespins.  Until last week! yay!  Now I have all my unruly (and huge) spools of ribbon tucked away in one small box.

Maybe one day I'll have enough room to put them all in cute glass candy jars like she did.  Although, I don't think I'll ever really NEED that much ribbon!  (this is obviously a mid-project shot.)

Can't wait to see what you've been doing this week!

Your turn!

Please refer to the sew & tell page if you have any questions or wonder why your link may have been deleted.

1. Link to your specific post about a sewing related finish you had THIS week.

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