My 2014 New Year post didn't get published in the New Year; here it is, February already, and I'm still adding bits to that post. Time to just finish it, and make new resolutions throughout the year if I need to.
One thing I'd love to do this year is catalogue my vintage machines,
organise them and all their spare parts neatly, and start to sew on a
lot more of them, the way Bonnie does.
I'm going to make a concentrated effort to clear out the very old UFOs. At the end of last year, while I was hunting for something to finish quickly, I realised that I don't have a lot left from my early quilting days, and it would be great if I had NO unfinished projects from the '80s or '90s. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be able to say that they're all done. Maybe they won't be quilted ,but they won't be in pieces anymore.
I want to set up guilt-free quilt storage for all my finished tops and finished quilts. I hate letting tops get wrinkled from being crammed into drawers, and having my quilts in a 20 high stack just gives me the irrits. So I will be investigating different ways to store things with no long term ill effects.
This isn't acceptable! I need to refold and put all the similar quilts together and stack them neatly.
I have one resolution that is really drastic. I would like to downsize my possessions by 30% over the year. It may seem extreme, but I am a hoarder from way back, with deep cupboards. I adore kitchen stuff, and china, and books, and Christmas decorations, and material and wool and craft stuff. I don't mean to get rid of anything I truly love, but there are things it makes no sense to keep. I rarely eat bread, but I still have at least a dozen bread tins in the cupboards, relics of when I used to bake all the bread for the family. They are sentimental favourites, but I just will never use them again. So they can all go. I've kept just about every frying pan I've ever bought, and I don't need them anymore. I have two toasters (see comment above about not eating bread).
If I'm really brave I will tackle my vase collection, and collections of tin kitchenware, baskets and old enamel. I can keep what I love, but I don't want the collecting to be about sheer quantity. I've seen so many people with enormous collections of stuff, who leave it to children who just don't care and can't wait to be rid of it. Neither of my kids want all this stuff, and if I ever have grandchildren with the same interests as me I will happily collect it all again with them. But I'd like a bit of breathing room between now and then.
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