WHO'S BETTER THAN ME?!

I did it! I did it! Pat me on the head! Slap a gold star on my forehead! Give me a cookie! Woo Hoo!

I have always been a person who gets distracted by "visual noise". You know what I mean....crap all over the place that needs a home or needs to GO. My stash had enough visual noise to drown out everything else in my head lately, and it was causing me to funkety funk funk.

So I did what any red-blooded courageous stitcher would do...I hitched up my big girl sweatpants, poured a vat of dietCoke into a big-ass glass and headed up to the studio, determined not to come down again until peace reigned in the kingdom once more.

I started with painted canvases. I took every single solitary canvas that I have ever laid eyes on in my entire life and made a pile on the floor. It didn't matter if I had stitched on it or not -- into the pile it went. Then I picked up each one and made a FAST decision: DO I LOVE THIS? If the answer was a fast YES, then it went to the right of me. If it was UM, WELL, I'M NOT SURE, then it went immediately to the left. No rationalizing or sentimentalizing...just ruthless culling. At the end of this pile I hung up the "keeps" with their respective thread bags and put the "nopes" into a big basket:
Next up were the counted canvas charts...same procedure here. (Interestingly enough, NOT ONE Laura J. Perin chart made it into the NOPE pile). These were a little easier, since I keep counted canvas charts in notebooks.

Finally, I moved on to...gasp...brace yourselves....THE DREADED CROSS STITCH baskets, containers, envelopes, books, and project bags that have been reproducing at will for the last several years. Again, every single piece of cross stitch I own (even if it was a WIP) went into the pile (OK, I had to break this up into several piles since there was so much of it), and away I went with the LOVE IT or NOPE decisions. I purposely did this fast...if it didn't hit me as a LOVE right away, then I threw it into NOPE without agonizing over it....brutal. Just brutal.

When the cross stitch pile was done, I put the NOPES into the basket and separated the LOVES into three piles....the WIPS:

Then a basket with projects that are ON DECK:

And finally, the seasonal storage baskets:

So here's my plan.....I'm going to send the NOPE basket over to Aunt Chrissy so she can paw through it and take whatever she wants. Then I'm going to put this basket away until August. In August, when Miss Linda at House of Stitches has her Midwest Stash Exchange, I'm going to rent a table and have at it. If the Stash Exchange doesn't happen for some reason, then I'm putting this basket into storage for ONE YEAR. Next January I will take this basket out and do the LOVE IT/NOPE thing all over again. And, if I don't have anything that I just have to keep, then it's all going to a school or a nursing home for somebody else to enjoy. My theory is that if I don't miss it for a year, then it wasn't meant to be in my stash in the first darn place.

I would bet that you want to a) strangle me in my sleep, b) could care less, or c) are happy that you now have a plan for your very own stash. Please understand that the only reason I am blogging about my adventures is that I am old now and have a TERRIBLE memory. So next year, when I pull the basket out of the closet and say "What the *$&%^?", I can look back at this entry and remember what the heck I'm supposed to do with it.

(Besides, what' s the point of doing something for six hours if you can't get your friends to fawn all over you and tell you how fabulous you are?)

Stewey gave up on the entire exercise after ten minutes and I came downstairs to find him sacked out on the floor:

There was a patch of sunshine here, but methinks a cloud happened by right at the very moment I snapped the pic. Sigh.

So that's it, kids. I am purged, organized, and ready to rock! Now that I have crap put away I am feeling that I deserve a new start. Oh, what will it be? Stay tuned!