A New Year Sort Out or

 ...start as you'd like to go on.

We're hoping to move in about 18 months time and I think before we do that we need to do some serious decluttering/divesting ourselves of stuff. There must be oodles of things in this house that it's not worth paying to move. 

Like many people who craft I also have a lot of tools and supplies that I don't use or haven't used for a while or haven't yet got around to using, so with a move on the visible horizon, this year has got to be the year I make serious inroads into all of that. 

I'm starting with the wool because that is what takes up most space, and what I'm most likely to be motivated to use to be honest. Most of my yarn lives in six large plastic boxes in my study and I aim by the end of the year to get what is left into three of them. This still leave a little bit of wool in a couple of other places but not in vast amounts. So the goal is to deal with one box every two months. I'm not expecting to use up all the wool in each box in two months, but hopefully by the time they have all had a good 'go-through' what is left will actually fit in three boxes. 

So last week I had a look in box 1. 

This was it when I started

Received wisdom is that you start by emptying your box/crate/drawer out onto a flat surface so that you can see what you've got, so I did that. All out on the bed. 

The next stage is to sort it out into three piles; to keep and use, to sell,  and to donate. I had four other piles; - works in progress, abandoned for whatever reason, empty project bags which shouldn't have been in there in the first place, project bags with cross stitch projects in them which  shouldn't have been in there either and projects which had lingered on the needles and which weren't ever going to be finished.

So the empty bags got put away, the cross stitch projects got moved to where I keep the cross stitch, the projects that weren't ever going to be finished got pulled out and the wool was either kept to be used or put into one of the other piles. 

And when I had done all that the box looked like this

Several WiPs, some large and some small, and some wool including  a lot of small amounts for charity knitting, and some earmarked for other projects. And quite a  bit of spare space at the top!  I hope there will be a lot more spare space by the end of February. We'll see.