Folding Things Up

This Weekend I discovered Marie Kondo on Netflix.  I watched the whole first season of her Tidying Up show in 24 hours and have subsequently spent quite a bit of time looking through her videos on YouTube.  I have spent even more time folding things up.

I was a bit sceptical about it at first, greeting the home and 'sparking joy' all seems a bit unnecessarily whimsical and airy-fairy but I am now well and truly converted and will continue in my own tidying journey with lessons learned.

I was particularly struck by two of her concepts.  The first is saying thank you to the things you let go, I think this is very useful for helping to let go of items that you are finding difficult to discard.  I mean the sorts of things that you don't really want but feel like you ought to keep, for me that's things I bought or made but didn't wear.  For people like me the act of saying 'thank you' alleviates any feelings of guilt associated with throwing something out.

The second thing I really, really like is folding up clothes.  I love it, I've folded all mine, I've folded Rose's and then I folded a whole bunch of other stuff too.  Look how nice my tea towels look now...

And my quilting fabric stash looks like a shop.

Storing stuff so you actually see all of it is genius.  In hindsight it's obviously the best way to go about things, you no longer have to empty entire drawers out before you realise the item you need is at the bottom of the washing basket, also using the Konmari folding method makes everything take up much less space.

But what I think I really love is the act of actually spending time folding things.  Marie says that you should smooth out each item with love first then carefully fold it according to her method so it will stand up, this is both practical as you can be checking if the item is still in good condition but it also gives you the chance to contemplate the piece and accord it a bit of respect.  I don't know about you but I feel like I own so much that it's not a bad thing to really look at everything individually once in a while.

So at the moment I love it all.  The only thing I'm not loving is finding small boxes to compartmentalise my dresser drawers.  Marie shows up at everyone's homes with bags of lovely boxes in beautiful colours and tactile materials, where does she get them?  If anyone has any hints and tips for that I would be very grateful.

Notions

This week I've been a bit under the weather so I decided to tackle an easy one and went through my collection of notions.  They live in a set of plastic drawers with labels on the front, for easy organisation and access (theoretically), and contain mostly useful items such as zippers, elastics, snap fasteners, pinking shears and grommets (the round fixings not the dog).

It would seem that my worst hoarding problem in this section is tiny pieces of pretty ribbon.  I had (notice the past tense there) loads and loads collected from all sorts of places but most notably:

1. Little tiny pieces from the cinched in bits of Christmas crackers
2. Long skinny bits that are sewn into the underarms of tops to stop them falling off coat hangers

They have not proved to be useful so they have now gone.

This is a list of items that I have kept and I think I will give myself a time frame (lets call it 6 months from now, 16 May 2019) in which to use them up or bin them.

1. Assorted bias tape
2. Spare snap fastenings from old clothes
3. Rick rack trimming
4. Pom pom trimming

I might use the bias tape to make some festive scrappy bunting but need ideas for the rest of the stuff please.

These are the best 2 Items I found.  The first I inherited, it made me laugh back then and I marvelled at why anyone would keep a collection of these.  Guess what? 6 years later I've still got them.

In case anyone's wondering they are free sewing kits from hotels, and you know what? I still can't bring myself to get rid of them.

Next are these name tags, they must be 40 years old, I've not had to sew a label into anything since I left high school and my name hasn't been Kirstin Miller for the past 14 years so I'm sorry labels, you're out!