Using craft organization in other areas of your life
Do you ever find yourself going down a rabbit hole for something you’ve recently been interested in? For a while, I was in a backpacking frame of mind. I would go down backpacking rabbit holes on Pinterest, Facebook, and other backpacker sites. I’d think about food, and pack weight, and other ways to carry our stuff, or other stuff to consider carrying.
So what does organizing crafts have to do with crafting a joyful life? Well, today I’m going to layout how my craft organizing skills have helped me in other areas of my life, such as backpacking.
Organizing versus Cleaning (they’re not the same thing!)
I tend to be an organizational person by nature, meaning I like to organize things. That does NOT equate to cleaning things. Two very different things. Cleaning is cleaning. Organizing is putting things in their place, grouping like things together, and making sense of different items that don’t seem to go together. Scrubbing the shower is NOT that. LOL.
And I’ll dispel any neat-freak myths right now….yes, I have a junk drawer. And yes I have a few closets you’re not allowed to open for fear of what might fall out! Yes, I leave my bed unmade most days. I’m not perfect. LOL.
Organizing a pack
When packing a backpack there are all sorts of guides online, and I won’t get into that. But while I’m going through this, think about how it could apply to whatever craft or non-craft area of your life.
Between my pack and my husband’s pack we pack our tent in one sack, and each of our sleeping bags in respective sacks. Our toiletries go in another smaller sack, what few we do bring. Our food for dinner and future days goes in its own sack. My extra clothes go in one sack, while my husband’s go in a second sack. That leaves us with a few random items like our water filtration device, jetboil, a few snacks, and a sweatshirt/jacket to top off the packs.
Pulling all of the toiletries together, or having our “kitchen” stuff mostly wrapped up in one place is such a calming feeling. Need some deodorant? Pull out the orange toiletry sack, it’s in there. Need food? Pull out the blue food sack, it’s in there.
Organizing crafts
When I look at how I organize my backpacking supplies, I realize I use the same process with when I organize craft supplies. My yarn is probably the best example. All blue 4-weight yarn goes in one clear tub. All green 4-weight yarn goes in another tub. All 5-weight red yarn goes in a separate tub. And so on. All yarn is separated by weight, and then by color. Need some orange 4-weight yarn? Pull out the tub labeled ‘orange 4-weight’ yarn. Need a furry black yarn? Pull out the tub labeled ‘black 5-weight’ yarn.
Organizing crafts this way, or really anything, helps to calm my brain. If I were to shove everything into a backpack without it be sorted and sacked, the distress of the pack disorganization would cause me distress mentally (there’s probably a name for that) and I’d probably hate backpacking, when it was really just the organizing distress.
My yarn story
When I began collecting yarn that’s where I was….distressed. I had different weights, different colors, some in bags, some not, all shoved in different piles. I NEVER knew what I had, and let’s not talk about forgetting I even had some yarns! It got to a point where I didn’t even like going through my yarn. It was too stressful. And don’t get me started on trying to find a single skein. I had to dig through a mound of other yarn just to find it. Stressful, at least for me.
At one point I decided to start organizing it by weight and color. And I took inventory of it. When you keep an arsenal of yarn that rivals a yarn shop, it’s almost a requirement to have some sort of inventory. Need to know how many skeins of a certain orange yarn are in the curated collection? Pull out the inventory notebook and turn to the page labeled ‘orange 4-weight’ and find not only how many skeins are on hand, but also how much yardage is on each skein. Need to know whether there is enough black furry yarn to make a certain project? Pull up the page labeled ‘black 5-weight’ yarn and do the math on number of skeins and yardage per skein.
Might there be people who would consider this going overboard? I’m sure there are. Those are not my people, LOL. Might their brains be wired differently than mine. Probably yes. Are we both right for handling it in a way that might be completely different from the other? Yes, again. Can we be okay that someone else handles it so differently from ourselves? Yes!
Quote: “One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.” — A.A. Milne
Final thoughts on organizing craft supplies
That’s the beauty of crafting or organizing. There’s not always one right way. Sometimes it’s about the way that works best for YOU. The way that calms the noise in YOUR brain. The way that makes YOUR crafting experience a tranquil one instead of a stressful one. And as someone who organizes (and enjoys it) isn’t it nice to look at a well-organized shelf of yarn and just breathe a relaxing sigh at it’s beauty? It’s like watching a morning sunrise, or an evening sunset. A small calming presence in an otherwise noisy world.
What are your tips for organizing craft supplies? In fact, it doesn’t even need to be crafts. Have you found a cool organization technique for a non-craft area of your life? Share it below. I’d love to hear about it.
Related Articles on organizing crafts
If you liked today’s post, or are interested in more details around how I organize my craft supplies, you can check out this section of my blog about Organizing, or check out these posts:
