Oh my gosh. I don't know if everyone has that room (or three) where they toss stuff when people are coming over, but I had two (and some closets and the garage) and then I had overnight guests so the guest bedroom had to get shoveled out. That left the craft room and man oh man oh man, is it a wreck of epic proportions. It's awful. There's glitter, scraps of paper, beads, ribbon, buttons, empty boxes, tangled yarn, dozens of bottles of paint (just imagine at least three things from every aisle in Michaels to complete this list) and it's everywhere. I have baskets and boxes for this stuff, but half the stuff is in the container and the other half is jumbled up with some other stuff. There are tote bags with project remnants and Levis with a tear in some important place. This is a hoarders starter kit right here. So I start dragging things out into the hall so that I can rearrange stuff to make the room more user friendly and I slowly start putting things into cubbies and plastic shoe boxes when I find my electric pencil sharpener and I spend the next half hour sharpening colored pencils!!!
This is exactly what would happen to me lo those many years ago when my mom would send me in to clean my room. I'd close the door and I'd get started and three hours later she'd find me sitting in the floor organizing my crayons with Roy G. Biv with no discernible progress made. My problem then is my problem now: it's very hard to clean up toys and not play with them.
I look at the pictures of craft rooms on Pinterest and I see these massive spaces with a billion dollars in Container Store shelving and three hundred plastic coffee containers spray painted robin's egg blue with chalk board labels on them and I think to myself well if I had that kind of room...I'd have a much bigger mess to clean. So I'm happy with what I have. When I was a little kid we had a family friend who had a closet filled with real cigar boxes and each one was labeled pom poms, feathers, jingle bells, felt, ribbon & watercolors. There was only one rule for her craft closet: no kids allowed. It was like standing at the window of the chocolate factory staring at all those boxes and not being allowed to use any of it.
Today one of my great joys is sharing the craft room with my nieces. I love that I'm the kind of aunt who gets to say, "Use it up, I'll get more!" So I guess that thought is just the nudge I need to get up and go spend another hour in there. Happy Hump Day people--and whatever you do, do it with enthusiasm!
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