Cleaning and Catharsis

I have a much nicer table than this now and have completed approximately 2.5 projects on it. Progress?

For the past two years, I've sewn very little for my personal use. I've been doing a lot of alterations for friends, working on dance costumes with my grandmother, and re-attaching the occasional button, but on the whole, my closet has been bursting with unused fabric and notions for far too long.

Last weekend, my dear friend Margaret and I decided enough was enough--we had to thin the stash.

 We spent hours combing through bags and boxes, and at the end of the day, I had two lovely, organized boxes of workable fabric, and a bulging bag of items to donate to our local community center. 

Sorting through was difficult--some pieces were hard to let go, like all the fat-quarter and half-yard remnants I've picked up over the years that I always thought I'd "do something" with. But it's best for them to be sent off to someone who actually may do something--perhaps some of the quilters for whom they were originally intended. But it was also very freeing.  Within an hour of finishing my project, I was commenting to Margaret about how much better I felt. For me, a cluttered home always leads to feeling like I have a cluttered mind, and I have been allowing way too much of that in my creative life lately!

I've decided to welcome myself back to the world of productive sewing slowly, starting by finishing up a couple of orphaned items and by playing along with the gang at The Monthly Stitch.

What was the last project you abandoned? Will you (honestly) join me in finishing something up this February?