Crafting New Year Resolutions

It’s that time of year again. How many people make resolutions at New Year, only to find that by one month in, those resolutions, whilst not completely forgotten, are but dim memories? By now, at the end of January, we have a good idea which resolutions have a chance of survival, and which are already dead in the water.

Crafting resolutions can be just as difficult to stick to as losing weight (like suddenly the habits of a lifetime are going to change?), exercising more (that gym membership can be expensive), and eating less chocolate (that was never going to happen!). Here are a few resolutions that you may find familiar.

1. Organise those craft supplies
2. Use up things from the stash
3. Only buy something new to replace something that has been used
4. Learn a new craft
5. Only start a new project when at least one UFO (UnFinished Object) has been finished
6. Buy something that looks great and is made by someone else, instead of thinking "That’s great - I could make that!” and never actually getting around to it

How can we give those resolutions a better chance of success? Let’s have a look at them one by one.

Organising Craft Supplies
You’ve decided you are going to knit that jumper you’ve been meaning to do for years. You have the yarn (from your stash, of course!). You have the needles. You have the pattern. Now all you need is a row counter, because you’ve tried pen and paper and that just doesn’t work for you. You know you have at least 4 of them, because last time you started a knitting project you couldn’t find the ones you inherited from your grandmother so you bought some more. Where, oh where, did you put them? Any of them?

The perfect solution is to build an extension to the house and call it the crafting annexe. Then you could have enough room to carefully stack everything in clear, carefully labelled boxes, or in the specially built cupboards and drawers. Bliss! But somehow I don’t think this is very realistic.

A slightly less perfect solution is to at least try to keep all the like things together. For example, keep all knitting things together, all embroidery things together, all scrapbooking things together, etc, etc. Don’t get too obsessive about it, though, because some supplies cross borders between crafts, and you need to pick just one place to put them. But at least when you go looking for something, if it’s not in the first place you look, it should be in the second.

But the best piece of advice is to try, and I mean really try, to put things away when you have finished with them. A tip that might be worth trying for this is to not just automatically put things back in the place you found them, but in the first place you looked for them. The assumption is that next time you are looking, you will look for it in the same way, and look! There it is in the first place you looked!

So how about giving it a go. Keep crafting though – don’t let organising crafting supplies become your hobby!

Next time we’ll tackle the challenge of using up those things in the stash.