Craft Organization... part duex!

I'm not fond of 7-11's new marketing plan.... dropping slushies from the sky until we go buy them... that is the yuck that is outside today.  So after the 90-minute school delay, I got out and did my errands as fast as I could so I could stay inside for the rest of it.

I've got several projects underway, but not much finished to show for it yet, and part of that is due to the current state of my craft area!  After all the great work I did to get it in shape, I'm struggling to keep it neat so when I'm ready to work, I don't have to wade through a sea of clutter to get to it...

While I am trying to maintain my flylady routines, no school days are throwing me off, part of why I haven't added anymore baby steps yet.  I get so easily sidetracked, especially when I sit down to check out some of my favorite blogs.  I really am trying to use my timer, but sometimes I stop it and litterally forget I'm supposed to move on to something else!  I know several things happened in between these thoughts, but I'm just going to save you the babble.... I ended up checking out my friend Debie's blog and seeing how she organized her recipes which led me to another blog hosting a year long plan of getting organized, 52 weeks of Organizing.  Since I aspire to be organized, I had to check this out.  Now, I actually like the process of putting things away neatly and organized, it's just the time it takes and I struggle with actually getting rid of things... but I digress... From http://www.orgjunkie.com/ I printed off this handy tool to list out the places I would like to organize and I broke it down to specific drawers to help me stay motivated (not, Organize Kitchen, but organize utencil drawer, etc).

... again, skipping some sidetracked babble...

Back to today, I stood in my craft area with an awesome bag of goodies from the thrift store, not what I went for, but they were having fill a bag for $7 sale today, and I snagged some great things to upcycle.  I was dying to finish up a few projects, so I could start some new ones, but alas, my space that looked like this earlier in the month:

didn't exactly have room for me to work.  Enter that nice orgjunkie list of 52 places I need to organize (ok, I don't have 52 on it yet, but I'm sure I will soon enough).  I admitted earlier that I wasn't 100% complete in my organizing of this space, those two middle drawers weren't touched, and I had still have my "other crafts" bin to sort through.  I always feel like I don't have enough drawers in my craft area or kitchen so I recently ordered a few of these add on drawers.  I'm itching to put them together and install them, but really felt I needed to clean out those center drawers so I knew what should go into these new drawers.

So, my list has the drawers as seperate items, and since yesterday I opened the right one and couldn't close it, it was the lucky winner of today's clean out!  Here is what I started with:

I emptied the whole thing out and even used a tooth pick to clean in the gross crevices:

And after only 20 minutes (probably would have been less but I was trying to do this with O-man at my feet), I had found several things I didn't need, a small pile of trash, a big pile of recyclables, some things that belonged in other areas and I actually ended up with an empty drawer!  Nothing that was in there before needed to be there, AT ALL!  I took a short break to really think about what should go in that drawer.

Truth be told, I know why I can't keep my craft area in good shape, I still have too much stuff!  So too much stuff ends up in piles on top of the work space.  I opted for relocating two of scrapbooking storage bins from the surface (far right corner of the counter) into the now empty drawer.  One of those bins has left the counter completely, and another one was filled in by a small basket of stuff that never found a home before.  This is my end result:

My scrapbooking punches (with a smidge of room to grow), crochet hooks and knitting needles each have a seperate space.  Plus, I actually had all those little connecting drawer containers that I hadn't decided if I should keep or get rid of yet, so getting this drawer in shape didn't cost me a dime!

Now, I know that was quite a long rambling post, but can you imagine how long it would have been if I didn't cut out the extra babble!?!?!?!?!?