A Clean Slate

I just finished up a sewing project, which is now wrapped up and awaiting judging at the county fairgrounds.

The crunch at the end of a project always makes a godawful mess of my sewing room. If I'm smart (and occasionally I am) I do a good cleanup at the end of it, restoring order to chaos.

I had further inspiration for the clean routine this time. I was recently gifted a family heirloom in the shape of a wooden chest. It was my great-grandfather's tool chest, once upon a time, and when it became my mother's, she repurposed it into a sewing chest, and recently passed it on to me for the same usage. It came with decades of sewing notions and thread spools inside, some of which, I suspect, were my grandmother's, and others whose function I had to look up on the internet. (Apparently beeswax is good for strenghtening thread for handsewing. Did not know that.)

I have to wonder what my great grandfather, whom I never met, would think of this box, designed for hammers and screwdrivers, now holding lace and scissors. And what he might think of this house in which it now sits, and the great granddaughter who is rummaging through its contents, a hundred years later.

So I went through and cleaned out the sewing room, restoring the ribbon remnants and bias tape bits to their allotted spaces, and herding up the blue and brown scraps of fabric on the floor and spaghetti monster of thread camped out under the table. I did a sweep for stray pins and needles and packaged up the tissue paper pattern pieces, folding along my muslin adjustments with them. I moved the chest to the center of the room and arrange on it a basket of yarn and another of upcoming sewing patterns.

A clean slate.

Time to make a new mess.