Purging Your Stash: Painful but Productive (Organization Pt.1)
Since my earliest days of scrapbooking seven years ago, I have loved collecting scrapbook supplies. Like many scrapbookers, I love paper, stickers and a myriad of other scrapbook accessories and want to have virtually everything I see! Buying supplies faster than I can use them led to an ever growing stash of supplies that first outgrew my scrapbook tote, than my scrapbook area, and then my scrapbook ROOM. Clearly something had to be done about this monster before it took over the whole neighborhood!
So a few months ago when I decided to really get my work area organized, I knew the first step needed to be to thin out my supply stash and purge old stuff that would likely never get used. In theory that should have been fairly easy, as my style has changed pretty dramatically in the past 5 years and I had accumulated a lot of old supplies that definitely did not fit my current style. And at first it was fairly simple. I culled out some patterned paper and really old stickers that I had long since fallen out of love with. But it was surprisingly hard to get rid of even things that I looked at and thought “what was I thinking when I got that?” and so that sorting only generated a small reject pile…the remaining stash was still way too large to be manageable and workable. On the first go-through, my rule had been: “When in doubt, keep it.” I decided that I would have to make another pass-through with the opposite rule: “When it doubt, pull it out.” The resulting sort-out yielded a much smaller remaining stash, much more workable in size and much easier to organize and store!
After organizing those remnants of my stash, I have now been thrilled at how much easier it is to scrapbook, at how much more creative and productive my work process has become. I was afraid of feeling hemmed-in by having so many fewer choices of supplies when I work. Instead, I no longer feel overwhelmed by the huge number of choices available to me. A huge number of mostly poor choices has been replaced by a much smaller number of high quality choices, leading to a more streamlined and less confusing work process. My work output has increased in both volume and quantity in the past months as a direct result.
Being brutal with my treasured stash was painful…after the initial run-through, it took me awhile before I was ready to make a second look at it and get rid of some more things that I just wasn’t quite willing to let go of the first time. But after time passed and I got used to my smaller stash, it didn’t seem quite so horrific to go through and thin out a few more things. What I have discovered, in fact, is that purging really should be an ongoing maintenance project. Every couple of months, I need to take a good hard look at things and decide if they still fit into my current style and work process. If the answer is “no”, then they need to be removed to make room for the products that will get used. This look-through can be done in a few hours and is a good investment of time that helps my work process continue to run smoothly and productively.
It was painful to take the first step of letting go of some of my treasured scrapbook stash. But once I started down that road, I found that I loved the journey it took me on to more productive and more creative scrapbooking – and that is the best result
of all.
