Well, I am and this is a good time of year to start that 12 /10/whatever Step Plan to a live free of all that stuff you don’t need, won’t use and are afraid to part with.

Step One in this Plan is to admit that you are a packrat or hoarder or collector  (for the politically correct)

Step Two is to pick one item type or area of your home to review first. As a crafter, a lot of my stuff is craft and hobby related. So I thought I would start in papercrafting ‘collections’.

If you are anything like me you have loads of cards from Christmases, birthdays, etc.that are just sitting in a box collecting dust. I once had this grand idea that I would create a scrapbook of all my cards (the ones I received). Ha! That lasted one year and then the new cards ended up on a shelf, then in a box. Then as I was cleaning up for holiday company, I found a few years worth of Christmas cards and remembered a comment by a customer last week. She said, “ Do you remember when making gift tags from old Christmas cards was all the rage?” Ah ha! I thought. My craft room is semi clean. I haven’t made nearly enough gift tags for this Christmas. So I grabbed several of my punches off the rack on the wall and with scissors and paper cutter proceeded to cut up all the Christmas cards I had just found. And with a few stamps ( Winter Post Stamp set has the nicest To:/ From: stamp) and cardstock scraps 3 hours later I had created all the tags I would need for this year and one of my Christmas card stacks was gone. Here are some of the goodies I made.

Step Three is to get rid of anything you are not going to use in a reasonable time. Remember my cards above, I got rid of all those I had found but I had now created something else to potentially store. As a SU Demo and papercrafter I am always wanting to create new cards and tags so after my Christmas gifts are wrapped, I will need to dispose of the leftover tags to make room for the new ones I will make next year (regardless of how many I have on hand) – Trust me – somewhere buried in all the boxes in my house and garage I have leftover Christmas tags from several years past. So to prevent this form continuing, this year I will package the leftover tags into gift sets and give them away to some lucky friends.

Stay tuned for more of my packrat step plan in the following months….