9.

9 – Sort through and tidy up all extra threads and cross-stitch materials and put away neatly.

One of my favourite hobbies is cross-stitch. I’ve been doing it for a few years now and have amassed quite a collection of related stuff. For example, here is the cupboard in which I keep all of it:

Apart from the DVD player, everything in this cupboard is my cross-stitch stuff. You may be able to make out 2 black plastic bags on the middle shelf. One is full of cross-stitches waiting to be done (I’m so bad at buying new ones and there are now approaching 20 in that bag). The other is full of all the bits that I’ve kept from completed cross-stitches, in other words, this:

Although much of this does represent hoarding, there are some useful bits in there. For example, there is a lot of extra thread in there, which I have been keeping for ages with the intention of sorting it out:

I bought a special box to put it all in over the summer, but until now had never got round to doing it. I got this far before I ran out of bobbins:

It does look very neat and tidy, but unfortunately I still had all this left:

So then I had to go out and buy some new bobbins (I was very lucky to get these as the shop only had that one packet and apparently doesn’t normally stock them at all):

I was then eventually able to sort all the threads out, as so:

Unfortunately I then realised that I had done it all the wrong way round. I know this makes little sense, but because I had been sorting with the box positioned so that the lid was directly in front of me, when I opened it normally they would all be in the wrong order. So then I had to change it all round again (I do see how obsessive this is, don’t worry):

 

So by now I had sorted all the threads out, which just left this (which is actually quite a big pile although you can’t really tell in this photo):

This is all the other bits from cross-stitch kits, which have only been kept because I have written on them all the dates when I completed that particular cross-stitch. To stop me keeping all this crap I very cleverly wrote a list:

This just says a description of each cross-stitch and when it was completed, but it was the last thing I had to do and then I had finally finished sorting it all out. The last picture just shows the bin full of all the stuff I threw away:

So this took me hours and hours and is prbably the first task I have completed where it feels like I have actually achieved something.