Peace of Mind Organizing

Worth repeating: Good intentions

17 July 2013

On Wednesdays this summer, I’m dipping into my archives to highlight articles written in the past with messages that bear repeating. Here’s the latest, originally posted on October 14, 2010.

The other day I cleaned out my t-shirt drawer. One of the benefits of having a friend who runs a t-shirt company and creates fabulous new t-shirts designs on a regular basis is that I’m frequently given new t-shirts. I don’t want to say no to them, because they’re wonderful. But I wasn’t employing any kind of “one in/one out” policy.

So it had become difficult to put away my t-shirts because the drawer was so full.

Weeding out the drawer was actually more challenging than I expected, because some of the shirts had some sort of sentimental value. (Commemorative t-shirts from family reunions or half marathons I’d walked, for instance.) So to make it easier on myself, I decided that rather than donate the shirts, I’d cut them into tubes, loops the tubes together and knit with them.

I created quite a large stack of shirts that I was going to turn into a big craft project. I put them in a large shopping bag from the Container Store and left them on the bedroom floor. I thought about the next steps to transform these shirts into something functional (I thought I’d make a bathmat):

1. Buy a rotary cutter to cut the shirts into tubes (which meant I’d want to find a coupon first for the fabric store, to get a good deal on the rotary cutter).
2. Loop all the tubes together into a giant ball of “yarn”
3. Find a pattern or just decide how big I wanted the bathmat and how many stitches to cast on.
4. Take the project I currently have on giant needles off, so I could use those needles, or buy a set of US#35 circular needles.
5. Knit the thing. I knew from past experience that knitting with giant needles is actually kind of painful. (I once knit a really ugly rug out of potholder loops.)

The whole project didn’t sound like a ton of fun, but I was game.

Then, a day later, I came home to find the bag moved from the bedroom to the hall. My husband told me that the American Kidney Fund had called and asked if we had anything to donate. He remembered the bag of shirts (but forgot I was planning to knit with them) and scheduled a pick up. He apologized when I reminded him of my plans for that shirt.

I thought about finding other things to donate so I could keep the shirts to knit with. Then I thought about all the steps to getting my shirts ready to turn into a bathmat. Then I thought about whether I needed a bathmat made of t-shirts. Or whether I really wanted to knit one.

Then I decided to give away the shirts. I put that bag on the porch. And I felt liberated.

With my clients, I often see that they’d rather do something complicated with an item they’re ready to let go of. They strive for the perfect way to discard. Instead of just donating it to Goodwill, they’re going to take it to their kids’ school. Or mail it to a charity that has a special need for it. Or send it to a relative. And often that unwanted item sits in limbo—still clutter— because they don’t get around to doing that action.

That’s probably what would have happened with my t-shirts. They’d have sat in that bag on my bedroom floor, or perhaps moved to the room where I store my knitting supplies. After awhile they’d become invisible. Or I would have actually started cutting them into tubes and maybe even knit with them, but they’d have taken a bunch of time that I could have spent knitting something beautiful.

So once again I learned to take the easy road.Do the thing that takes fewer steps. It was very easy for me to just let the charity pick up that bag. And I can assure you that I don’t miss those shirts one bit. Nor am I itching to make a bathmat.

Tagged with: decluttering, ease, knitting, perfectionism, sally brown, worth repeating

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