When the party's over . . .

you have to clean up.

That's sort of the way I feel when I finish a piece of needlework.  There's housekeeping that should be done.

OK, I know I had "finished" the obligation stitching weeks ago. But as I said, I didn't like the way it looked, so it never moved from unfinished status to finished.

But now it is finished to my satisfaction, so  I need to take it off the stretcher bars and put it in the "to be framed" box. The stretcher bars need to go in the stretcher bar box. The tacks need to go into the tack box (and not a minute too soon--I need one of the pairs of stretcher bars and the tacks for No Place Like Home, the needlecase from Catherine Theron's class at Jeannine's.)

I need to put the threads away.  And I need to file the directions.

I have a question. What do you do with the instructions from a project that you've completed?  Because I can be a little OCD when it comes to needlework, I very carefully file the directions away. In a file cabinet. With labeled hanging files.

Unless it is an online class or other long-term project, in which case I print everything out, put the pages in page protectors, and install those in loose-leaf notebooks. And the notebooks go on bookcase shelves when the projects are finished.

A little OCD?

I do have a rationalization for the notebooks.  Somehow I never, ever get around to starting a class when it starts online. If I have everything printed out and organized, it's ever so much easier to get the project going when I finally have time to do it.

And, yes, I will admit to this bit of hoarding.  I have all the instructions for all the projects I have done. Except two.

There was a one-day class from an EGA region seminar years ago. The teacher was abysmal. Her directions were worse. I came home and threw everything, including the threads, into the trash.  The one thing I learned that day was to never take another class from that particular instructor.

The other was a pilot project for someone, who, thankfully, decided that teaching needlework was not what she wanted to do with her life.  I managed to complete the project, but I took the instructions out to the grill and ceremonially burned them so that no one would ever, ever, EVER attempt to stitch from them again.

So tonight I'm cleaning one more project away. Does this mean I can bring another project out of the stash and into the light?