Cleaning Up Is Just Putting Things into Less Obvious Places 

Whenever I clean up, as rare as that may be, I always spend the next few weeks wondering where I put my stuff. The way I find things is by their visual relation to other things. For example, my scissors are in the orange crate to the right of my computer. Maybe it doesn’t make any sense that they are there, but that is where they are. If I “put them away” to a more logical location, say for example, in my sewing basket, then I can never remember the new location. This results in me tearing apart the entire house, trying to remember what I was thinking at the time I put them “in a safe place.”

Recently, I was looking for a bag of vintage doll clothes buttons. Now, coming upon this collection of hard-to-find buttons was a rare thing in the first place. A friend of the family (who is the local junk guy) brought them to me along with a huge pile of sewing stuff that he had acquired in a clean out. More likely than not, the original owner had probably passed on. I was ecstatic to discover over two dozen cards of tiny Lucite buttons. No doubt the previous owner was a prolific maker of doll clothes, to the delight of their grandkids, I am sure. This was clearly a treasure that needed to be protected. But where? I had to put them in some “safe place.” Much later, I very predictably could not for the life of me remember where that place was.

I looked for them for literal weeks. They were so special I knew they had to be someplace “safe.” How about in the tub of my regular buttons? Of course not. Too obvious. I even have a special cigar box full of vintage buttons, were they in there? Not a chance. I painstakingly combed through every container of sewing notions I had and every other place in the house, for that matter. No buttons. When faced which such a situation, the only remedy is really to give up… or go mad. It’s really hard to stop looking when you want to find something so desperately, but we all know the only real solution is to stop looking, wait for the next thing or two to go missing, and only then you are bound to find it. A corollary of this proposition is to go out and buy a replacement for the lost thing, which always produces the lost thing within day or in most cases within 24 hours, but as these buttons were vintage, there was no buying replacements. So, I waited. And I looked for other lost things. Of course, the buttons eventually turned up… in the place where I keep my checkbooks. Thank you to the oil company for not taking online payments! If it weren’t for you guys, I never would have found my buttons. Technically, they were in the “place where the important stuff is,” even if that place had nothing to do with sewing.

--

Please join us here every other Wednesday for another fun, fiber-filled installment of By the Yard. You can read more By the Yard® comics at www.bytheyardcomics.com and check out the 5th annual By the Yard® Calendar for Quilters at www.bytheyardcomics.com