Kitchen Packing Redux

See those striped boxes?  Those are the boxes from my kitchen along with the three small boxes on top of them and the toaster box.  It looks like a lot, but in actuality those striped boxes don't have all that much in them.  They mostly contain large things like stock pots, colanders and frying pans.  Pots and pans will only nest so much together.  The shorter boxes contain silverware, a flipper, a whisk, knives, cutting boards, and other long skinny or flat things.  I have one more striped box reserved for the kitchen for aprons, hand towels and odds and ends that we find need packing that we forgot.

The exciting thing is that we were successfully able to cook in the kitchen last night with little fuss.  Although we are finding that we may have to hand wash bowls between dishwasher runs as there aren't that many left for my daughter.  I don't think she will need as many bowls, though, as the four of us do.  All in all the packing of the kitchen yesterday went fairly well.

Today's task is the hobby room.  It shouldn't take that long only because much of what I have is already in bins.  All my yarn is in bins that is carefully labelled  (I love my label maker) as is my fabric.  The big challenge is going to be weeding through the miscellaneous craft bins to see what I truly love and need.  Mostly it is paper crafting supplies for rubber stamping and scrapbooking.  Neither of which I have done much of in the past few years.  I'm trying to determine exactly what I don't need from the major culling that I did about a year and a half ago.  My agreement was anything I hadn't used in one year was going.  I need to truly stick to that and realize that I just don't do rubber stamping like I once did and that is OK.  I may keep a few of my favorite stamp sets (like the one with knitting and sheep) and release the others into the wild.  Perhaps I will allow myself one small bin of paper crafting supplies which I will agree to let go of in a year if I haven't truly used them. 

I also need to go through my "collectibles" and decide what I can and can't live without.  Honestly, I need none of it.  There are just a few things that I love and wish to keep.  For instance I have a traveling sock monkey named Niji Saru (Japanese for Rainbow Monkey) that has been all over the world.  She has visited many interesting people been to Japan, Spain, England and Northern Ireland.  She hung out in New York City and LA and visited my dear friend Naomi.  She has a collection of souvenirs that she picked up along the way and she has a pet elephant named Tibby that was made for me by a friend.  I also want my calendar, my small bowl that I use to collect my teabag each morning and my framed signed print of The Silence of the Lambs (not what you think - or if you are a knitter it is what you think).  There is also my stapler, tape dispenser and candle. 

Then there are things such as my placard from the Obama campaign, my dressmaker's dummy, and whether to take the decorations that I specifically bought for this room or leave them as they are part of a theme.  I'm thinking of taking the dressmaker's dummy as I have always wanted one and do use it, but leaving the decorations and the campaign signs.  I have several Obama buttons in my jewelry box.  You never realize how much you have until you start packing it up to move.  Of course I am learning how little one really needs when you think about what you truly use.