I’m debating this year whether I should make a new dress for Easter. I have this great border fabric I bought probably two or maybe even three years ago with a gift certificate from a friend that would be perfect, but I keep holding off because I don’t want to make the wrong pattern choice and then regret cutting it up.

I’m also not wild about my current shape, another reason to hold off (though, that reason can last for years when you don’t do anything about it). I don’t know. I’m ambivalent at the moment. One thing I am sure of is that at the end of the month I’m hosting a fabric swap at my house for a bunch of ladies who sew. Hoping to get rid of stuff that’s been hanging around with no purpose and maybe get a few new pieces with possibilities.

Partly in anticipation of the fabric swap and partly due to a sudden inability to take the mess anymore, I’ve been cleaning up my sewing area. I was shamed into mending half a dozen pairs of pants my husband had asked me to fix over the course of the past, oh, let’s say five years. It took all of half an hour. After that I realized that there wasn’t too much more to put away. So I did.

As I was searching for extra buttons to fix Zach’s pants, I realized my button organization (or lack thereof) was untenable. So I found some jars and organized them by color. I put up an extra thread rack that had been lying around for months (I don’t even remember where it came from) and organized all my thread by color.

It feels good to be so orderly, to look at colors other than white and gray. And now that I can see what I have, I realize I have a few big projects — recovering a chair, recovering an old comforter, recovering a cushion — to attend to. Perhaps I’ll find that they, like the pants needing mending, will be fairly simple and painless.