Problem Solving

We took down the tree and other Christmas decorations yesterday.  It was a three-man job, with me wrapping the ornaments, Paul taking the lights off, and Ben getting the tree off the stand and out the door for the compost guys to take away tomorrow.  I'm always sad to see the decorations go, but I do love getting the house back to its normal configuration. 

Having helpers meant that some things were done differently this year than when I handle the whole job myself.  Paul impressed me by carefully coiling up each strand of lights, fastening them with Velcro wraps that he had bought to organize all the cables the make his computer setup work, and packing the strands into a box where they will wait nice and flat and tidy until next year.  Yes, I admit, I usually just throw them all in a jumble in a big shopping bag!   

He got me thinking about organizing in general.  I'd already been thinking about whether I wanted to make any New Year's resolutions and working with Paul made me change that question to "What isn't working so well?"  

One thing that wasn't working was how I kept my collection of quilting rulers.  For the past three years they've sat in a pile on a shelf near my cutting table and I'd have to rummage through the pile to find the one I wanted.  Not only was this a pain but I was starting to notice the wear and tear this was causing to these expensive sewing notions.  A search of Pinterest revealed that most people were hanging them in file folder holders mounted on a wall, or on a pegboard on a wall, or on Command hooks on a wall.   Well, I had a wall but I didn't want to spend any money on this improvement so I decided to just hang them on nails above the cutting table.  Voila!  Now I can see them all at once and grab the one I want.  

I also decided it was time to improve my cutting table setup.  I had two mats of different sizes and from different manufacturers and they just weren't playing well together.  So I bit the bullet and bought a new one ($50 with a discount!) so now I have two that make one big cutting surface with measuring grids that match up nicely.  

Thinking about solutions to these small problems made me think of other problems that need solving, like how to cook beans at this higher altitude (solution: learn to use our pressure cooker) and how to print labels for my quilts (solution: finally decide on what new inkjet printer to buy).  I added these to my "to do" list and moved on to a problem that would be fun to solve:  how to add text to photo collages.  I like the PicFrame app I got a while back but it doesn't seem to have a way to add text.  So I got a free 7-day trial of PicMonkey after playing around with it decided to go ahead a subscribe. 

Here's a quickly made sample of a collage using it.  

It's fun to use and time will tell if it's worth the $6 a month.