Welcome back
Hi everyone and welcome back to Midweek Minimise. Can you believe it is week six already? So if you have been decluttering at least 10 items a week that is now 60 things gone! Can you see a difference already? I have to confess that I am really getting inspired to press on. I’ve even gone beyond the craft room and tackled my makeup collection which I thought would be traumatic but was actually really simple. If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen the new collection I bought myself on Saturday. Those items more or less replace all of my old stuff. I have about ten items max left. Result! If you are new here it is not too late to catch up, here is what we have covered so far.Alcohol Markers
The first thing I tackled was my Spectrum Noir Marker collection. I noticed they had some new colour charts on the website since I last looked. I printed out the blank marker system chart twice. I used one to go through my newer 2nd generation markers and colour in the squares. At this point, I realised that two new collections had been added since I completed my collection the Vintage and Nature collections. You can obviously get these at Crafter’s companion themselves as linked, however, I managed to grab a couple of bargains and got one from Amazon for just over £20 and the other from eBay for just under £20. Finances are likely to get tight soon so I grabbed them whilst I could! With the second blank colour chart, I went through my 1st generation markers. I did a quick scribble on some scrap paper and unless they were totally useless filled in the chart. Here was my first mixed blessing of a victory, five of the markers were completely dead. Great for the declutter but sad.
A word of warning
At this point, I really wanted to give you a word of advice, when buying markers I would always buy new ones unless you can see each colour swatched. I noticed someone on eBay selling their complete collection of 1st generation markers and they were getting bids. This occasion I went through mine and removed 5 dead ones but it is only a few months ago that I last did this and removed far more. One of the improvements with the 2nd generation is the ink lasts longer so the 1st generation ones can easily die even if they are not being used! To allow for my extra sets of markers I headed to Amazon and grabbed an extra storage rack.
Filling the holes
Planning ahead, I got out my old colour chart:
Confession time
I actually expected to find ten dead markers but no! All of my Illustrators were fine as were my Aqua Markers and Spectrum Sparkle, although I did have a bit of a disaster with my Sparkle chart as you may have seen on my social media account. Even my Colorista collection that I keep in a small draw that I can carry to the bedroom for relaxing colouring in bed were all still great. So I had to go rooting through my draws and it’s a good job I did because I found things I forgot I had! There are Perfect Pearls in the Draw with my H2O’s (not to mention those Smooches) and Pastels and Chalks behind some of my glitters.
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Not that any of that helped with the decluttering but it was great to find things you forgot you had, a bit of a money-free shopping trip feeling. Well, I did talk about shopping your stash all those months ago!
What I did find of use was these though:
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I had forgotten about the ink pads behind the embossing powders and also even though I reach into the other draw practically every time I craft, and certainly every time I stamp I have been totally ignoring all the ink pads to the right of the draw, so I figured I might have a win in amongst them.
A Major Success
Well once again the success is slightly tinged with sadness due to some over consumerism but the results of that purge are that all the ink pads to the right of the draw were dead so I didn’t find five more items I found 24! The ink pads behind the embossing powders were still fairly useable so they have relocated in with the other ink pads after pruning them down and removing colours that have since been replaced recently with My Brilliance Inks which I keep on top of my Distress Ink rack.



