How to Organise Your WIP Projects

In this episode, I am sharing some tips on how to organise your WIP projects. Of course, I am talking cross stitch projects but you can also apply this to any other crafts you do such as crochet, embroidery etc.

This episode was inspired by a tutorial I shared in my monthly membership; the Cross Stitch Club. You can join here if you would like to go deeper into this process.

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Count them

Get out all of the projects you are currently working on. You could include patterns you have bought as well but I personally just got out those I had already started stitching but not finished yet. It’s so good to have that number written down so you know where you’re at.

If you work on one project at a time then you can just count out all the patterns you have bought to stitch.

I personally had 14 projects which was actually much less than I thought. However, these are just the ones I could find; there may well be more hidden in boxes somewhere.

Rank them

Next, we’re going to rank them from ones you actually want to finish to ones you’re not too fussed about. Start with your top favourites and least favourites and then work out the middle ones.

Or you might want to rank the ones that need finishing soon to the ones that have no timeframes attached.

And another way might be to rank them from the ones closest to being finished to the ones you’ve just started.

You could also do a mix which is what I did. At the top, I had a project that was nearly done, a couple that had deadlines attached to them and one I just really wanted to work on right now.

Decide what you’re stitching next

Once you have ranked them you can pick your top 3 to work on over the next few months.

You can pick more than 3 if you want (I have 4) but I would say no more than 5 so that if you see any new projects coming up you can buy them/start them.

You could also just work on 1 at a time if you really want to make a big dent in your pile.

Decide when to stitch them

Now decide when you will stitch each project.

You could designate each project to a certain day of the week. Kind of like I speak about in Cross Stitch Theme Days.

Or have one project for weekdays and one for weekends.

You might just want to work on one until it’s done then start the next.

It depends on your personality but try and few different ways and see what works for you. The good thing about this process is once you have finished your top 3/4/5 you can go back through and decide the next few projects you will stitch and you will have a better idea of when to work on them.

I am personally splitting mine up into day/night and weekday/weekend. One project is for daytime on the weekdays, one is for nighttime on the weekdays, one is just for the weekends and the other is for stitching on my Instagram lives (10 minutes a day).

Start stitching

Next is the fun part -start stitching! Hopefully, this process gave you lots of motivation to work on these projects over the next few months.

You can try the 100 days of stitching challenge to help keep you motivated to get some of your WIP pile stitched and finsihed.

Or you could stop buying new patterns/starting new projects until you have X number completed.

You could dedicate a certain amount of minutes each day to stitching.

I have a lot of episodes about this on the podcast already so you may have heard me talking about when to stitch already but I have also linked some below for you if you need more help with this.

How to Organise Your WIP Projects | S3E77

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