My Draw and Dump Project

One of the things I love about Facebook is reading about what my friends are doing and being inspired by their actions.  Today was the perfect case in point to illustrate how wonderful this can be.

The wonderful Orly Avineri posted about how she was decluttering with the help of a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, written by Marie Kondo.  I have been thinking about starting to seriously declutter my home (I always seem to get this urge in the spring, as so many of us do but it has been a long time coming!) and was inspired by Orly's recent efforts.

Then my friend Vanessa Oliver-Lloyd posted about a project she is starting today as part of the Great Discontent's "The 100 Day Project" on Instagram.  You can read all about her project here on her blog or check out her images @unfinishedspirits.

I liked the idea of playing along in the 100 Day Project but was really feeling the urge to declutter as well.  Since the focus of the 100 Day Project is "making", I needed to think of something "artful" to do.  So I decided to mash the two ideas together and voila, my "draw and dump" project was born.

Every day for the next 100 days, I'm going to find at least five (5) things in my apartment that I am going to discard.  But before I pack them up and they head out the door, I'm going to sketch them. By July 14th when this project draws to a close, I'll have discarded at least 500 items and, hopefully, improved my sketching skills by drawing daily.

Here's what day 1 looked like:

The actual items look like this:

As you can see, they have all been cat approved!

Here's the journal I'm using for my sketches:

If you'd like to track my progress, you can find me on Instagram under #100daysofdrawanddump. Feel free to play along!