Tidying up my Pens and Pencils

I have too many pens and pencils. I never thought about this much, but now that I'm reading 
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I've decided to start decluttering the way this book suggests. The first thing I've learned is to only keep things that give you joy and the second thing I've learned is to tidy by categories. So, pens and pencils seemed an easy category to do today.

This is what sits on my work table.  I did a doll sample for a toy designer friend of mine a while back that included making tiny high top shoes and she sent this to me as a thank you gift and I have used it ever since. It doesn't looks so cluttered but really, I don't use 2/3's of the things in there.

I, also, have a couple back up boxes of more pens and pencils ...

and a few packages, partially used.

This does not include my colored pencils, which probably should be looked through, too, at some point.

First I need to group everything into subcategories. These are the pens that can be used to mark fabric and the marks disappear with heat from an iron.  But, I still am careful not to make LOTS of marks with these. 


These give me joy! These I keep.

Here is a group of charcoal drawing pencils I NEVER use, no joy here.

These I get rid of.

WHOA! how did I get SO many highlighters? And I don't ever use them! 

Joyless! 

OK, Sharpies are useful, but should be checked over. These give me modest joy.

How did these fabric pencils get in with all these other ones ... I will put those in my small notions draw.

Here is a mishmash of pens that need going through,

and a mishmash of mechanical pencils that also need going through. 

These two groups give me confusion.

These wooden pencils I will give away, I never use them.

No joy from these.

Red pencils I keep. These I use to make the large pattern sheets I send into Simplicity clearer by writing somethings in red. These make me joyful.

But, these small ones that just get lost at the bottom of my little pair of ceramic shoes I will toss.

I will also toss these difficult to use rolling highlighters.

I test all my Sharpies and only keep the ones that write well. I do this to my regular pens also.

And here is the best reason to be cleaning out my pens and pencils.  This is my mess of mechanical pencils. I keep buying new ones because it is so confusing to find ones that work and are the size lead I want.  Here are pencils, leads and erasers for 3 different sized leads, .5 mm, .7 mm and .9 mm.  I don't use the .5 or .9 anymore, for a long time now, so any of that stuff gets eliminated. Then any extra erasers that don't fit the pencils I have get eliminated, too.  Now I will only have pencils I will actually use and I don't have to sift through ones I don't use!

Now I am joyful about my mechanical pencils.  I use them a lot, all the time, everyday and now they will be easy to deal with.

So, after throwing away all the things that don't work this is what I will be donating to my local thrift store.  I hope they find someone who needs them.

This is what I'm keeping, a box of .7 mm mechanical pencils and red pencils, a box of pens I know I will use and ...

This is all that will sit on my table.


Now I have to remember not to buy any more until these are used up!