2KCBWDAY3 - Organizing

Day Three: 30th March. Tidy mind, tidy stitches.

How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.

The only positive thing I have ever heard consistently in past job performance reviews was “She’s organized”. I won’t go into the negatives from those reviews except to say that I AM what the Home Ec films warned you about in high school.

But it is mostly true. I love using spreadsheets to keep track of things, 3 ring binders to store hard copies of POs and important information like MSDS sheets and just generally like for things to have their own designated spot complete with carefully selected item-specific storage container. That is so much easier to do at work than at home. My need to compartmentalize my organization efforts suffers in the face of having to pay for the storage places and supplies out of my own pocket. So I close my eyes, grit my teeth and do my scraggly best.

The corner of my bedroom is my little way station for all things crafty not in current use. I have a little folding craft bag next to my chair in the living room where I do all my crochet work and other craftniverous type activities not requiring a flat work surface, but you are not getting a picture of that DMZ. Instead, let’s talk yarn.

I rarely use yarn. Does that mean I don’t have a stash? Heh heh, yeah, that’s funny. I decided a few months ago to collect all the stray skeins I bought for some project or another that I self-proposed but never actually realized and this is the result:

Great Leaning Tower of
Yarn and Yarn-like Fibers

Not too huge a stash but not so small as to fit in a single box. The boxes? Free... once we ate the bakery goods that came with them. Well, they are corralled, stacked and dust free. Doesn’t have to be pretty or high quality as long as the solution solves the major problem. Right? It's the story of my life, so it better be right.

I use thread for my work. Lots and lots of crochet thread. Mostly cotton but some nylon. I never know what to call the package type – ball, sleeve, skeinette? – but they tend to take up a lot of room. Especially since I found these cool, not too expensive clear acrylic boxes to store them in. I have to grease the sides to fit the new packages in these boxes (the outside dimensions are perfectly the right size for these things. Perfect. The outside. Soooo close.), but they fit great once I use up a couple dozen yards of the thread:

Upper Right Craft Corner

Contained, stackable, dust free, tangle free, cat-slobber free. All a gal can ask for in my apartment. Too bad I already outgrew the 25 I bought and need to place another order. That’s the reason for all the little scrunchy plastic bags. The very bags the boxes were shipped in – how’s that for ironic and miserly upcycling? Alas, time to start saving up the pennies that don’t already have Lincoln screaming from all the pinching that goes on around here.

The only real problemito with this system was that I need access to all of the threads when I’m making my appliqué pieces and vignettes. Often the detailing requires only small amounts of thread and I would have to be constantly interrupting my work flow to get up off my buttocks and grab a snippet of thread from the bedroom every time I need a new color. As cool as the boxes are, they are bulky and storing them handily in the living room would just add even more flotsam to the already copious jetsam and that all just makes me want to toss my frumpy apartment-frau /domestic non-goddess cookies at the sight. The solution:

Bobbins!

Embroidery floss bobbins! Yay! So I keep this huge jailer's keyring with me at the work comfy-chair and only have to refill the bobbins periodically. I may have to hide the ring from zee kit-tees, but then again, what don't I have to hide from them. Besides, this system is actually working for me. Who knew?

Hook On!
C