Wednesday, March 30, 2011

You have how much stuff and it goes WHERE?!?

My knitting 'accoutrement' sort of grew at an accelerated rate when I first started knitting two years ago...  At first I had a basket... wicker and cute with balls of yarn in it... and then I found all the balls of yarn on the floor and realized that some sort of 'cat keeper outter device' would be a good idea so I exchanged the basket for one with a lid.  Oddly, since the basket with a lid was larger than the basket without, I felt some sort of compulsion to fill it up... not hard... altho to be fair, i've since given away most of the yarn that was originally used to fill up the basket... it was ugly and the product of an unknowledgable knitter with no yarn direction or personal knitting taste.  Once that basket was at it's limit, I bought two small 'storage ottomans' which live under my coffee table.  There's a 'red/orange/earthtones/natural' one and a 'blue/green/variagated' one.  They're both full to the brim with yarn and roving and ends of yarn that need to be made into a scrappy blanket of some sort... 'remnants' take up a lot of room!
And then besides that, I have two large six bottle wine boxes (like the one posted below, only six wide) with all the 'really good' yarn in them and one two bottle wide box that has some yarn in it for projects that I'm currently working on (so I dont' have to go digging to get the next ball).
 
As far as my needles and patterns go, i JUST organized those... I bought a 3" three ring binder and clear plastic page protectors and all my patterns went into their own protector...  Circular needles also went into their own plastic holder by size (all US7's together etc...) and then I bought a set of 10 CD holder pages (two to a page, fits right on the 3ring binder) which holds my interchangeable tips (two sizes per pocket) and the interchangeable cables (each length to it's own pocket).
All of this (needles, cords and patterns) go in the same binder, which seemed like a good idea but it's a bit hard to operate... I'm considering getting an Offhand Designs interchangeable needle case in Cosmo Bloom so that the patterns are in the binder themselves... 
 
I try and keep my knitting area (henceforth known as 'craftland') relatively neat and tidy... as with any sort of hobby that has a lot of 'pieces', if you don't keep it as tidy as possible, it can start to look like a bomb went off....
 
I also (ALSO!) have a very cool antique accordian sewing box (exactly like these two pictures) that I keep pins and ribbon, dpn tube, extra graph paper, buttons (some, not all), samples of wool wash etc... in.  On top of that sits a small basket that has the ball winder, some threads and other 'junk' that I can't even picture right now.  And I have two large decorative bowls (like soup bowl sized) that have more bits and pieces... beads, markers, cable keys, yarn labels etc.... I usually just pile stuff into the bowl until it's full and then organize stuff into it's proper place from there. 
 
 
I keep all my yarn labels (for everything I've ever made) in a 'coupon accordian' and that goes on the bookshelf beside all the knitting books and mags...
That's about it... It's a wild and wonderful place, craft land!

3 comments:

Karen said...

I have one of those sewing baskets! But mine is all full of sewing notions, thread and stuff... Hmmm likely another thing to add to my "need to organize" list. To me your picture of the sewing box open looks like an optical illusion - it looks curved in the picture!

P'cess said...

I got mine for $1 at an antique store... a buck! I think it's the circle ragrug in the pic that makes it look curved... not my pic tho.... ;)

Ria said...

I need to reorganize- my area is A- growing and B. Looks like a yarn store exploded.

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