Knitting and Crochet Blog Week: Day 3

Rollin' right along!  Though typing would be easier if the cat wasn't sitting on my arm...

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.

Tips: Many people use their blogs partly as an organisational tool – logging and cataloguing projects and newly attained skills, projects and modifications. Did you bear this in mind when you began blogging?

So I have to talk about the size of my stash and how it's organized?  Wow, that's a skeletons in the closet sort of post!  Or tubs of yarn, as the case may be...  And no, I'm not brave enough to photograph it all, but I will discuss it.  :)

Well, my name is Lara and I am a yarn addict.  First step, right?  I will admit that I have a large stash (but what long-term knitter doesn't?).  Part of it is inherited from others downsizing their stash into mine, and part of it is what I've accumulated myself.  Either way, it's enough that it took some thought for organizing.  Needless to say... yeah, I'm on a yarn diet...

I would love to have a craft room with a set of shelves for my knitting books and shelves for some of my yarn - the projects that are next on the queue, pretty skeins that I haven't decided a project for yet, ones that I can grab for quick'n'easy charity projects...  I'd love to arrange them neatly by project, or weight, or color.  I'd love to have them out on display, useful decorations in my own little knitting realm.

In reality...

Yeah...

Well, really it's not quite that bad, but I definitely don't have space in our apartment for a Craft Room totally  set up on my own.  Right now I kinda have 'my room' which is the library/craft room, and where Joey's pen used to be - almost there but not quite.  It's one of the things I'm hoping for when we move this summer! 

I do have my yarn sorted pretty well, though, all things considered. I depend a lot on Rubbermaid tubs :)  There's one for sock yarns (just a small one), and one for acrylics (the charity yarn tub), and two for total projects (complete with copies of the pattern, if I've made them already), and one of odds'n'ends.  I've used Ravelry to help inventory my stash, with reminders which tubs things are in, which projects different yarns will be used for, that sort of thing.  Makes it easy to "shop from home" too - browse my stash to get that yarn store experience. 

Once a project is begun, it's moved to a tote bag.  Makes things easy for Knit Night transportation, as well as keeping project, pattern, and notions all together and free from meddling kitten toes.  It was a hard day when I realized that I'm turning into my mother, organized by tote bags...

I honestly didn't start blogging with yarn or project organization in mind.  Really, I wanted a place to chatter about things that drive my husband up the wall if I talk about them too much, and I wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and family on what we're doing as Zach and I move about.  So, that's what you see here - chatter about knitting, beading, books, movies, running, travel... all the things that I try and stay busy with to help keep myself sane!

As I've gotten into the blogging, though, I've tried to make my posts (well, my knitting posts at any rate) somewhat helpful.  I depend on Ravelry a lot for information about yarns, projects, pattern alterations, that sort of thing.  It always frustrates me when I see project entries on Ravelry that are in my size, with the perfect alterations... and no information on needle size or yardage used or other similarly useful information.  I know not everyone uses their Ravelry pages the same, so I'm not mad, but I don't want to give others the same frustration.  I wanted my Ravelry gallery and my blog posts to be helpful, if there are other folk like me looking for information.  Not that I'm a wealth of information, but I do try to share what I know or have learned.  I try to post lots of pictures of my projects, to see stages of a piece as well as the final project.  I try to give feedback on the pattern too: was it clearly written and easy to follow; did I make any alterations; were there any particularly challenging steps; did I learn something new in the process.  And any links that I found that were useful - both for my own future use, as well as anyone else trying to find the same sort of information.

So, I guess that's my knitting organization, from stash to final posts.  Yarn tubs to tote bags, with lots of pictures in between.  And maybe, that gloriously organized Craft Room waiting ahead in the future :)