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.

When it comes to my stash, it is less that there is method in my madness and more that there was a method there once.  Every now and again I have a grand sort out but gradually it all gets rummaged through (because what you need is always at the bottom) and my neatly organised stash is once again just several boxes full of yarn, odd needles, patterns and stitch markers.

Downstairs stash -recently tidied, the kind of order I treasure

Upstairs stash - reflecting reality!

Overall I’m fine with this, once in a while I get in the right mindset and spend a couple of hours making little piles out of my yarns and nestling them lovingly together in a box.  I know that chaos will gradually return, but it rarely escapes the confines of the box so it’s ok.  The only thing which really causes a problem is when I tuck UFOs in the box with the stash.  I always do this with the best of intentions, the project, yarn, pattern and any row counters all get packed in together, but before long rummaging happens and they all get separated.  Usually they can be reunited but rarely can I make any sense of it and I’m left wondering where on earth I got to with the project.

To solve this problem I’m making a real effort with new projects to keep them painstakingly documented.  I know now that the actual project itself may not stay all tidily together so I write stuff down that will help me figure it all out if I stop work on something for a while. 

Using this combination of Android app and a notebook I am so far managing to keep everything straight.  Apart from the final stitch count for the scarf I designed at Christmas, I distinctly remember writing that down round here somewhere.........