Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, Day three (2KCBWDAY3)

Today's challenge:

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.

I love the proviso that "organisation exists on many levels". My entire life seems to consist of small pockets of organisation surrounded by seas of relative chaos. But some of those small pockets of organisation are knitting-related...

This is my pretty-needle stash. It lives on the counter between the kitchen and the dining room, behind the digital radio and the bowl that, at the weekend, holds vegetables, but by this stage of the week is somewhat bare. (One lemon, one hunk of ginger and a head of garlic at the moment!) And, these days, behind my brand-new James Naughtie egg-cup. This is where pretty plastic needles (I particularly love the Durex brand ones from the 50s) and other favourites live...

Otherwise, when organising, throwing some purple at the problem always helps.

The folder on the left holds my fixed circular needles - it holds an amazing number. It's made of thick, rip-stop nylon, and has little tabs you can write the needle size on. It's quite brilliant, made by a company called Happy Bags which seems entirely untraceable on the Internet, and it was a present from a friend in the US, probably about a decade ago. I've never seen anything quite as useful for needle storage before or since.

The box on the right holds small/short DPNs and stitch holders. Both of these live in the top couple of drawers of a yarn chest in the dining room.

Otherwise, my main organisational tools are Ravelry (queue, projects, etc.) and a couple of spreadsheets on my PC. I start one each year for finished objects (dates, yardage, weight knitted up), and have a running one for the Stash Inventory; the main Stash is in 14 plastic crates in the loft so a spreadsheet is a bit vital to avoid running up and down there all the time...

Having said that, I also have baskets, boxes, bags, mailing envelopes, etc. etc. of yarn kicking around the place too... And thankfully, a near-photographic memory of what's where... Having said that, the Stash can still surprise me.