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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.
Believe it or not, my craft supplies are actually very organized. I can usually find whatever I need without too much trouble, especially my knitting/crochet supplies. I keep my dpns in a needle roll, my fixed circulars in a roll I got in a swap, and my interchangeable set in the pouch they came in from Knit Picks (okay, it’s not the best pouch ever, but it works). My collection of stitch markers are in a box on my craft table and I have a couple in my notions bag, a little zipper pouch I keep in my purse with my current project.
My yarn is actually the thing that is the least organized, but it’s not too bag. I keep it in large plastic bins under my bed:
The bin on the left contains mostly sock yarns, along with sport weight and lace weight. The middle bin is mostly worsted weight (with a couple bulky weight things). The bin on the right is mostly scraps organized in bags by fiber, though it also includes over flow from the other bins (like the oversized cone of green lace weight that won’t fit anywhere).
Also, if you look carefully in the corner, you can see my small stash of acrylic, obtained mostly by a friend from an estate sale:
But the most helpful thing for organizing my yarn and seeing what I have is Ravelry. I finally uploaded my entire stash, pictures and all, to my Ravelry stash page in December. I’m so glad I finally did it: it’s great being able to scroll through all the yarn I have and deciding what to knit next. It also helps my organize my pattern queue–the first page has patterns matched with yarn in the stash.
In short: Bins and Ravelry. Yes.
So after my recent adventures in earring making, it occurred to me that I needed somewhere to display them! So I made an earring holder, complete with tutorial for you lovely people!
Materials:
– Crappy old picture frame from the thrift store, preferably with kitschy 50s cross stitch or print
– Paint/paintbrush
– Strong glue, like E6000 or FabriTack. Or I guess you could use tacky glue (which I used) or hot glue. Whatever.
– Aida cloth or plastic canvas (something with holes in) (I used 14-count Aida cloth. If you’re using Aida cloth, go for 11 count cause it’ll have larger holes. I just used what I had)
– Pliers (probably)
Step one: Dissemble kitschy art:
(IDEK)
Step two: Grab your pliers and yank out the points of DEATH holding the picture in the frame.
Step three: Paint frame.
Things I will not judge you for doing at this stage:
1. Forgetting until you get home from the thrift store that you do not have any paint and using watered down puff paint instead.
2. Remembering that puff paint will peel off, lacking some sort of sealant, and saying out loud, “Ah, fuck it.”
2. Visible brush strokes. We’re going for shabby chic here. Or something.
3. Lacking newspaper to put under the frame/paint and using ONE ripped apart plastic bag even though you have about a billion plastic bags.
Ahem.
Step four: Measure Aida cloth against the glass that probably came with your frame.
Step five: Glue Aida cloth against the sticky-out bit of the frame. Let dry.
Step six: Add earrings, hang up in the back of your closet so no one can see your shoddy paint job. Or on the wall over the dresser, which is what I actually did.
(Also, I have more earrings than this and the singular ones have partners, they’re just downstairs in my boyfriend’s apartment and seeing as we’re on Spring Break, he’s not here to let me into it.)
Yay!
Incidentally, if anyone has any idea what to do with several pieces of glass from picture frames, I’d appreciate some ideas. I don’t usually use glass with embroidery, but my frames all come with it.
Stitch, Brinn, Stitch! 