I may have a scrap problem...

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See what this is all about!

photo journal

There has been a lot of this as I continue to take control of my sewing room:

small containers to hold 'crumbs'  (anything under 2") sorted by colour

scraps waiting for my attention

moving from open baskets to lidded storage -- this stack is for squares from 2' - 4.5"

 
and some of this in preparation for a workshop (on using coloured and variegated yarns) I am facilitating on Saturday

two samples of 'stacked pooling'

while listening to this on a continual loop in preparation for a worship service I am leading on Sunday

and a vast amount of this (we spent most of the last week of WM’s annual leave gardening)

native hibiscus in foreground, buddleia in middle ground;
clivea and camelia in backgrouns

verbena seedlings

cosmos seedlings sown five days ago!

 There has been a daily dose of this (can’t resist that view)


and tomorrow is forecast to be 40°C ( 104°F) so there will probably be some of this:


Unfortunately, there never seems to be enough of this:


And, yes, I do know I owe you a post about our time away!

How much yarn is too much?

Warning: all about yarn (no fabric here sorry!)

The week before last I assembled all my yarn in one place.

I didn’t intend for it to be there for long. Things happened (a story for another post) and I was just too exhausted in the evenings to do anything! By the time I updated my  records on Ravelry, it took me most of a week! However, I was able to look at the whole lot realistically and make some decisions about what to keep and what to give away!

To tell the truth, at first I was overwhelmed by the amount of yarn I had. However, the longer it sat in front of me, the more used to it I became and now it doesn’t seem so bad!

So we’ll begin with what I had before the cull!

The synthetic yarns were mostly on the table. Here is the view from the end of the table closest to my knitting chair

 

and here are the synthetics (including baby yarn) again from the side of the table (yes, that is my fruit bowl lost in there!)

 

That's a lot less synthetic than there used to be but still way too much for my liking!

On the floor, under the end of the table were the cottons and bamboos, with the sock yarns to their right

 

I discovered that I could knit a pair of socks each week for a year and not run out of yarn (I had no idea I had so much)!

Finally, in front of the television unit, are the wools, including UFO’s in that white box.

One thing this exercise has reinforced is that my stash is mostly either 8ply (DK) or sock yarn. No wonder I never get around to knitting all those lightweight projects I have queued!

And, because we all need closure, here is my yarn collection now. Now I just need to find a permanent home for those nine 28 litre (7.4 gallons) tubs (left to right, top to bottom: baby yarn, two tubs of sock yarn, yarn for me, cotton and cotton blends, wool in weights other than 8ply/DK, UFOs for me, sock yarn for me, acrylic 5ply/sport-weight). The two large ones, which have a capacity of 80 litres each (21 gallons) live under the spare bed. The bottom one holds my 8ply/DK wool yarn, the other is full of 8ply acrylic!

This collection of tubs does not include my stash in “grab bags”; some of which are seen in this photo. These are housed in a drawer under the spare single/twin bed.

I did not take a photo of the yarn I gave away – that didn’t even occur to me, sorry.

Now that the yarn is sorted, I can get back to some stitching! Of course, there’ll be some music in the background while I sew or some television viewing while I knit.

What do you like to watch (or listen to) while you’re stitching?

What would you do?

We have had a very mild winter and spring has begun early. Although we are officially still in the coldest month of the year (there was snow on the nearby mountains a couple of days ago), yesterday was warm, clear and bright -- not a cloud in the sky in the morning and only small puffs of white in the afternoon. A perfect day to be outside.

So where did WM and I choose to spend the day?

In my sewing room, where else?

Now, please don’t be shocked. You are going to see something that is quite awful. I’ll admit that I am a hoarder, a procrastinator and a bit lazy. But I’m working on improving in all those areas!

My sewing room was a bit of a mess. I really didn’t feel creative in there at all! Any horizontal surface, like my cutting table, my sewing table and the spare machine table that DD occasionally used, had become cluttered. The cutting table had mostly knitting projects from last weekend or those in progress but there’s also a finished quilt under all that. My sewing table has a pile of pre-washed but not ironed fabric on it plus a few other odds and ends. The old machine table had become the storage place for works in progress and more prewashed but unironed fabric, this time flannelette.

 

To begin the clean up, I moved everything that wasn’t furniture but was on the floor from the sewing room to the family room:

Yes, all those boxes, bags and tubs (and a pile of batting scraps moved from a container because I needed it for something else) were on the floor of my sewing room, making it hard to get at anything else. Don't worry, it's all ordered so I know where it's going! That lounge with the two tubs in front of it is covered in quilting related things and everything there will be going back into the sewing room. The lounge with the two green shopping bags on it has knitting related stuff and everything there will be moved to the wardrobe in the spare bedroom.

The wardrobe in the sewing room had been a repository of all sorts of things. The room had been DD’s bedroom so there were still some clothes of hers plus at least one box of her things. The rest was either quilting related (fabric) or stuff I had packed in boxes for our renovation in 2007 and had not unpacked yet!

 

Encouraged by WM, I threw out some unneeded, long accumulated items. This is very hard for a hoarder who saves everything because I might be needed in the future. I emptied four of the five archive boxes (the other was DD’s) and the large white carton carton and WM re-packed what was left into one carton (to be rehoused at a later date)!

WM visited the local Reject Shop (a discount store) while I, supposedly, moved things back into my sewing room. Unlike others who enjoy this part of the process, I don't -- I find it very hard to work out where I want everything. Especially when we started on the task before I had thought it all through!

WM returned with four storage units -- five plastic drawers in each. Here are three of them:

 

At first we arranged three of them in the wardrobe like this, but then we moved the old ones into the wardrobe and put the new ones on display because they are all charcoal (the only colour they had), and the original two units, now hiding inside the wardrobe, are blue.

I like the uncluttered look that we have achieved so far but the family room now looks like a disaster zone!

There's still a way to go. Lots of ironing and folding of all that pre-washed fabrics to be done too.

However, the thing that is really holding me up concerns a lot of fabric that is not actually mine.

As many of you would know, I belong to an organisation that makes quilts for children in hospital and for palliative care patients. We make these mostly from donated fabric. Because we have minimal storage space in the Council-owned room where we meet, different members are storing the donated fabric at their homes. I am one of those. At the moment, some of the fabric at my place is stored in a large plastic tub which is crammed so full of pieces of fabric that I have no idea what's in the tub and so am not using it to his full potential. That tub, the larger of the two in the photograph below, has been in my home for fifteen months now, and no-one, not even the lady who packed it, has any idea what's in it!

The big question is this: should I leave it all in the tub so that, in the unlikely event of our founder requiring it at a meeting, it will be packed and ready to go? Or should I unpack it and have much greater access to the fabric? If I do the latter, I lose space but gain precious time because I won't have to rummage around the overstuffed tub on the off-chance something inside might be just what I need. I may even become inspired when I see all those new fabrics to play with! ;-)

I'm inclined to unpack it -- but what would you do?

you win some, you lose some

This post was going to be called “necessity is the mother of invention” but my prototype is less than spectacular!

You've seen my intarsia blanket in progress (here). This is the methodical way I lay out my yarns next to my chair.

This is the storage unit where they are kept when not laid out for work!

And this is my solution.

Looks okay, you think? It works to a point but the pockets are too small for full 100 gram skeins so I have to force the yarn in and drag it out (meaning I  don't put the skein back in the pocket, I just drop it on the floor beside my chair). There are too few pockets for all the yarns I am using (some fell out of the bag and got left out of the photo).

I could have made something like this (picture from http://flickrhivemind.net/Tags/handmade,oilcloth/Interesting)

but as the skeins got smaller they would fall out. Hindsight tells me I could have used elastic to solve that! I was trying to use what I had to hand to do the job and I didn't have any wide elastic. Perhaps in my second attempt, I will purchase what I need to be more efficient.

And I forgot to mention – I cut the binding at 2” instead of 2 1/2” then sewed it on at 3/8” instead of 1/4”! Therefore sewing down 132” of narrow binding took hours, put stress on my hands and could have been avoided if I had tried the pockets first before applying the binding!

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

Linking up with Sew What Monday

thread and bobbin storage

On Monday night, WM and I were discussing options for storing threads and bobbins. I have seen containers for storing threads and containers for storing bobbins but I, being different, wanted to store the threads with their matching bobbins.

We discussed a peg board on the wall (dust magnet) and trays inside drawers (too hard to see the colours from on top). WM had a brilliant idea - he looked on the Internet! That may not sound like much to you but it is not a normal idea for WM.

Anyway, he found a "bobbin box" from a company called CraftLocker. But what he found was not a "bobbin box" it was a plastic case designed to hold thread and one or two bobbins - together.

The one WM found was an ebay type auction - no longer available; but, using the information given, I found a company in Australia called Craftainers who sell all kinds of amazing storage and gadgets for crafters.

picture copied from Craftainers

I ordered one bobbin box and one set of extra pins. I paid standard Australian postage (not express or parcel post. I ordered late on Monday evening. The box was here on Wednesday afternoon - nicely packed, goods in order. Now that is not good service - that is great service!

I couldn't wait to open it and put my meagre thread supplies inside! There'll be more threads and more "Thread and Bobbin Boxes" in my future I am sure!

Thank you Craftainers; I will be back to shop with you again!