Wednesday, August 26, 2015

My Dream Knitting Studio - My Latest WIP

This summer, Keith, Lucky, Indy and I packed up and moved back to Massachusetts.  This means that once again I had to pick up all of my knitting supplies and they actually had to live in storage for around 6 weeks! (Don't worry, I did bring some knitting with me to tide me over while we were waiting to move into our house.)

The fact that we are now home owners means that my yarn has a permanent home!  I have a new system to organize my yarn and knitting tools and I cannot wait to share it with all of you.  The walls are a cool toned purple that I'm totally in love with.  When we contracted the painters we didn't intend to paint this room, but then saw that it was included in our quote.  I was so excited that I could have a purple room all of my own.


In the room that is entirely dedicated to my craft (and whose closet functions as my dresser), all of my knitting boxes suddenly seem very small.   If something appears to be missing, it is!  Sandry (my Kromski Fantasia Wheel) is currently living in our spare bedroom while we bring boxes in and out of the third floor.  I'd hate for Sandry to get knocked over as we're rearranging things!

The third floor?  My office is really a walk through space connecting the second floor bedrooms to a third floor finished attic.  Therefore this "bedroom" could never actually function as a bedroom because you'd lose access to a whole floor of the house!


I have a huge 4x4 cube (the Ikea piece formally known as Expedit, now redesigned as Kallax) that I can use to store my yarn.  I previously used a TV stand but the doors didn't stay closed and I was quite honestly out of room.  The yarn was also inside my coffee table, inside another cube with Lucky's toys and spread around the house.  Hopefully the bulk of my yarn will live in this unit.


The room also features a little writing desk and matching file cabinet.  I haven't ever kept files in this but I might just start now.  I now have a lot of paperwork for all of my ChemKnits business so having it in my studio would be useful.


It was finally time to deal with the boxes.  First to come out of the boxes were my books and knitting magazines.  Really just because they are easy to unpack and I wanted to feel like I'm making some progress.


I took a big sigh as I was looking at my yarn.  I know that I need to open the boxes and start unpacking because there are some projects I really want to start working on.  (It doesn't help that I lost my yarn scale so that was keeping me from progressing on one of the projects I currently had unpacked.  This is the real reason I started unpacking my studio as July drew to a close... I haven't even unpacked my clothes yet!)

I have all of these purple bins left over from when Expedit was my dresser.  It was located in a room with white walls so the colors looked wonderful.  Now in my "Persian Violet #1419" (Benjamin Moore color) studio, the purple bins sort of clash with the cool purple walls.  For now, they will work as I start sorting yarn into different categories.  I hope to have a whole box for KnitPicks Wool of the Andes, one of Palette, one for handspun/handdyed, one for undyed fiber...  well this is just off the top of my head so far.  Deep breath... let's go!


One box of yarn down and oh boy is this going to be harder than I thought.  I've already filled 3 bins entirely (handspun, unspun, and undyed) and I have a whole mess of things that are going to be hard to categorize.  I keep my yarn in plastic bags but they get a little oily after a while (likely from wool lanolin, or from something in a previous move.)  They are slightly sticky and I sort of want to replace the plastic but I'm not sure what makes sense.

Wow, I seriously had three large boxes full of yarn.  I don't know if all of this is going to fit!

I don't think the greasy bag feeling is from the yarn, I think it is from the move and plastic bags being in boxes.  I really want to replace all of these bags.  Ugh.

I had to stop with a mess of yarn all over the floor.  I needed a break and a breather.  I was able to look a bit through my stash enough to figure out what I needed to order to get to my $50 KnitPicks cart.  (Why on earth am I ordering more yarn when I have this stash all over my floor?!?!)

This pile is only going to get bigger...
The room is coming together but I still have a lot of organization to go.  How do you organize your yarn?  Given that this studio is still a huge work in progress I would love input on anything that makes your stash management easier!