I love yarn. Simple truth. But as much as I love yarn, I absolutely adore knitting patterns. (Just like Albus Dumbledore in the 6th Harry Potter book)! ESPECIALLY free ones!
A Scary Sight
Recently I opened my lovely knitting ‘closet’ and saw THIS:
In the lower left-hand corner, there is a space in which I placed my two large binders full of knitting patterns. Sadly, they were unorganized, un-labeled, and un-nerving. This closet holds all of my knitting supplies and all of the music that I managed to save when we sold our house 2 1/2 years ago. As you can tell, it is a horrible mess!
My Inner School Teacher just couldn’t stand the disastrous lack of system I endured for knitting patterns. I’ve collected patterns for almost 40 years. I had knitting patterns EVERYWHERE: the bottom of this closet, the middle of this closet, in every available cubbyhole of my desk, on my kitchen counter. If you are a knitter, you get it, right? I subscribe to a lovely knitting website called Expression Fiber Arts, which sends out a free knitting/crocheting pattern every Friday. I’ve saved dozens of these patterns and printed out dozens of these patterns. They were EVERYWHERE!
What To Do, What To Do…
Originally I thought that if I put the saved patterns in sheet protectors and stuck them in two large binders, it would be easy to find what I needed when I bought yarn.
WRONG! The problem became one of matching new yarn to old(er) patterns or matching new patterns to old(er) yarn. For example, many of the patterns that Chandi sends from the website mentioned above are for her beautifully hand-dyed fingering weight yarns. I’ve bought some of her yarns. I used some of it to make a lovely shawl for my daughter, Heather. I mentioned in an earlier post called “Knitting In The Hospital.” Wonderful yarn to knit with!
I printed the pattern long before I bought the yarn. So when it came time to actually start the project with my newly-acquired pink yarn, I couldn’t find the blessed pattern! It took a few days before I could locate it, and I managed to finish the project before her birthday.
But this became a serious problem when my knitting storage space changed from two large compartments in the RV to a single, small closet in the apartment. Soooo…I put my brain to pondering a solution. I liked the idea of using sheet protectors and binders to store knitting patterns, especially if I decided to reuse a pattern and didn’t want to soil it. But as the number of patterns increased, my ability to locate the patterns decreased and magnified my frustration.
…Eureka! I Have Found It!
I decided to sort my patterns by YARN WEIGHT! This means I would go through the binders and find all the loose patterns in the apartment–a time-consuming, but necessary endeavor–and sort each pattern by yarn weight.
I knew I wouldn’t have enough space for a 3-ring binder for each yarn weight, but I thought I could probably fit two weights into each of three binders. Here was my answer! I found 3 white 3-ring binders of varying widths that we had lying around the apartment (after Richard reorganized some of his stuff) and put them together like this:
I found some cute free knitting clipart for each binder to ‘jazz up’ the sign I made to go in the front of the binders. I used the same graphic for the spine label of the ‘worsted and bulky weight’ binder, like this:
I haven’t finished organizing them; I still need to go through and organize each binder by project, i.e. clothing, men’s, women’s, children, household items, etc. But it’s a significant improvement over the old ‘toss ’em in a binder and don’t worry about it’ method that I used before!
Last, But Not Least
The next project? *sigh* Go through my yarn and sort it by weight, as well.
This may take a while. *sigh*
Happy knitting…
Anita