A Cool Organizing Tip!

After several years of teaching school, I find myself craving organization in my home.

Y’all probably remember that my DH and I lived in an RV for 18 months or so. You probably also remember that we moved into a 2-bedroom apartment back in February of 2019. What you may not know (because I probably didn’t mention it) is that I have one small closet for my knitting/sewing/music stuff.

Yep. Just. One. Small. Closet.

In the meantime, I’ve been struggling to figure out how to organize my knitting needles. I don’t have very many straight needles anymore; I prefer circular needles for all my knitting except when I knit cotton dishcloths. I also have a pair of size 35 and a pair of size 50 straight needles for the time that I may choose to knit big bulky multi-strand afghans/blankets for family/friends/clients.

So, I’ve tried lots of different ways to organize my needles…and the ‘stuff’ that knitters tend to accumulate to go with yarn and needles. I’ve put things in gallon zip-close bags. Nope. I still found myself searching through needle packages trying to find the right size and length for a given project. I never seemed to be able to find my stitch markers or coil-less safety pins or row counters or needle sizers…you get the picture?

Eureka!

While pondering this exasperating dilemma, I had one of those ‘Eureka!’ moments where the light bulb went off over my head. (You know the ones; you’ve seen them in cartoons or comic strips.)

So I trotted myself down to my local Big Box Store (the one founded by Sam Walton) and meandered over to the closet organization aisle. I snatched up a $3.00 shoe organizer that hangs over the closet door in your bedroom and holds 24 pairs of shoes.

How about THAT?! I filled most of those 24 pockets with knitting needles, organized by sizes, and various accessories required in the creative process we call ‘knitting.’

How It Works

I’ve kept my circular needles in their original packaging…mostly so I didn’t have to find one of my elusive needle sizers to figure out what size I have! In the first pocket on the uppermost left-hand side I put my size 0 and 1 needles, as well as that European size that’s between zero and one–the 2.25 mm size. In the next pocket to the right, I’ve put size 2 needles, then in the next pocket, I placed size 3. And so on. It doesn’t matter how long they are or if they’re Turbos or Rockets or Lace or brass, nickel, or what have you. If they are Size 2, they go in the size 2 pocket. It looks like this:

You see the first 2 rows of the shoe organizer above, containing my circular needles sizes 0 through 8. (I also have a tiny pair of size 8 straights in the ‘8’ pocket; I’ll talk about them on another blog someday.)

The last 3 rows of the 6-row organizer looks like this:

In the upper two right-hand pockets you see in the photo above, I have a small blue-lidded container of cabone ring stitch markers, and next to that you see my size 17 and 19 circular needles (in the same pocket, still in original packages). The next row has–in the same pocket–a pair of size 15 straights, size 35 straights, and size 50 straights.

After the pocket with the large straight needles, I have two pockets with various accessories encased in zip-close bags and the fourth pocket with my few double-point needles that I’ve kept.

In the bottom row, left to right, the pockets contain my stitch holders in three sizes and the few size 8 straights I’ve kept in the red circular container. That container is a metal container that held Christmas candy that I received from a student about 8 years ago. It’s PERFECT for short straight needles. It also holds a single pair of size 10 needles that I used to knit slippers for my grandmother many years ago. Since taking the photograph, I removed the bottle of blocking soak and blocking pins from the metal container and placed them in the empty pocket to the right of the straight needles container.

Spreading the Word

Yesterday I stopped by one of my local yarn stores after enduring a very unpleasant medical procedure that one of my doctors prescribed. At the checkout counter was a woman talking with the clerk about her frustration with trying to find her needle sizer and having to buy yet another one.

Being the shy, retiring little wallflower that I am (NOT!), I sort of ‘jumped’ into the conversation and told the woman and the clerk about my organizational triumph. They both listened with rapt attention, and then simultaneously said, “Can I steal your idea?”

Well, y’all know that knitters never ‘steal’ ideas from one another! We just borrow them, then make them our own!

So, of course, I said “Yes!”

Feel free to borrow!

Happy knitting!