Getting Organized

I have come to realize that I am an episodic housekeeper. Or maybe a hit-and-run organizer is more accurate. I have great difficulty keeping things neat and tidy all of the time, but periodically I go on intense cleaning and organizing sprees. One of these sprees hit this week-end and involved my yarn stash.

My DH and I live in Boston in a tiny, two bedroom condo (and the second bedroom serves as his home office). This means that I don't have a craft room (dream on!), but only a craft corner -- located in our bedroom. Recently it's really gotten to be an eyesore. See for yourself.

To be fair, it's usually neater than this, but the above photo reflects the level of chaos I was starting to feel and the degree to which things had gotten out of hand.

So, rather than spend $350.00 on this Pottery Barn cubby organizer which caught my eye in the catalog, I decided to be more thrifty and purchased this Martha Stewart cubby organizer for about one-third the price.

Now, granted, I had to assemble it myself, but it only took about an hour before it was good to go. So, I then took all of this:

... and turned it into this:

On the upper-middle shelf is a three-drawer organizer that holds all of my dps; the left-center shelf holds my sketching notebook, knitting journal and circular knitting needle organizer; and the brown cloth drawer in the middle-bottom holds my awkwardly shaped tools such as a yarn scale, a ball winder and, my most recent acquisition, a darning egg.

I had originally intended to display the yarn a la LYS style which I had thought would be very pretty and would allow me to constantly admire my beautiful yarn. However, after careful consideration I decided that I needed to protect my yarn from dust and moths. So, each of the cloth drawers is lined with a  100% cotton, zippered pillowcase cover into which I packed the yarn and then included a cedar sachet for good measure.

Finally, almost everything got a label. (Be still my heart!)

Fashion Week in Milan

My new favorite blog is The Sartorialist (found here ). The blogger, Scott Schuman, has a great eye for fashion and is an excellent photographer to boot. I like to check out his blog in the morning to seek inspiration before I head to my own hum-drum closet to get ready for work. He is currently in Milan for the fashion shows and included a photo of these Dries Van Noten socks in a recent post. Aren't they great?

I wonder if they were handknit? I'd love to knit up a pair of these babies! Just seeing them made me smile.