Nothing prompts cleaning like imminent house guests! Geoff & his girlfriend arrive Saturday and since she has only been to our house once before, I am still working on a good impression — you know, demonstrating that our house is a wholesome & respectable domicile. Not the cave of a crazed knitter — which is what it has rather resembled of late.
I actually need to reorganize my whole studio space, but that has not hit the Top Ten list of household priorities — yet. So, putting things away has meant piling them up in my studio space. And since my studio space is open to the kitchen & family room (okay, it has leaked out into the family room), it is not a private mess.
So, Wednesday night, I started to tidy. It was mostly a matter of pulling ziploc bags of projects or the remains of projects out of knitting bags, shopping bags, random baskets. The ongoing projects were sorted into ” active” and “neglected” — the latter going into a plastic bin. The bags of remains turned into a guessing game of “what project was this?” I pulled out ziploc after ziploc each containing: knitting needles, wee balls of yarn, notes & charts ( both printed and handwritten), and a pencil. I dumped all the yarn into boxes “to be sorted later” and reclaimed dozens of needles. The papers mostly went into the recycle bin.
The bulkier component of the general mess was yarn. Yarn I have bought recently (um, over the last 2 years or so). Again, 2 bins: “yarn with a purpose” and “general for-whatever yarn” ( the latter being mostly sock and lace- weight).
I recovered books I had been missing — and they are now neatly piled (since the bookcase is packed!). Magazines are piled too. And the collection of yarn catalogs dating back 2 years got recycled.
It is amazing what an improvement even this rather “surface” sorting made! My studio space is still crowded, but looks much better, cleaner and more organized. I am even more inspired to tackle the massive overhaul it really requires.