Organizing

New home, old mess. I'm trying to organize my crafty things in some way that makes sense, and the basic idea is to have just one address for each category of hoarded material. Like the quilt backing fabrics in this cupboard:

Embroidery floss kept popping up in different project bags, shoe boxes, and pouches and bags with my mother's unfinished projects. I had no idea how much of that stuff I had, and what colours. Now I'm working my way from this mess

towards something in this direction:

One way to help with the organizing problems is naturally reducing the amount of material to organize. Using up yarn rests is my favourite method.

Still some light grey yarn left, so I started knitting this pair in a smaller size. I ended in a vicious circle and had to buy more light grey...

... and so there was yarn left and therefore I had to knit these mittens to go with the Little Knight  hat for our grandson. The pattern is for a newborn baby, I just used heavier yarn and more stitches.

 

Anyone still there? ...

It has been such a long time, and much has happened since September and my last post here.  We have moved, and this is how my sewing room is now arranged:

Not quite finished yet. No place for every item just yet. But I have been going through my belongings, binned an amazing amount of ancient textiles and saved another amazing amount of textiles. I have found trash, and I have found treasures, like this lonely mitten, 

all felted in snow and sweaty fingers, with a hole showing how much it has been used. Why on earth is this a treasure? Because it was knitted by my Grandmother, and I have saved this years and years back when I was still living with my parents. I knew some day I would want to knit mittens like she did, warm and comfortable. Her patterns were not from magazines, and I have only found one of them on a Finnish knitting blog, written down as a traditional pattern. 

With a sewing room in a chaos like that, I have spent time elsewhere with yarn and needles, and so I tested and tried out stitches and found out how Grandmother had knitted that mitten.

It is a lot like this other pattern she used much, but over two stitches where as the second pattern has a repeat of four stitches.

I decided to knit a sample of that pattern too for my knitting pattern archive.

And then there is Grandmother's third favorite, extravagantly in three  colors. This is the only pattern she knitted in the round, and again the reason must be that she didn't like to purl!

 

Knitting in the round makes my little sample is so narrow, with the same number of stitches as the other samples.

All these patterns look more complicated than they are, because they only use one color at a time, and the slip stitches make the mitten close-knit and warm. Not even tiny fingers will poke through stitches here!

Naturally I needed to test my newly found pattern, and here is the result:

Settling in our new home in an old house is still a learning experience. We get exercise while learning the new places of our pots and pans and plates, or going through the cardboard boxes when looking for something not yet unpacked. I hope to find more time for reading blogs and posting on my own as well. Take care, stay safe.