Getting organized

I have never been a noticeably neat or tidy person. I have struggled with mess and clutter my whole life. It was bad enough when I was a kid and the only space I was messing up was my own bedroom, but now I have a whole house, and it's pretty frightening. Especially since DH is even worse than me. Don't get me wrong, it's not 'call-Child-Services-we-can't-find-the-baby-amidst-all-the-clutter' messy, but it's definitely 'too-embarrassing-to-have-people-over' messy. While many things are responsible for this problem (such as the reams and reams of paper we possess), I would be lying if I said my knitting was not a contributor.

So! A few weeks ago I resolved to completely tidy and organize the house, bit by bit, starting from the front door and working my way forward, being ruthless about getting rid of stuff we don't need, and storing things in logical, tidy places. Two weekends ago I finished the front hall. (It looks great.) This past weekend I began the living room. The living room is significant because it is the source of Knitting Mess Part I. Knitting, patterns, yarn and needles are all over the floor. It's very hard to get around, and this would be bad even if we didn't have a toddler running around...which we do...which makes it worse. It would be hopeless to ask me to simply not keep knitting stuff in the living room. The living room is where I knit when I'm at home. Therefore, there will always be knitting stuff in the living room. The key is to have somewhere large enough to store it, out-of-the-way enough that it doesn't look awful, yet close-to-hand enough that it will be convenient for me to put it away.

I began with the simple, quick, no-effort task of completely dismantling the entire wall unit running along the side of the room. Sigh. I never do things by halves. I began to put the unit back together at the front of the room, integrating it with the existing unit holding the television. (Damn, but I love the modularity of Ikea's stuff.) Very quickly, this all became too much for my husband, who could not stand back and watch me as I did it all completely differently from how he would have done it. Suddenly, it because his project. :) And last night, I came home to find it done. Finito. New wall unit completely put together just the way I wanted, just where I wanted. The man is a doll.

Thus, this morning I delayed our departure from the house so that I could toss some crap, free up shelf room, and start to store knitting stuff in a location other than the floor. It's not finished yet, but the new handy-dandy home of Knitting Mess Part I is in the end tables on each side of the living room sofa which I sit on when I knit in front of the television. Perfect!!!

Cape cod sweater for MIL

The tangle on one skein got so bad yesterday that I cut it. About a minute later, I figured out how I could have unravelled the tangle without cutting it. (Insert aggravated Marge Simpson soundbyte here.) As per my resolution of yesterday, I started pulling the yarn from the outside of the skein. So far, we are cruising tangle-free on that skein. Lookin' good.

Spanish Knight sweater for Mom

Took this to work with me today. I'm getting quite close to completing one whole pattern set. (That sounds pretty lame given how much time I've spent on this already, but since each pattern set is a whopping 60 rows tall, it takes a while to do one.) 15 more rows until the waist.