Finding Some Order

Thank you all for your kind words and sympathies regarding Chris' illness last week.  He is doing much better with only occasional cough.  The doctor had told  us his eardrum was already healing when we went to urgent care, so now that he's a week out and done with the antibiotics he should be fine.

Last week was spring break for the local public schools, so work was non-stop crazy every day.  Several days I came home, sat down, and then realized I had sat staring into space for half an hour.  I really started to feel a need for calm and order to offset the chaos and noise of my day.  Normally I would find that in knitting, but even that was too fidgity for me this week, so I turned to a method proven successful by generations -- spring cleaning.

I'm doing this at a leisurely pace.  Tackling one or two projects a day rather than trying to overhaul and clean out our space all at once.  Project number one?  The stash.

I keep my stash theoretically in a cabinet I inherited from my grandparents.  It has three shelves and is deep enough for a skein to lie lengthwise rather than on its side.  In the past few years my stash accumulation has increased to the point that it was no longer fitting in the cabinet.  The area around it in our bedroom has been taken over by excess skeins in boxes and tote bags, piled precariously so that when I went to get something it would all fall out onto my head.  So on Friday I emptied the cabinet, bagged up all the skeins in boxes, and organized everything by weight.  I also took photos for Ravelry, but I have yet to upload them.  Then I pulled out a few skeins and leftovers that I will never use and put them aside to donate at work.  Finally I started to pile it all back into the cabinet.

And it fit!  The door closed and everything and there are no more piles of leftovers and unfrogged projects sitting on the top.

I still have a lot more to do around the apartment, but just having that one bit of organization in the corner made me feel so much better.  And it is good to revisit what I have because on Friday I will be adding some new items -- from Stitches South!