Spring Fever

I think it is finally spring now.  Not because the calendar says so, not because I can finally run after work without fearing I'll be hit by a car (due to darkness, not inept drivers, which is still a concern), and not because the weather is struggling ever so much to warm up.  Our warm/cold spells continue but this time it only ducked down to around 40 rather than the 20s.  No, none of these indicate spring in my home quite as much as my sudden and desperate need to tidy all the things.  Last night found me at 10 pm embarking on almost two hours of organization and manic cleaning.  There's this thing that happens in the waning months of winter, and I highly doubt I am the only one who suffers from it.  This thing that saps all of your energy the instant you think about putting away clothes or sorting the mail.  I don't know if it has a name, but one day you emerge from this wintery haze and see a layer of just stuff coating every surface.  You realize that you have been mixing clean and dirty laundry for such a dangerous amount of time that you wonder no one has noticed a smell.  And you vow to never again fall under its sway.

Today I continued with my mania to tackle a task that I often dread -- I cleaned out my crafting area.  

I call it my craft area, but really it is still dominated by the stash.  New yarn, old yarn, leftovers, ufos.  It all needed to be put right.  The good thing is that I no longer feel the need to buy any more yarn.  I started with the intent to just put in the cabinet what had been floating around the sewing desk, but I ended up pulling everything out and doing a full airing of the stash.  Everything has now been examined for damage, bagged, and stacked neatly in the cabinet.  

I also organized my leftovers into various categories as I am making hexipuffs.  I have an entire bag of fingering weight, all of which is my own and most of which is much more than is needed for hexis.  There may be preemie hats in my future.

All of this cleaning and organization is great.  I feel less cluttered and I get to rediscover items I have not properly appreciated.  But the downside?  I need to knit all the things and I need to knit them now.  If you need me I'll be huddled in the corner, winding yarn madly while I chew off my hair.

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!