KNITTING UP DULWICH ROAD

A couple of weeks ago I spent hours looking for the yarn I wanted for a test square. Everything for the project was in one box so it had to be in there. Didn’t it? But I kept pulling out the wrong ball while my quarry lurked somewhere unseen.

Ok, it wasn’t hours. More like 10 minutes, but they were exasperating minutes. The time had come to be methodical about how I keep the project materials.

I wouldn’t say I’m tidy by nature. I have no problem with unnecessary piles of stuff lingering in the corner of a room. My brain edits them from view once they’ve been seen a few times, like the disappearing frames of my glasses. I know there’s a dead VCR tucked behind a chair in the bedroom that’s been there for years. See also current mayhem at the edge of my desk. (This week-end, Pat!)

But I am obsessive about the things I want to use often. They must be kept religiously in the same place and put immediately away after use, because otherwise – where on earth to look?

For my knitting, there are boxes for whole projects, plastic bags for yarn collections and individual tote bags for any specific parts of a project I’m working on. There is a wooden tea-bag box with the perfect compartments for row counters and locking stitch markers, darning needles, cable needles, crochet hooks, tape measures, thread cutters, blah blah blah. There are loaded bead boxes, a bag full of embroidery thread, another of sewing thread, pencils, paper. I could go on.

Of course this isn’t unusual. It’s preaching to the knitters’ choir: the essential care taken to avoid that groan when the perfect tool is missing when we need it.

But my hours (10 minutes) of yarn-search frustration showed me that just keeping things in the same place isn’t quite enough for this project. I was at the point of losing control. Which of the yarns in the box had featured in final squares and which only in tests? Was the bag of ‘possibles’ really so far unused? If I’d been bright, I would have hung on to all the ball bands and kept them with their yarns. But I’m an inveterate thrower-away, and still being rubbish on this even now I’ve realised I should do better.

Cue a couple of happy real hours sorting, bagging and labelling – et voilà! New arrangements.

Yarns that have featured in a test stay in the Tests bag unless they’re used in a square that becomes final, at which point they move to, er, Final. Yarns that have graduated to the Final bag are those I aim to use often in future squares, to bring coherence to the blanket. They’re labelled by name (due to bad habit with bands) and the square they’ve been used in. Same for those in the test bag. The tote bag on the right contains yarns for the active WIP, which is currently the final for BLM Hedge.

The other two bags contain the sum total of my stash. Honest. In 50+ on-and-off years as a knitter, I have only ever bought the yarn I need to make a project and used it up. I’m still basically doing the same here, even if I’m now acquiring some yarn that will end up as stash due to the testing. (Maybe one day I’ll have one of those exciting floor-to-ceiling rooms that I see online.) The contents of my previous yarn-collection bags have all been thrown into Untried, apart from the wonderful Ricorumi multipack which is for another project but great to dive into for Dulwich Road.

My next job is to start a list of all the yarns bought for this project, including their cost, to keep a record of spending. I’ll do another post about that soon.

For now I leave you with a little furry gift. Here is Lobster, photobombing my first image of the project bags and looking like she owns my stuff. Her brother is Shrimp and we are their Crustodians 😊

Featured image: Kev Fuentes on Unsplash. Thank you!