I love to craft. It’s something I’ve been doing since I was a child. Every summer break was a time for me to let my creative juices flow and waste the sunny days away making things. I made friendship bracelets, paper beads, rings with wire and beads, I would make different kinds of shoebox doll houses and every time I would rearrange them differently, and one time I wanted to “dig” for dinosaur bones so much I took a shoebox and paper mached a lizard to the bottom then covered it with sand and spent hours pretending I was Dr. Alan Grant uncovering a T-Rex skeleton with a large paint brush.
However, now that I am an “adult” ( whatever that means) I have moved on from such frivolous activities… And instead have filled my extra time and procrastination with knitting!!! I love knitting and although i had been a huge fan of sewing I began to fall more in love with creating something 3D from a long piece of that soft loveable string called yarn. Unfortunately, this means that my room has now become the prequel to a Hoarders episode for crafters. Seriously, it’s scary.
Now, I will say that this pile is A) not all of it but also B) started by my mother in the 90’s!! The woman has passed down her hoard to mine thus creating a nightmare of killer yarn tangles and nameless balls of unknown fiber content!
That pretty mint green one is from Sears!! How old must it be that it was from a time when SEARS sold yarn?! Oy vey. I’m just shocked this label and skein have lasted through the test of time and yet remains a fabulous colour that is so “in” right now….which means I want to use it! But how can I use it if I don’t know or can’t remember I have it?? What if I have an equally fabulous colour trapped in a bag in one of those cardboard or plastic boxes pictured above?? And thus begins my conundrum:
HOW DO I STORE MY YARN???!!?
I have pondered, googled, researched aka googled again) and decided on plans and scratched them because they are either too time consuming, too expensive, or I’m just too lazy to go out and find the right equipment.
There are countless blogs and websites offering advice, all helpful and inspiring but I don’t want to trouble myself with buying and nailing pegboard to my wall after buying a winder and winding a million little fluff balls. It looks beautiful and I was so ready to do it. I even started winding little yarn cakes out of a toilet paper roll!! But then I realized things get dusty in my room especially if I am not using my yarn that often. So I scratched the pegboard idea (at least until I had more time to knit…perhaps for the future when I’m a counselor and need some good ol’ yarn therapy for myself!). But then I was left with cute little cakes I can’t seem to organize!
So after much deliberation I decided to opt for my original idea but with a change. I had bought fabric boxes to hold my skeins standing upright so I could see the colors I have. Unfortunately, this whole issue started because I realized not all my yarn is in those long factory perfect skeins (like my friend Minty from 90’s Sears). And I tried and failed to wind them up myself. (It was pronounced a failure when I tried using one of my long hand wound skeins and it knotted up and caused needless frustration). BUT I used my silly/crazy brain once again today and have come up with a new way to wind yarn using a paper towel roll. I will experiment changing my original method so that I can still achieve a long skein but with less possibility of unraveling and tangling!
So please stay tuned for my yarn winding and storing developments!!
Cheers 🙂
Drea
forgot about dre.a 