Christmas is put away for another year, I wrangled the kitchen under control again, and both the stash and the spinning room are in much better shape today, so the neat and tidy OCD part of my brain is cheering very loudly. There are a few things that make me crazy – things like too much caffeine, too little sleep, and boredom – but nothing makes me crazy like mess. It’s part of why I don’t spend too much time in the basement these days, as it’s where Mike has contained his mess. So even if my stuff is okay (which it wasn’t before today, I’ll admit), I just have a hard time sitting down there without getting an eye-twitch or starting to enter that unpleasant mental place that we both try not to refer to, and try to avoid at all costs.
The good news is that I wrangled the yarn quite well this morning (even if not efficiently as I was half done when I discovered the stabilizing zippers on the bottom of the bins), and freed up quite a bit of space in the stash case just by using bins from Ikea. The yarn has the same amount of space in each Expedit cubby, but because I don’t have to worry about it falling out, I was able to stuff a lot more in there. I’d like to get two more bins next time we’re in south Edmonton for the lace and the handspun, but neither of those I’m worried about exploding out all over the floor. The scary part is exactly how much yarn I’ve managed to accumulate. There’s a full bin of sock yarn, another full bin with clothing quantities of Dale of Norway, Mission Falls 1824 Wool and 1824 Cotton, and also the five skeins of Mirasol Nuna that was supposed to be a Pioneer, a bin of acrylic for yarn bombing and toys, over half a bin for baby yarn, and the other half for bulky, and then two (TWO!) bins of various assorted non-acrylic yarn. Not to mention the growing stack of handspun, and the excessive amount of lace.
Actually touching and handling the yarn was good, because now I know I can shop in my stash for a lot of things this year. Also, I think this will be the year of starting to knit with my handspun. It really is about time…
And no, I’m not trying to hide how much yarn I actually have by putting it in bins.
The spinning room didn’t take too much wrangling, more just stuffing bags full of roving and other spinnables into the bookcase and hoping they don’t fall out. I still can’t close the closet door, but that’s because all the items I need to relist on Kijiji are there. I should get to that sometime this week, and hopefully a few more things will move out of the house. The good news here is that it’ll be easy for me to switch out wheels, so I’ll be able to start again on the Level 2 homework this weekend. And since I got everything tidied, I even treated myself to about half an hour of spinning on the Traditional, and I haven’t wheel-spun in weeks!
All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the progress I made today. No, I didn’t work on the outstanding Christmas mittens, and I didn’t work on my homework, but I got the house to a place I’m happy about starting off the new year with. It’s (mostly) tidy, (mostly) clean, and everything is (mostly) in its place, and I’ll take that as a good start to 2013.
