Organizing

Do you save ball bands?


I have this thing where I save all the ball bands of every yarn I've ever knit with. (My only concession might be that for multiple balls of the same yarn used in a single project, I would save only one band.)

Of course I have a huge collection of questionably useful -- some would say useless -- paper now. After all, if I properly document stash and projects in Ravelry, theoretically I would never have to look at a ball band again.

But...


I've been organizing my "stuff" for the last couple of days. And in the process, I've been reclaiming a lot of yarn by frogging projects, as well as neatly winding partial balls of leftovers. The same compulsion that has me imposing this kind of order on my yarn collection is telling me to search through all those ball bands and match up the ones that go with each reclaimed yarn. (Not the little bag of scraps, of course. I know that they are all Noro Kureyon.)

Now, the other thing I have started to do -- and this is something Ravelry does not really provide adequately for -- is to document my needles in the same way as my yarn. The best way I have come up with to do this is to photograph individual needles in their packages. (I usually save the packaging for my needles, at least the good ones that are packaged in plastic bags.) I then use the Other / I don't know category. This changes the form so that you only have to enter one field for the name of your stashed "yarn".



To keep everything neat and tidy in my stash database, I preface every entry with the word "Needles:". This ensures that the needles are all grouped together in the N section. So far I am starting with the best, most unique needles in my collection; that is, Signature, Kollage, and Bryspun. Next I plan to do Addi Lace, then Addi, then Hiya Hiya, then Knit Picks. Yes, it's going to be huge. I understand now why the Ravelry section for needles is mapped out simply as a chart. However, I know I want to keep track at least of my "good" needles by photographing them. Maybe the rest can just go in the chart, to keep things manageable.

ETA: Wow, so I just added a lot of needles to my "yarn" stash on Ravelry. I used the Colorway field to enter information on size and length. What is cool about that is that I can use the Search function to figure out whether I have a needle size I need, and even whether I have repeats in a size. The other thing I can do now is keep track of which needles are "in use" in a project, by entering them on the project page as a "Stash Yarn". In fact, the only thing that is in any way distracting and odd about this is the "skeins" overlay on the photo in the Stash database. (For yarns, I love that feature, since it lets me know which yarns I have large amounts of if I am thinking of knitting something big -- which I never do, but you know, the day might come -- but for the needles it's just ugly. Oh well, can't have everything.)