Saturday, September 5, 2009

Organizing My Knitting Patterns

I am a pretty organized person naturally - I usually know where everything in the house is located. I am not exceptionally clean however and usually have to force myself to keep up appearances. Every spring and fall I like to do a large cleaning/decluttering/organizing effort. This year I'm probably more motivated after watching a not-for-the-faint-of-heart reality show series on hoarders but mainly it is the change in seasons.

My yarn stash is pretty organized and decluttered already so I decided to say goodbye to my Spin-Off magazine collection. It is the only magazine I collect (and I haven't purchased any issues in the last few years) and I'm not sure why I've kept the magazines since I rarely even spin. Our house is tiny and I really don't have the room. (I don't even save magazines I've had articles published in - I just rip out the actual article to save). I went through each issue and pulled out any article or pattern I wanted to save. I also saved the entire hand spindle issue since that is a really good one. I put the old magazines in our library's recycling box.

Next I tackled my knitting pattern files. I save various patterns from magazines and the Internet in individual file folders labeled by type of project. Here's what I managed to toss - frankly I'm not sure why I was saving so many of these patterns. I even had a pattern for a simple ribbed scarf and many, many patterns that didn't even appeal to me. I even had duplicate patterns. I went through each pattern file to find stuff to toss.



Here's what is left. I keep a file for each of my own pattern designs and I also keep multi-pattern booklets in this file container. The one file I didn't even bother to look through is my Dale of Norway booklet file - there's no way I'll ever give those up as long as I can knit. (I get asked about selling my various old Dale patterns quite frequently.) If you look closely between the Baby file folder and the Design Ideas folder you can see that the Dale of Norway booklets are a pretty large section of my files.