The Great Hand Knit Reorganization of 2017 (an Update)

Here's an update on my hand knit reorganization from last March. Take a look at the photos below. I'm proud to say the shelves and drawers of my armoire (which store the sweaters) still look as beautifully well organized and tidy as they did when I sorted everything out. I always get a little jolt of happiness when I go to the armoire to get a sweater out to wear. I'm also wearing a wider range of things as I can finally see everything at one time. Separating winter garments onto the shelves and summer garments into two of the larger drawers means at this time of year I really only look in one place to choose something to wear. 

Unfortunately, the shawl and accessory sort hasn't been so successful. They are all in one place (good) but I'm using a linen closet in a dark corner (bad) and the shelves are too deep to keep the stacks tidy (bad). I tend to knit those items from very soft and slithery yarns (bad) which makes it even harder to keep the piles neat. I've got everything there sorted by colour which is hard to see because it's dark. Add to that a much wider range of sizing and I think I have two fixable issues. The first is I'm going to add a battery operated light so I can see better. I'm also going to start looking for some shelf organizers. I'll probably wait until the January household sales to start my search. I think spending a little money to tackle this will be worthwhile since the garment reorg was so successful.

Here's my original post on this topic:  

The great hand knit reorganization of 2017 got stalled out a few weeks ago. The combination of not enough space banged up against "I can't get rid of that I spent too many hours knitting it" and "I know I don't wear it any more"!

I kept reminding myself of an organizing rule from an old TV show Clean Sweep. Peter Walsh would tell people they could keep what would fit into a specific space. So I paused and loaded all the questionable knits into laundry baskets while I mulled. It is amazingly hard to let go of garments made with your own hands. 

It did help as I got the shelves and drawers of my armoire looking good. I really didn't want to stuff things back in. 

Wow! that's a lot of knitting, but the stacks mean I can see what I've got.

Here's summer sweaters with the piles graduated so I can see them properly.

I'm still working on the shawls and accessories. You might not get to see a photo when I'm done. That corner of the room is so dark I'm not sure even editing will lighten it up enough.

I finally tossed out some of the things which are not in good enough condition to donate. I had some garments which were in very good shape (thank you, tough hard wearing wool) those ones will go off to donation in the very near future.