The Great Hand Knit Reorganization of 2017-8 (an Update)

In the last post on this topic I wrote:

"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." 

I searched everywhere for clear storage boxes which turned out to be either very expensive, even on sale, or just the wrong size to maximize my space. Instead I ended up with white fabric collapsible boxes. They turned out to be great. They fill up almost the whole space and I placed them facing forward so all items are visible and it's really easy to get an item in and out with out disturbing too many others. 

I'm also using the space on top of the boxes and in some cases beside or in between the boxes. This works especially well for some very large shawls. I've sorted everything by colour which makes finding specific things very fast. I bought small lighting strips which have rechargeable batteries. You can see the light flare from one in the bottom left of the photo above. 

You can see one of the strips on the left above. This is a bit of a fail. The lights are motion sensitive and when I open the door two or three always turn on immediately, however sometimes one or two of the four take longer to come on and occasionally I have to tap a light to get it to come on. Overall, considering the almost total lack of natural light in this space it's still a big improvement from the original challenges of the space. I took the two photos at night without a flash on my camaera so I'm pretty happy with the results.