Thread Candy Studio debuted a purse-sized stitch journal last month. Each page is about 5×4 making it small enough to carry around. That’s its strength, but also one of its weaknesses. For those with large handwriting many of the pages and lines are too small to record information.

The book attempts to be a place to hold lots of useful information for stitchers of all kinds. The first section is project notes with a lined page and a table page for about 12 projects. The table has columns for stitch, effect thread, and thread size. A dozen stitches can be recorded. This is plenty for most small to medium projects.

After this there is a wish list section with pages divided into need and wish list. Having this in the same place as other inventories and plans makes it easy to keep track of what’s needed. At the end of this section there are sever pages without labels that can be ised for additional notes or lists.

Following this is a thread section where you can inventory your threads. The first several pages have marked columns for thread name, color, size, need/have. The vast majority of pages have unmarked columns. While this is very useful, I can’t really see anyone but those with the smallest stashes using this for inventory, there just aren’t enough pages.

The next section, design, has pages printed with grids, so stitches can be recorded. These are big enough to sketch a stitch but not enough for a pattern of any size.

The final section is for your project diary with two pages for each project, including a blank lined page and an open area marked “notes” which looks like a good space for a picture.

While there is lots packed into this little book, my main complaint is that the size limits its usefulness. While some people will find the small pages difficult to write on, but the desire to include everything and the small size mean that it can only hold a limited amount of stuff.

But at under $8, you can probably afford multiples. The book comes with three choices of cover color and can be ordered directly from Thread Candy Studio.

Related posts:

1. Thread Candy Studio – Product Review
2. Threadworx Journal – product review
3. Thread Candy Studio & the Economics of Publication
4. Stitch Notebook – Product Review
5. Tiny Treasures – Product Review

A major contributor to messy stashes are our piles of unfnished and unstitched projects, I know it is for me.

Once a year, at least, you should go through the piles of this stuff and organize them. It’s kind of like a treasure hunt. Yesterday was that day for me, occasioned by finding the two underbed boxes of stuff I had stored over the summer.

Begin by sorting stuff into four piles:

• unstitched canvases
• projects you are actively working on (WIPs)
• started projects you aren’t working on (UFOs)
• projects you don’t want to do anymore

I sorted my unstitched canvases into large and small (small is by far the biggest. The large ones went back into one of the storage bins. The smalls got organized by subject and put into a straew tote bag whixh ia easily accessible for when I want to start a new project.

My WIPs are stored in zippered project bags in open baskets under some of the thread stash. These projects are one stretcher bars. Some of them, like the CyberPointers President’s Challenge are long term, some, like Maple Leaf Rag, are almost done. I’m hoping that new projects won’t get added to this pile until an old project is done.

The UFOs are more problematic as I don’t want to waste stretcher bars, thumbtacks, and zippered bags on things I won’t be stitching for awhile. So I use plastic bags for storage and put threads and canvas into the underbed unit.

The stuff you don’t want anymore and what to do with it will be the subject of next week’s article.

Now instead of two underbed units, I have one. I’ve reduced the number of WIPs to ones I can handle and have the small pieces I love somewhere where I can get them fast.

All in all not a bad day’s work.

Related posts:

1. Unstitched Canvases – Organizing the Stash
2. Organizing the “Junk” Drawer
3. Organizing the UFO Pile
4. Organizing When You Don’t Have the Space
5. Needlepoint & Moving

A new web site, Cut Rate Crafts, has discounted supplies for needlework and other crafts. Their home page promises discounts of 15-30% on their products. They also have free shipping on orders over $100.

While it’s not fantastic for needlepoint, it does have some good products. Their best selection is in stretcher bars where they have both mini and regular bars in sizes from 5 to 18 inches. I can’t tell the brand from the picture, but at least some of them are from brands I’ve seen in shops. Another great resource is the many types of scroll frames and scroll bars available. It can be hard to find these parts in shops, so this is a great resource. They also have a small but nice selection of lap frames.

There selection of organizing products is also good, with the biggest assortment of floss away bags I’ve ever seen. They also have small unmarked zipper bags in three sizes at fantastic prices (about half what I last paid in a craft store) and other organizing supplies.

As far as other supplies and materials for needlepoint go, the selection really falls away. They have a few colors of Kreinik Tapestry Braid (more of #8 and blending filament), floss mostly on cones, perle cotton and DMC wool as well as some threads assortments from Prism (find it in craft stores) and Valdani. There are no needles between ones for large mesh plastic canvas and #24 tapestry needles and their selection of canvas is either Interlock or waste canvas.

In addition they have a small, but nice selection of scissors and a far wider range of popularly-priced kits than you’ll find in any shop.

Their interface could use some work, most of the images on the upper level pages are missing and the initial Needle Arts screen is too long to be easy to use (they should add some anchor text to minimize scrolling). They could make their navigation easier to use.

I liked that they should the retail price along with their discounted price, so that comparison shopping is easy. But I didn’t like that manufacturers information was not available for many products. for “brand names” like Kreinik, DMC, or Charles Craft the name is either in the category or in the item description, but I am unsure who makes many of the sizes of stretcher bars. On the item pages there is a tab for an overview so this information could easily be added. For items in other areas, they seemed to use a generic company “elevator speech” for the overview. Perhaps as they grow, they will provide more helpful and item-specific information.

I haven’t bought anything there yet, so I can’t speak for their service, but it looks like a good resource.

Don’t expect to find things here you might not find in a chain craft store, but for convenience and price, they are a great resource.

Related posts:

1. Great Crafty Site – Dollar Store Crafts
2. Dyed and Gone to Heaven – Caron Collection Web Site Review
3. Anna Marie Winter’s Outstanding Technique Site – Web Site Review
4. Shakespeare’s Peddler – Web Site Review
5. New Site for Weeks Dye Works

One of my favorites blogs, Modish, has had a running feature showing off great spaces where people make things (I want to go live here). The picture at the start of the article is on of my favorites from this series. She also has a Flickr pool showing off more great spaces. Many of these spaces are not neat or organized but look like the everyday places where people create. I just love looking at them.

Another great blog, Whip Up, also has posts about studios, although they are not organized into a particular category.

Your stitching space should reflect you and should be a source of inspiration as well as a functional space. A recent post in the series on Handmade Spaces showed the wonderful collections of people who made things. I’m so delighted by these collections and the way people show them off.

Would you like to see your stitching space featured here? Throughout March in honor of National Craft Month, I’ll be featuring stitching spaces and studios. If you’d like to be featured, email me at napaneedlepoint [at] gmail [dot] com. Remember, your pictures don’t need to be fancy, we can all be inspired by each other’s spaces.

Related posts:

1. Thread Candy Studio – Product Review
2. Needlepoint Inspiration in Gifts
3. Thread Candy Studio & the Economics of Publication
4. Needlepoint Inspiration – National Parks Posters
5. Vintage Clip Art for Adaptation & Inspiration

Be honest now. You do.

The Junk Drawer.

Mine is in my desk and has in it, among other things, random twists of threads that don’t have a place, cards of beading needles, templates from LNA luggage tags, magnets that don’t hold needles very well, jewelry, and who knows what else.

It needs cleaned out. It needs organized. Because of the cats (this also applies to small children) I have to do it all at once.

Here’s how.

1. Take everything out.
2. AS you do examine stuff.Decide about each item if:
   • It’s a storage container. If so put it aside, you’ll use it to put stuff into back in the drawer.
   • It belongs somewhere else in the house. Put these in piles by room or floor and put into bags and take them there.
   • It’s trash. Throw it out right away without delay.
   • It should be given away. Make a pile of these, inventory them when you are done for tax purposes, bag them and get them out of there.
   • They belong in your junk drawer. This pile should now be fairly small.
3. Take your junk drawer pile and sort it with like items together. Put scissors with scissors for instance.
4. Look at your storage containers and see what of your pile will fit in them. Also decide what in that pile should go someplace else. For example, I keep my small project scissors in a pot on my desk so I can grab a pair quickly. My markers are all in a big box in another drawer except for a few in my pencil jar on my desk.
5. Put your stuff into the containers you have and put them back into the drawer.

Depending on how bad your drawer is, this might take an hour or two.

But when you are done, you are organized and can find that elusive tool you KNOW was there.

Related posts:

1. Organizing the UFO Pile
2. The Simple Joys of Organizing your Stash
3. Organizing your Stash
4. Unstitched Canvases – Organizing the Stash
5. Organizing WIPs, UFOs, and Unstitched Canvases

When I talk to people about art one thing I emphasize is that understanding art is largely a matter of looking, looking often, and looking lots.

You look and your eye becomes trained. Look and think and you begin to understand. Two things brought this to mind recently. I was talking to a friend’s husband on Monday night having just found out her husband spent three years as a teen living among the Inuit in northern Canada. He’s an artist and a writer and I had always wondered why his art looked the way it did and was oddly familiar.

When I learned that, I knew. Although he probably doesn’t think it or even remember how, those years and that place taught his eye something and it influences his art, decades later.

The other thing happened last week when I was asked what research I had done for something about Japanese art. I hadn’t. I’ve just looked.

So I find lots of inspiration all around me for my needlepoint. And I cut out much of it. This creates a storage and organization problem. These pieces of paper are not the same size and don’t have any single reason for being there. I might like the colors, the pattern or even the whole picture. They might become the basis for a needlepoint (like my turquoise cross, based on a piece of jewelry), or someone else might find them and turn them into a canvas (like this animal parade/a>, also pictured here, that sat in my notebook for YEARS until earlier this year my daughter found the source and Art Needlepoint has turned it into a canvas.

1. How Do you Organize your Current Projects & TOtes?

The toys there were unloved or missing something.

We have unwanted projects too. Maybe it was a class and we learned what we wanted to and never finished the project. Maybe your taste or decor changed. Maybe it’s too late to give that gift.

Whatever the reason we all have projects that have been started but won’t ever be finished.

Marlene asked about what to do with them. Here are some ides:

Do you have stitching friends? Arrange a “needlepoint swap.” Everyone bring 5 items to trade. The hostess should arrange for food and maybe goodie bags to entice people to come. This is like a pot luck, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Are you in a guild chapter? Donate these projects to your guild for a chapter auction. My chapter has funded our education auction with these for decades. Chapters take different tacks with this. Our chapter goes with bargain basement pricing, but other guilds go with higher prices. If you aren’t in a chapter, look for one nearby and ask.

Work with a local shop to have a garage sale. People buy tables, with the money going to charity, and on a given day the sale is held. The shop does some of the marketing so there are plenty of sellers and plenty of buyers.

Sell it in eBay. There are some shops, such as Fireside Stitchery and The World in Stitches, who will sell your items on eBay for a commission. They will take most things (email or call to ask) and have better luck than you would yourself.

Sell it through and independent reseller such as Canvases Begone or Stashing Destashing. From what I see as a buyer, they are more strict about what they take, but I’ve found great bargains in both places. Many stitchers visit their sites.

Donate it to a thrift store. I sometimes see needlepoint at local thrift shops and Northern California has one thrift shop that only has craft items.
Donate it to charity. You might know of a local charity looking for craft items. There are also some organizations that take donations from everywhere. The ANG Yahoo group has a list of these.

If it isn’t a UFO, you have more options for donation. Rittenhouse Needlepoint has a wonderful charitable program for teaching needlepoint. Local youth organizations and schools might welcome yarn and thread. Knitters who knit for charity might love uncut skeins of yarn.

There are enough places to place those unwanted projects that maybe we don’t need an island after all.

Related posts:

1. CyberPointers New Projects
2. How Do you Organize your Current Projects & TOtes?
3. CyberPointers Is Here!
4. New Needlepoint Projects – October 2009
5. HaViNG FuN WiTH CuSToM NeeDLePoiNT CaNVaSeS – Ideas for Great Projects

Deciding what constitutes a UFO instead of a “project on hiatus” what you store with it, and where that all goes can be a complex process, different for each stitcher.

Here’s how I do it and along the way you might find some tips to help you organize.

I would love to be one of those organized people who keep things neat and only work on a project or so at once. But I’m not and never will be, so this at least keeps me somewhat in control.

Triage

Deciding what kind of UFO a project is makes a HUGE first step to getting organized. When you go to the emergency room they call this triage, we can apply the same idea of quick classification to our needlepoint.

There are three kinds of UFO’s:

• Projects currently being worked on
• UFO’s you’ll get to soon
• UFO’s you’ll egt to “someday,” or projects on hiatus

I’ll talk about each one in turn and how I store them.

Current Rotation

I am never without several projects going on at the same time. And my current projects range from models for classes, new projects for the needlepoint clubs, projects that will be used on the blog, gifts, stitch guide projects, new designs, and Sunday stitching (stitching for me).

Each of these projects lives in a project bag and sits somewhere around the house. I know when there are too many of these and I need to clean up when my DH complains about needlepoint being “everywhere.”

As soon as something is done, it goes to my office with the threads, gets taken off the stretcher bars and the project bag gets used for the next thing. Sometimes I have used a basket to keep these together but at the moment they are just piled around.

I like having these in bags, then I just pick one up to go someplace. I’m happiest if there are only five of these floating around. Right now I think I have six, so I need to get one done and none are very close.

UFO’s

These are projects that aren’t currently in the rotation but will be as soon as a space opens up. I used to keep them in piles in the office, but now I have them put in a tote I’m not using next to my desk.

These pieces are on stretcher bars and in project bags. To start work on them I just need to add needles and scissors and go.

Projects on Hiatus

A project on hiatus is one I intend to finish but has no deadline or compelling reason to be completed. If I have taken a class and learned what I needed to from it, I’ll take it out of hiatus and donate it or give it away. So every project here is one I plan to do. This is one of those parts of my stash I go through about every six months to be sure I haven’t changed my mind about any of these projects.

These live in the same dresser drawer as the large unstitched canvases. Mostly they are in plastic bags although some are in project bags. Usually, but not always, if something goes into this pile, I take it off the stretcher bars.

In theory if I take something from my UFO bag, I take one of these projects and put it in. But usually, I’m afraid, a new UFO has intervened.

Related posts:

1. Organizing your Stash
2. Organizing WIPs, UFOs, and Unstitched Canvases
3. Organizing When You Don’t Have the Space
4. Planning – the First Step in Organizing
5. The Simple Joys of Organizing your Stash

When you are looking for storage for canvases it’s important to remember that they need to be stored either rolled or flat. Do not fold canvas.

I think it’s also important to store them so it’s easy to look through them.

Finally if you tend to overbuy canvases, find some kind of storage method that controls the size of your stash.

My current method for small canvases, a smallish tote bag is great for controlling stash and keeping canvases flat but it’s hard to look through. Larger canvases are kept in a dresser drawer, also hard to go through.

In our old house I had a system that worked beautifully. I used a set of wire baskets in a frame that slid in and out. These were from one of those closet organizing companies. They were perfect. Small canvases went into the shallow bins, sorted by type. Large canvases went into deeper bins, rolled.

With the many organizing systems and the lovely flat baskets I often see you should be able to find something of this type that fits your budget.

Another possibility, if your closet space allows it is to store canvases on skirt hangers. This works well for larger canvases but you’ll still need another method for small ones.

If You’ve found another method, I’d love to hear about it.

These methods work for canvases with no threads. Tomorrow I’ll talk about storing WIPs (Works in Progress), UFOs (UnFinished Objects) and canvases with threads.

Related posts:

1. Organizing WIPs, UFOs, and Unstitched Canvases
2. Organizing your Stash
3. The Simple Joys of Organizing your Stash
4. Using Canvases to Use Up Stash Part 1
5. Planning – the First Step in Organizing

Here’s how I deal with my essential stitching tools.

First off let’s talk about needles. I lose them constantly. I also tend to use mostly one size of needles (22) and so about a year ago I stocked up. John James makes 25 packs of needles you might be able to find. Many of them live in a little tin that goes in one project bag. It’s the size of an Altoid minis tin and I bought it on Etsy. Usually there are a couple in every project as well, but not always. I was stick waiting someplace in the car and lost my needle. Usually there is one on the floor, but not that day.

So now I have a second, zippered needle case in my purse. I keep it there stuffed with even more needles, just in case I run out. It doesn’t take up much space and I know I’m always ready to stitch.

Scissors are another important things. You need to have them, but many scissors have points that will pierce even a reinforced project bag. I like these little titanium scissors. They are small with sharp, but not too sharp points and big comfy fingerholes. I have four pairs of them and usually they all are in project bags.

Since I found the little flat Lantern Moon ORT container (reviewed here) I take that with me. I’ve looked at other portable ORT containers, but this is the one that works for me. Another one might work for you.

The newest edition to my traveling kit is my iPodTouch. It has several stitch dictionaries on it and so I can look up stitches easily on the go.I also use the note pad for ideas, Weave (a free to do application) to keep track of projects, and if I had time to do it, thread inventories — all in the size of a small notepad.

These things sound small, and they are, but they have changed my stitching life. I can be organized, I don’t worry about not having a needle, a stitch idea, or a place to put my ORTs. I know my stitching will stay neat and I will be organized and that peace of mind is worth so much.

Related posts:

1. OOOOOH The Essentials of Silk Ribbon Embroidery – book review
2. SuZy’s Portable Stitches – vol 2 – Book Review
3. The Urban Needlepointer’s Tool Kit
4. Using a Laying Tool
5. Make Yourself a Portable ORT Box