That's My (Notions) Bag, Baby

Today over on Luvinthemommyhood, Shannon posted about the contents of her knitting bag. I have about 62 project bags stashed around the house, but only one or two sets of the essentials which get transferred from project to project. Sometimes they get contained in their own little bag, but usually they're just tossed in with the current project. Here's what I always have:

A package of stitch markers (locking and regular), scissors, a pen, waste yarn, measuring tape, row counter and a cable needed of some sort. Right now, I'm using an 8 inch cable needle that I've found to be a sock knitter's best friend.

I love using my ipad for the patterns I'm working on. As long as I don't have to make adjustments to what I'm making, I can be paperless which has drastically cut down on clutter for me.

Speaking of clutter-when I'm finished with a project I almost always have a partial skein of yarn left, the band for which I've removed and probably tossed. If you would like to re-organize your yarn stash, Shannon also created a free printable DIY yarn stash ball band that you can print in either skein or cake size.

It helps if you keep good notes in ravelry on your projects so that you can go back and enter all of the pertinent information on the label, but whatever information you can add is better than nothing. Keeping notes on ravelry has saved me more than once. I had a photo of a prior scarf I'd made as an example listed on etsy, and the customer wanted that exact color; thanks to my notes, I was able to reorder the same colorway and cast on.

Now that the kids are back in school, I feel the urge to start purging and organizing my spaces. Closets and storage bins, I'm looking at you!

Fellow mamas of school-aged kids, what projects do you like to take on with the time you've gained having kids back in school?