Knitting & Reading About the Magic of Tidying Up

Knitting Reading and the Art of Tidying UpI was recruited by a knitting teacher friend of mine to knit a scarf. She got connected with an organization that checks in with seniors who live alone, who have lost most of their friends and friends. They were asking for a dozen scarves to give them for the holidays. Now I had made a decision a few years back that it was okay to knit purely self indulgent projects. Knitting was my happy place and I didn’t want to burden it with the mental ties of ‘having’ to knit gifts for others who might not appreciate them. I also vowed never to start one knitting project before I’ve finished another. I’m a one knitting project kinda girl, what can I say. I haven’t finished my Barn Sweater yet. But gosh, I’m a total sucker for the thought of knitting for someone’s grandma or great-grandma. Especially since it was my own grandma, who lived alone for so many years, who taught me to knit. So I signed up.

I found this blue ultra soft fingerling yarn in my stash and took it as an opportunity to knit a lace pattern, called Ashton. I haven’t knit a lace pattern in a while and unfortunately my printer ran out of ink so I’ve started this while looking at the pdf on my computer. Kind of a whacky way to ‘peacefully’ knit….to stare at a screen. Maybe I’ll go buy some ink today.

To pull this small story into a loosely formed circle, when we moved my previously mentioned grandmother into an assisted living facility about seven years ago, we had to clean out her house. It was a large task to empty out a lifetimes worth of possessions from a 4 bedroom house. The experience was a big one for my family. Not just the amount of work it entailed, but also the idea of having possessions filling your house. Its a shocking thing to see that every single thing you’ve filled your house with is essentially worthless once you leave. The vast majority of the things that are useful or sentimental to you, won’t be neither sentimental nor useful to anyone else. That’s a pretty heavy topic to bring up, but it’s a thought that’s stayed at least in my mind ever since. It’s greatly influenced my buying and more importantly my keeping habits over the years since. If you’ve read this blog for a while you know decluttering is one of my regular habits. And honestly, I don’t buy that much stuff.

Yet my house is always cluttered. I’m not a tidy person and it bothers me. So when a new favorite blog of mine, Practising Simplicity, discussed the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizingon facebook, I quickly added it to my next Amazon order. I’m two thirds of the way through it and I’m pretty inspired. After following flylady for years, this book is giving me a new philosophy of keeping my house. The author, Marie Kondo, doesn’t believe in tidying up a little bit every day. She’s ruthless saying that you must tidy and discard with intention and focus all at one time. She explains how hard it is for people to keep a tidy house, because it’s never taught to you. There aren’t any classes in house tidying. Even if you’ve taken home economics classes, there isn’t a section in house tidying or even how to fold your clothes (which is the section I’m on now). She claims that none of her home organizing clients relapse into have a cluttered house. If you follow her direction, which includes the line ‘start by discarding, all at once, intensely and completely,’ you will be able to maintain a tidy house. Wish me luck friends, wish me luck!

Comments

  1. Sheryle Sage says

    Free yourself. I downsized from 1800 sq ft to a 250 sq ft travel trailer. Love it, makes you really rethink what is important in life; and it ain’t stuff. Side note, I just took up knitting to pass the time while traveling the country. I have a storage cube which doubles as a footstool to store my supplies in. A place for everything. Headed out from MI, stopped in NC 6 weeks, en route to southern Cali by way of Texas where we will stay a couple weeks.

  2. says

    I applaud your determination. I had a neat freak for a mom and I have rebelled my whole life.. Thank goodness I live in South America where I can afford a house keeper 2 X a month! :)
    And that Shawl is gorgeous… I passed over it because it is charted…

  3. says

    I love the idea of giving a homemade gift to a local senior. Both my grandma’s are gone now, and I miss them. It would be nice to adopt a new one, and make a friend. alas…I don’t knit. Good luck with the tidying up, let us know if you have any lightbulb moments. The author is right, nobody really teaches you these things.

  4. says

    I wish you good luck! You will feel so much better for it!
    I used to follow Flylady years ago, I remember having the binder and following it step-by-step, room by room :) We live in a tiny home and can’t afford clutter as the home looks like a labyrinth shortly afterward. We have a family clean up morning each Saturday where we all pitch in and tidy and clean our rooms and surfaces and because it happens weekly it doesn’t take more than and hour for a quick clean. The surfaces are also de-cluttered then which allows for a fresh energy to flow through our home for the beginning of each weekend which is amazing and make such a difference.
    x

  5. says

    I love that idea of knitting for the older people. That sounds like a book my family needs to read! It feels so much better to be clutter-free.

  6. CTY says

    I think I shall order that book. I too follow FlyLady, her e-mails keep the “it’s time to scrub the ________ ” type cleaning in rotation; but the de-cluttering 15 minutes a day really doesn’t work for me. Your timing is right on–I did not read this until a few days after you posted because I have been working on “The Great Craft Room Purge”!

  7. Julie says

    I got the TIdying Up book from the library because of one of your posts, and I was right along with it, until she started talking to her socks and thanking them for their usefulness and insisting that they be rolled a certain way and pointing a certain way….it was a bit creepy for me.
    On a positive note, I LOVE her idea of vertical filing and it really resonated with me! I naturally gravitated toward some Martha Steward clearance folders I recently found at Staples, billed as ‘backpack folders’ (or something like that) and they were like manilla folders with the tabs and openings on the TOP and after reading the book I know WHY they seemed to just make sense to me! :>)
    I still struggle with wanting to deal with all of those routines each and every day….some days I just get tired of trying to ‘keep it all together’. Fly Lady says ‘don’t get a bigger garbage can, add emptying the garbage can into your daily routine!” I say “I don’t WANT to empty my garbage can every day!”

    • says

      Hi Julie, I know what you mean. I don’t think I could ever work it into my daily life to thank my socks for their usefulness each day, nor could I roll them up like sushi (they’d unroll whenever I took the pair next to them out!). But there are plenty of other useful things she talks about. And yes, now I have my butter standing up straight in the fridge’s butter cabinet and I can fit more in. And at this time of the year, we are always hording butter!

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