Other than the magical blocking, yesterday we popped along to WHSmith to buy Captain Underpants and Astrosaurs books and the fixings for a brilliant (but unoriginal) idea I had.

Although I have a set of Denise interchangeable circulars, they only start at 3.75mm. I knit a lot of projects with needles smaller than that, e.g. shawls, so I have a fair collection of circulars in different lengths. Until now I’ve always kept them in their packets in a shoe box (men’s shoes come in the best size shoe boxes, so I always steal Mr B’s!), along with all my dpns (except for the sock-size ones, which have pride of place in the Piddleloop dpn holder that Cairi gave me for Christmas last year).

This was fine as I knew where they were, but I’m slack and untidy and would just shove the circs back in the shoebox when I was done with them, without finding the packet for them. Occasionally I’d have a tidying session, but mainly I didn’t, meaning I was getting an unruly tangle of cords and having to fish around for a needle gauge each time I wanted to find a needle.

So I’d been looking around for some other way of storing them that didn’t cost a fortune (I’ve been using a shoebox for storage, after all!) but did the job. Plus it had to accommodate a lot of needles. All the pretty fabric needle holders I’ve seen on Etsy hold maybe 10 circs at the most. And there’s no way of labelling the sizes.

Anyway, I’d read about people using cd binders (the ones with the little plastic pockets) but they always seemed a bit small and I wanted something slightly bigger so that the needle cords didn’t get too curly. Then I found A5 size plastic pockets. And an A5 binder. Add some stickers, and the job’s done!

It’s not perfect. I’d like to find a bigger binder, like a lever-arch, because this one is already full and there’s every chance that I’ll buy more needles… And it still relies on me tidying them up properly, though I only have to find the pocket I need, rather than rifling through the shoebox. And I’ve yet to find needles that tidy themselves away after use. But each size and length is in a different pocket, labelled with the sizing, so all I have to do is flip through until I get to the right one A lot quicker than rifling through a shoe box to find the packet I need. And then find that the packet is empty…

My dpns are still in a shoe box, but as they’re all sizes I don’t need very often (i.e. larger than sock size) it’ll do until I can think up an equally Blue Peter-esque solution.