Tidy Mind, Tidy Stitches: KCBW Day 3

Just to show you how untidy my mind (my life?) is, I skipped KCBW Day 2 entirely and toddled on to Day 3.
Today's topic is supposed to be about how one keeps one's knitting and knitting stuff organized: yarn, needles, patterns, etc etc.  Organized? Me? Not so much.  I inspect with interest various computer and internet tools for keeping track of it all, but I always find that I'd rather spend all the organizing time necessary to these schemes doing actual knitting.

The one tool I do use is LibraryThing.  I have put all my knitting books on it, and it's been very handy in quandries such as "do I already have that book?" You can see down in the lower right portion of this page a little widget displaying random covers from said knitting library, and here's the physical bookcase they're all in. As you can tell from the photo, there is at this point a bit of overflow.  The situation could do with a little overhaul.

Sad to say, the library is the most organized part of the whole operation.  The yarn situation would give a neat freak (like my DH) the vapors.  Here, for example is the (main) yarn storage closet.  There is a very basic amount of organization in what appears to be total chaos, e.g. all the sock yarn is in one area; many of the planned projects have yarn and pattern bagged up together, but many a time I have entered the Yarn Zone in search of a particular item and either come out absolutely confounded or skunked or completely delighted by something I  discovered that I had totally forgotten about.  That's one small reward for being disorganized--one is always making delightful discoveries.

So there you have it.  My name is Ptarmigan and I am a slob.  I would feel worse about the situation if knitting were my profession and not my hobby.  But my professional stuff is curiously tidy.  Records from a previous business are stored in banker's boxes in this very closet.  Ditto the abandoned possessions of a son who has flown the nest.  Around the corner is a bookcase that contains the orderly music and dvd collections for my current water aerobics profession.  And there have been put forward various creative chaos theories that I like to justify my slobitude.  One is that apparent chaos is just another form of organization,  and another that clutter is stimulating to creativity.  So I will probably just keep knitting on, feeling a tiny bit guilty, and at odd moments frustrated (where is that purple alpaca, anyway?), but creative as all get-out.