Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Retro knitting storage

Compensation for having to leave the cottage early: making it back to the city in time for the Sunday Antique Market.


St. Lawrence Market is a famous food market open from Tuesday to Saturday, but on Saturdays the North Market offers space for farmers, and on Sundays, for collectible dealers.  Technically the regular market is now the north market, because the actual North Market is slated for demolition and rebuilding and has moved temporarily to a marquis tent just south of the regular market but hey! we'll just refer to it as the Antique Market, shall we?

Technically I don't love the Antique Market - in the move, I had to give up a lot of stuff I'd collected in such places over the years, and I am not anxious to fall back off the no-clutter wagon - but I have a perpetual weakness for vintage bowls like this Pyrex one and as it was the end of the day, the vendor let me have it for $10.


If you know the primary colour nesting sets, you'll recognize this as the print counterpart of the small blue bowl, so handy for mixing up cake icing or serving fruit.  It's not quite the same shade of blue though, so I won't be pairing those two bowls together! I do think it will be beautiful with cookies in it at Christmas though.

When I'm not storing yarn in it.  Because you know what?  Small knitting projects look really nice in a decorative friendly bowl like this.  And they're safer that way than loose in a basket where the yarn might catch on a protruding bit of wood or straw.

When I was clearing out the house I had a lot of catching points like that, where I couldn't quite face letting go of something.  I thought of yarn again when I stumbled across these tins:


And really, I should have thought of them before.  They are probably too small for something knit with straight needles, but I am pretty sure tins are mothproof, and I know they are stackable, and your needles are not going to stick out the side as mine sometimes do from a little cloth bag.

That said: little cloth bags are still my favourite!  I love how you can squish the yarn inside them like a cuddly toy.  And mine, as you know, often have beautiful embroidery on the fun vintage fabrics.


What's your favourite spot to set down your knitting?


ps: rabbit hole alert.  The Pyrex Love site I linked to above is an amazing source of information on collectible glass bowls and casserole dishes!  I could read it all day (and might, ahem.)

6 comments:

Mimi said...

I have "yarn bowls" but I find myself using regular bowls that I like just as often. A bowl is a bowl is a bowl, isn't it? The blue one is a beauty.

Mary Keenan said...

A bowl is absolutely a bowl... I spotted a giant wooden salad one at the cottage last weekend I had hung onto though it looks kinda unseemly now for actual food, and now I realize it would be amazing for stowing a big project :^)

Barb Fullerton said...

I love bowls, too!! I am a little jealous of your blue bowl! I have begun to store little balls of yarn in large clear plastic bottles such as the ones that nuts come in from Costco. I put like colors in the same bottle and keep the bottles on a shelf in my knitting studio, so at a glance I can find the exact hue of scrap yarn I need for my current mitten creation. The line-up of bottled yarn is somewhat like the line-up of bottled nails and screws and washers you might see in a handy-person's workshop. The bottled yarn approach is much more efficient and neater than plastic bags that inevitably end up out of sight and out of mind under a bed or on the back of a closet. There is less tangle in a bottle too!!

Mary Keenan said...

Barb, that idea is sheer genius! I did an online search for wide-mouth clear jars before I even posted this reply... and they're not hard to come by in bulk. I'm so excited - it's perfect solution for my new office to decorate with pretty yarns in skeins and cakes, apart from all the practical aspects :^) thank you for thinking of it and mentioning it too!

Laurinda said...

Barb is a genius! That's a much more practical solution than the big glass containers that I started using, & I think would be mouth-proof, too!
As much as I love old Pyrex bowls, I couldn't use them for yarn. I have a bad kitty who loves playing with yarn so much, that he has learned what the bags from Webs look like, & targets them.
I used to have an old tin collection too. Too many moves, & I got tired of packing them (I think because I want USING them!)

Mary Keenan said...

I know what you mean Laurinda... I was looking at IKEA's glass jars too and thinking they are very pretty and price-comparable in the larger sizes if you're not recycling Costco packaging... but they are also heavy and fragile. That is so funny your cat can laser in on yarn bags!