One of my work friends is having a baby so I have been knitting for her.

I made a monster hat and booties from Rebbecca Danger’s knit a monster nursery.  So cute!

Monster Hat

Monster booties

I also create a pattern for an elephant lovie.  I made two so she would have a spare.

Elephant lovie

I do a lot of thrift store shopping.  I dislike shopping in general, but the thrill of the hunt, and the bargain make me love thrift store shopping.

Find the sales: Stop by every day of the week or ask the clerks what the sales are.  Different days might have different items on sale.  The one near my house has Sundays’ as 3 for a dollar.  It took me forever to figure that out.  Another has Saturday .69 sales.

Do they have shipment days?  If they have shipment days show up on that day or the next to find the best stuff that hasn’t been picked through yet.

Be picky- but flexible.  Don’t buy something just because it is there.  If it is worn, has rips and holes, or stains, then pass it up.  There will be something else, if it is cheap junk, it is still junk.  But be flexible- look at the potential of everything.  Sheets, towels, blankets and other household linens make great yardage.  It might not be what you were expecting, but it can still be great.

Know what you have.  I keep a list of the clothes I have bought for my son in a certain size in my purse.  That way I know if I have enough long sleeved shirts or if I should pick up a few more.

Keep a list of what  you are looking for in your purse.  You never know when you might stop at a thrift store.  Know what you are looking for to be sure to check out those areas.

Thinking of furniture?  Keep a list of measurements AND measuring tape in your purse.  If you find that perfect item you want to make sure it is really perfect and it fits the space.  In the same token you don’t want to have to pass up a great find just because you don’t know if it will fit.

Shop frequently.  You never know what the store will have, and what great item will come up.  I shop at thrift stores twice a week, but I am just as likely to walk out with nothing as to come home with a couple of treasures.

Once you have your stash and are attempting to organize it you then need containers to hold your items in the categories you devised. 

You can spend a lot of money on these containers, but I would rather spend my money on my stash and not the containers.  You will have to make some large purchases, but hopefully these will be used for years to come and you get something versatile enough to evolve as your stash and space does.

Small container storage for beads, buttons, and notions: clear is the best type of storage, that way you don’t have to open up the package to see what you have.  Free containers can be assembled from reused food storage you have in your home.  These days baby food is sold in small see through tubs with a snap on lid.  Save all of these, or hit up your friends and children with little ones to save them for  you.  Peanut butter jars are plastic and a nice option.  I have my button collection in different sizes of glass jars such as pasta sauce, pickles, and a vintage Skippy jar. 

Think outside the craft store- there are nice storage options in the craft store, but they are expensive.  Tackle, tool, and fastener storage from the sporting goods store or the home improvement store make great drawers or bead trays.

Plastic bins: You want them in a variety of sizes, shoe box sized and larger for your various stash.  Instead of writing on the bin use a note card and place it in the front of the bin with the contents.  As your stash evolves you can switch out the label without pealing off tape or covering over writing.  These can get pricey so you want to get the most of your money.

Shop your house: What do you have around the house that you can use?  An old dresser, book shelf, or containers?  These can be re-purposed as is or you can do a little repair and sprucing up (a great project opportunity!) to fit your craft space.  Our first apartment table is small but has been reinvented many times as desk, computer table, extra seating for large family gatherings, and craft table.  I probably won’t ever let that go.

In a previous yarn university post I discussed the different types of yarn fibers and described their drape.  I think it is important to talk about the difference between drape and droop.

Drape takes advantage of natural fiber and fabric properties to make something look good.  Droop is when the fibers do something undesired and make it look like crap.

Wedding dresses drape, flour sacks droop.

Quality cotton and wool yarns will drape and retain their shape.   Cheap yarns and unfortunately acrylics have the tendency to droop.  If you are going to spend hours and hours on a project do what you can to make a quality finished project.  Pick the correct yarns for the situation and avoid a droop disaster.

Once you start growing your stash you are going to need to organize it too.  This will make it more pleasant to look at, but will also increase the odds of you using something.

You are going to have to group your stash by like items such as beads, tools, paper, and yarn.  However, at some point you are going to have more than just a few items and sub category organization will be necessary.  In some cases you will be able to apply all the types of organization to your stash, the more categorization the easier it will be to find that perfect something.

By color-If you have a lot of an item organizing by color makes it easier to find like items, say a bunch of buttons or beads, as well as making it more attractive to look at and allow you to be picky when selecting different shades.  If it is attractive you are more likely to use it.  I dropped an organized box of beads once, I found I didn’t want to use them digging through to find each bead that matched.  I ended up spending a week sorting them back out, now I use them again.  My step-mom gave me a bag of dyed wool roving she got for free at a garage sale (great find!).  I didn’t use any of it until I sorted it by color.

By type- Sort things by type as well.  What kind of bead is it?  A seed bead, large glass beads, etc?  Sort things like yarn by weight and fiber content so you can reduce your choices by those variables for a particular pattern.  Same goes for fabric, I generally have my fabric sorted into 108″ wide fabrics, decorator fabrics, specialty fabrics and cottons.  Then they are then sorted by color as well.

By use- I have an entire box for kid crafts and one for adhesives.  If I am looking for glue, I go to the adhesives box to look through my different kinds of glue.  The kids crafts have things like sequins, pipe cleaners, pom-pom etc. that my son enjoys while doing crafts.  That way I can put the whole bin on the kitchen table for him without having to go back and forth and clean up is a breeze.

I felt a lot of thrift store sweaters, so I often have a little from this sweater, a little from that sweater.  I have found that creams are one of the hardest to coordinate.  You have to be real careful which creams you use together.  They can look dirty, yellowed, or pale by turns.  When I start a project where I need a lot of cream felt I make piles of all the creams that look good together before I get started.  Grey felt doesn’t have this problem at all.  Most grey felts can mix without a problem.

Yarns will drape in different ways depending on the fiber content, tightness of the gauge and treatment of the material.

Acrylic: Lumpifies, drags off of hangers and sages.  I can’t tell you how many hand knitted sweaters I find in thrift stores made from Caron Simply Soft that look like a flour sack hanging off the hanger.  Almost always it is done in garter stitch.  It feels so nice in the ball, but when you knit it up it looses all shape and gets saggy.  I will use it for baby quilts and baby sweaters but never for adult sweaters.   I do use it quite a bit for softies, but I use a pretty tight gauge which it responds well too.  Don’t get me wrong, I use a lot of Acrylic, I think it is awesome and Caron Simply Soft is my fav.  Just know what you are getting into.

Wool- Springs back, hugs tight, shapes nice.  Wool will keep its shape and it has a lot of elasticity which makes it great for garments and softies alike.  Especially after blocking you have a greater likely hood of a quality finished product if you use wool or wool blends.

Cotton- Drapes into a cascading fall.  I have found that cotton yarn drapes and sages a little.  Not as much as acrylic, but it does more than wool so it is less forgiving.  I don’t knit with much cotton at all, partially because of cost, and partially because of availability.

Have you ever wondered why Pink is called pink instead of light red?  Some how it gets its own color name like blue, green, red, orange, purple, brown, black, white,and yellow when it is just a different value of red.  No other color does that.  Navy blue, baby blue, all have “blue” as part of the name.  Think about it, all other colors do the same thing.  Even tan, we still think of as brown, but how many of you think of pink as red?  The only exception to this is maybe lavender  which is a specific type of purple, but that is iffy in my book.  It is my experience that men don’t know the difference between lavender and purple, but they all know the difference between pink and red.

Once you know what you want, now you just need to find it, and on a budget too. 

Know what things cost: Figure out how much things cost for how much at a variety of stores.  That way if you find a deal, you know it, and can take advantage of it.  It also helps you avoid what you think might be a great deal but isn’t.

Coupons and store circulars: Sign up for the coupons and circulars in your frequently shopped stores.  Know how often certain sales are and use that as a judge on how much you should stock up when there is a sale.

Garage and Yard Sales: I found a four tier bead holder (with the beads, brand new!) at a garage sale for $10.  I probably could have negotiated down, but $10 was such a deal, it would have been over $50 in the store.  My father once found me 200 packets of Kool Aid for yarn dying for $2, and at the same sale my step-mom got be a gallon zip lock bag of wool roving for free, FREE! 

Estate Sales: Estate sales are also a great place to have someone else’s stash become your stash.  I went to a sale that literally had about 50 little Styrofoam birds.  Buttons, yarns, and other supplies can be found in great quantities and at a bargain.

Around your home: Never donate, throw away or rag bag a single item without thinking what else it could be.  Buttons can be cut off garments that are too warn to donate.  That table cloth that doesn’t fit your table- it could become great yardage for a project.  A large glass jar can become storage for your buttons.  A vase or bowl that is too big can become a plant terrarium.  A chipped tea cup can become a small planter.  Too small wool sweater- felt it!

Thrift stores: Check out thrift stores for wool garments to felt.  Be picky and make sure it is on sale.  There will always be another sweater.  Table cloths, table runners and place mats make great yardage.  Remember those Morse bags I made? 69 Cents for a large table cloth, practically new! 

The girls and boy’s section is where adult felted sweaters go to die, so don’t forget to check that isle too. 

Be sure to check out the bins or bags of randoms.  Some have yarn and other donated stash items.  I found about 12 OZ of red alpaca yarn, some of it frogged for under $3.00.  The jewelry section makes a great place to find beads to un-string and stash.  I found a little girls purse for .60 that had beads all over it.  The purse was stained so I cut off all the beads and washed them.  Perfect!

Online stores: Oriental trading company is one of my favorite online craft stores, but you have to be careful, sometime stuff isn’t what you think it will be.  They are my go to place for ribbons, rick-rack, buttons and piggy banks.  They have a whole collection of piggy banks, pig banks, robot banks, elephant banks, etc.  I get these by the dozen for my son to decorate as Christmas gifts.  There ribbon, rick-rack and buttons are the most affordable I have found and of reasonable craft quality.  Just be sure to sort the buttons once you get them, if you have them organized you will be more willing to use them.

This weekend was a good haul as far as thrift store shopping was concerned.

From the salvation army I found:

A table cloth that was stained, and later discard for .69, a green velvet table runner for .69, an ivory table runner for 2.00, 4 red place mates for 1.99 and  a fall table cloth for 2.00 for a grand total of $8.02 including tax.  I will embellish the table runners and make totes from the place mates and table cloths.

Thrift store finds

From the Village discount outlet I found 6 belts for tote handles for 2.00, 4 place mates for .40 each, 3 place mates for 1.90, 2 place mates on sale for .20 each, a pastel table cloth for .90 and a stripped table cloth for 3.90 for a grand total of $11.69 including tax.

Place mates and table cloth

Table Cloth