Being organised

I knitted a dishcloth! I love knitting, and I've knitted some presents recently with thick, bobbly wool. When I got a couple of balls of cotton yarn for my birthday, I planned to make a few dishcloths. I'd forgotten how nice it was to knit with thin soft yarn! 

I used the waffle knit pattern from the Homespun Living blog. It was really rather easy - I think the main pattern is called sailor's rib. It's actually green with a yellow stripe - the picture makes it look blue. 

If you look closely, you can see I've managed to add an extra stitch to a row near the beginning and shift the whole pattern sideways a bit :) But progress not perfection and all that. It took me probably about 3 hours in total, mostly while I was watching a film (a subtitled film! Hardly ideal when trying to follow a knitting pattern for the first time...). I'm going to try another one soon with a different pattern.

Tonight I've also been working on well, I'm not sure what to call it. I started it based on Flylady's control journal. Rhonda Jean also talks about a home management journal - it's essentially a similar thing - a place to keep routines, recipes, cleaning tips, plans and projects all in one place. Mine is fairly basic, and I've tried to not get hung up on making it look pretty. 

At the beginning I have a plan of things to do this month, split into PhD, work, house, garden, and money. This changes over the months, not all of them will have a big money section, for example, and I'm looking forward to the month when there's no PhD section... :) I've got deadline dates for each goal, and the colours correspond to the week things need doing. I've noticed I've only managed to tick one thing off so far - oops!

The rest of the folder is split into sections - home, food, garden, money, presents, and contacts. Again, things will be added to this as I go along, this is just what's useful to me right now. 

There's not much in the food section yet, just a shopping list, meal plan, and recipes for yogurt and quark, together with how they've worked (not very well so far!)

The garden section has a list of what needs planting in which month - although I haven't yet made a list of what I've actually planted and when. Probably should do that soon. It has a couple of pictures in of things I'd like to have a go at one day.

The presents section is again quite small, but hopefully it'll grow. I'm trying to make all birthday and Christmas presents this year, and not doing too badly so far. This very rough list is from a whizz round a few websites before last Christmas - some of these ended up as presents, and some might do in the future. At some point I'll make a list of planned presents for each person's birthday so I can start making them in advance, rather than a couple of days before. 

So, has it helped me be more organised? Yes! I'm trying to get everything in one place that I need in the quest for this cheap and cheerful, home made life :) It keeps growing and changing and developing over the months, and has already moved from an A5 to A4 binder. It lives on the kitchen table, so I can refer to it when I want to make soap, or a shopping list, or a birthday present. It's a great idea, one that I certainly didn't make up, and there's some fab ones out there on the internet to have a look at.