If you're like me and you enjoy a variety of different crafts like crocheting, knitting, and cross-stitching you'll soon find that it is essential that you keep everything organized.

Most likely you have projects on the go all throughout the house to make it easier to work on them when you're in the room. This is a great way to get your projects finished, but it can get messy after a while. You’ll soon have left over yarn all over the place, plus you'll lose track of where you last used your pattern books, crochet hooks, and knitting needles.

It's actually very simple to get organized and stay organized. The easiest and best way is to designate a room to your crafting. If that is not possible a corner somewhere will do provided your stash isn't too big. Whatever corner or room you choose, make sure that the rest of the family is aware that it is your space.

Once you have your space established you need to gather all your yarn, pattern books, hooks, needles, scissors and whatever other accessories you have and use. Make a list of how many books you have by writing down each title. Make another list with all your hook and needle sizes, and another with all other accessories.

You may also want to make a list of all your yarn that you have. This is especially useful if you have a lot of yarn and not a lot of space; instead of searching through your stash you only have to look at your list and know whether you have it or not.

Now it's time to start organizing. It really doesn't matter where you start as long as you find a specific spot for every item on your list. Invest in a few organizers for your hooks and needles if you have to, and a large tote for your yarn, and proudly display the books on a shelf if you like.

It doesn't matter how you organize, what matters is that it makes sense to you where you put your stuff, this will help you in finding it when you need it.

Ok, now that you have it all organized, how do you keep it that way?

The best thing to do is figure out how many projects you normally have on the go. Then go out and purchase that many knitting or crochet bags to hold the yarn for each project.

Put everything you need for project 'A' in one bag. This includes the pattern, yarn, hook or needle, scissors, or whatever you may need to finish the project. This may require you to purchase a few extra needles, or scissors, but it will keep you from running back and forth from one project to the next searching for your scissors, or whatever.

Now to keep it all organized it is essential that you mark down all the items which you removed from your storage room or storage corner. It doesn't matter what type of list you make as long as you know that the items you just removed are with project 'A'.

Now do the same for project 'B', 'C' and so forth. If you only have small projects and you plan to keep them in the same place you may put several projects into one bag…whatever works best for you.

As you complete each project return all items to your storage center, and start all over again with a new project.

It may take a little time to get it all set up, but in the end you'll save yourself a lot more time because you now know where everything is, and no more running around trying to find stuff.