Organizational Yarn 101?

Does your yarn stash resemble this....

 Chances are your yarn supplies mine when your students have been weaving for a week or two.  I'd roll everything up into nice little balls and have it stowed away and before I knew it, we had a twisted, knotted, woven mess.  I didn't want to single any of the culprits out, they were just doing what kids do in their desire to select the best color ball of yarn ever but the knots and disarray were making me nuts.  I chose to dive right in and attempt to create organization out of this total chaos.  So the great UNTANGLE began......

or this?????

Let's create

a solution 

or two.

First on my agenda was finding a new way to store the yarn.  Like all art teachers, I seem to always see possibilities in all those recyclables.  I don't always know what the possibility is but I stash it away and wait for the moment to arrive.  My daughter binged on those biscote for years and I never parted with one of the big square containers.   After a few holes punched in the lid for the yarn to thread through,  Wa La, yarn storage.  Tape on the lid because the kids think they are suppose to remove lids from things.  You gotta teach them how to use it correctly, don't assume.  Next shown are some artificial creamer containers that a fellow teacher passed on to me at least 7 or 8 years ago.  Yeah, they have been sitting in a bag waiting to be discovered for a looonnnnggg time.  They work great and the lids screw on so no take needed.  They also hold one skein of yarn each so no tangling allowed.  Finally, I have purchased a variety of things from the dollar store in those little mesh bags.  I think some held river rocks and others little trophies.  Pull the yarn through the mesh and then seal them back up again.  Individual ball storage.  I should have shot one more picture of the nice way they look stored in the messy bin above.  That photos is for another time.  For now I am totally yarn organized for the next weaving session!

Organization

My principal recently emailed everyone looking for a place to move a metal shelf.  I jumped at the opportunity to have it placed in the kiln room.  It has been such an asset this year for managing the approximately 400 pieces of green ware that have passed through the kiln room.  I have always found organizing clay pieces and keeping them safe to be a real challenge.  It is the worst possible mishap when I accidentally break a student's work.  I avoid that by carefully managing each piece.  This shelf has made a rough situation so bearable!  Crazy really that I am writing about this wonderful addition of a metal shelf!!  Today I took a few pictures of my clay organization.

3rd grade work

Each plastic bin is labeled by grade and day of the week.  As I unload the kiln, I sort the works into the bins.  I will apply wax resist by class and the glazing will begin!  With the bins labeled it is easy to prioritize which classes I need to work with and in what order.  The 3rd grades will not glaze but will instead paint their pieces.  There is a lot of work there; thanks goodness, no wax resist!  The rack those are store on was assembled from a metal cube system.  It was suppose to go together with plastic caps connecting the intersections.  Instead it is assembled with plastic ties from the hardware store and with extra shelves in each cube that are more suited to the sizes of my bins.