Bags within bags!
Today I’m here to sing the praises of an organizational system I creatively refer to as “bags within bags,” which I’ve been using to keep several aspects of my life organized for the past few months.
I don’t normally carry a very big bag (if I carry one at all), but when I do carry a tote for whatever reason, I really hate having all my stuff just...floating around in it. I don’t want to have to root around for something, wondering the whole time if I remembered to bring it with me; I want to be able to find it quickly and easily so I can move on with my life! This became a problem over the summer, when we started going to the beach regularly. I wanted to be able to easily grab things like chapstick, car keys, hand sanitizer, etc. and not worry about anything spilling or getting lost. So I decided I’d just buy a couple of small mesh travel pouches…but the thing that made the most sense at the time turned out to be a set of 18 (!!!) zipper mesh bags of varying sizes that cost $12.99 on Amazon.
This turned out to be an incredible purchase, which I didn’t really expect. The smaller pouches did exactly what I needed them to do, and the larger sizes (which are really quite sizable) meant I could put bigger bottles of sunscreen or bug spray in their own bag as well. Great! My beach bag problem was perfectly solved! But the mesh bags really began to shine when I picked up knitting again.
After a few weeks of working on a couple of different knitting projects at once, I realized I needed a better way to corral all my stuff and not have half-knitted sweaters perched on every flat surface. This led me to the baby Baggu bag ($10 from Baggu or Amazon) which is the perfect size for 1–2 knitting projects. (It’s smaller than your standard canvas tote, but bigger than a brown paper lunch bag.) The baby Baggu made it easier to just keep the needles, yarn, and instructions I needed close at hand, and to easily move everything from, say, the bedroom to the living room or up to the roof, or wherever I felt like knitting on a given day.
But I still had the problem of a lot of small loose items (a measuring tape, knitting markers, tiny scissors, crochet hook, etc.) floating around the bottom of the bag. So I pulled out some of the extra mesh bags I had and organized everything in the baby Baggu. The size 9 and 10 needles of varying lengths I was using for one project went into one mesh bag, while the size 4 and 6 needles I needed for another project went in their own — so I no longer had to sort through all my needles to find just the size 9 40 cm circular needles. I put my needle stoppers (which I’ve found are weirdly hard to keep track of) in a small bag of their own, and put my remaining tools in their own bag.
This new system was nothing short of life-changing.
When my girlfriend and I drove up to Maine last week, we used more of the mesh bags (because, remember, the set came with 18 bags) for all of our toiletries/products, as well as things we wanted to have handy at all times (like phone chargers, contacts, and bandaids). I took the Fjallraven Kanken backpack I bought for the trip with me everywhere, and being able to throw the appropriate mini bags into it depending on where we were going/what we needed was so helpful. And on the couple of occasions when I wanted to take my knitting out with me, I just put the single project I was focusing on into the Fjallraven, and then added the small mesh bag with all of my tools in case of a knitting emergency.
Being far from home/driving for 10+ hours/out all day in a national park for the first time was mildly nerve-wracking, and it was a huge relief to not be stressed about where my car keys, eye drops, and granola bars were. But even when I’m just knitting at home, it’s just been so nice to know where all my shit is.
Get the mesh bags from Amazon for $12.99 and the baby Baggu bag for $10 from Baggu or Amazon. 🎒