Ah, the yarn stash. If you've stuck with knitting/yarn craft long enough, you've probably accumulated more yarn than you could ever use in this lifetime. People find out you knit and they gift you random skeins of yarn (or worse yet, random bits of mystery yarn), you buy skeins just because they're pretty, and if you happened to work in the yarn industry for 10+ years (off and on) like I did, there's also a huge amount of freebies and samples in the mix. Long story short, yarn keeps finding a way to sneak into your home and things can get out of hand quickly, even if you've taken great pains to establish some semblance of yarn order.
Before the Big Move last summer, my yarn stash was neatly organized by yarn weight in several large 66-qt. storage bins, and nearly all of it was also photographed and accounted for on my Ravelry account. And then it quickly fell back into chaos as I tried to pare down in preparation for our move to KC.
I donated several boxes of yarn to the Knitting Connection, a charity that makes hats, mittens and Christmas stockings for children in need. Since we were already a few months into the pandemic, I reached out to. make sure that they were still accepting donations, and they said that their local board of health had given them the green light to keep accepting donated items. I'm not sure if that has changed since then, but it sure felt good to ship several boxes of yarn their way (until I got an extra $100 surcharge bill after the fact from UPS, because apparently the shipping address they gave me was incorrect...but even with the extra shipping charges, it was worth it to re-home part of my yarn stash!).
Then, as Moving Day approached, my focus shifted to condensing all of the remaining stash down to as few containers as possible. This is where the real anarchy ensued: yarn weights were mixed with reckless abandon, spinning fiber became packing material for some of my favorite fiber tools (and other fragile items, for that matter), and partially used skeins were crammed in some pretty unexpected places.
While I still have something of a craft room in our new place, we did downsize from 3BR to 2. Overall I've found the process of paring things down to the essential to be a satisfying challenge, getting my stash corralled has been tougher than I thought it would be. For the first six months we were here, yarn was spread out across several bins which were scattered in various corners of my office. Remembering which bin was stashed where was a struggle - it drove me nuts! So one quiet Friday afternoon, I decided to dive head-first into the Great Yarn Stash Reorganization.
Basically, I just pulled every single bin out of hiding and dumped its contents on the floor. Then the process of sorting began! For all of the partially used skeins or yarns that had somehow lost their labels, I kept a WPI gauge handy so that I could sort those properly as well. From there, it was easy - just throw the like yarn weights into the same bin and call it a day! I would like to do some additional organization within each bin of yarn weights, but for now, this works for me. Plus, All of my yarn now fits underneath the weaving/craft table for easy access!
Last year, once we'd decided that we were moving, I put a temporary freeze on buying any more yarn. It ended up being fairly easy to stick to since I have so much good stuff in my stash, including plenty of sweater quantities. I ended up shopping from my stash for most of last year, but I did give into temptation at the very end of last year during Miss Babs' annual gratitude sale - I treated myself to enough yarn to (most likely) make a Pink Velvet sweater, plus a really bright skein of Yowza in a color called Mix Tape.
At the end of January, I treated myself to two more skeins of sock yarn from a new-to-me dyer called Old Rusted Chair. I've been following them on Instagram for a while and couldn't resist the colorway called Hipster Scum. Since I way already paying for shipping, I also threw in a skein of Panic in Detroit. Both colors are even better in person, but the names really make them! I'm thinking of using them with some other yarn from my stash to make a Simple Something sweater, or maybe a Radvent Cardigan - we'll see!
I did buy yarn from a few other places since the move, but have already used it up or am in the process of using it. Ideally, that trend will continue in 2021: buying yarn because I need it for a specific project I plan to start in the immediate future, NOT just 'cause it was pretty and I decided it needed to sit in my stash for the next 10 years. I'm sure that will still happen, but if the frequency can be decreased dramatically, I'll consider that a win. Plus, if I can keep working through the stash at my current pace, then a few "just 'cause" skeins here and there are not so concerning.
Now that order is restored, I'd like to keep it that way....and perhaps some weekend when I need a break from knitting, I can work on the next phase: making sure all of my stash is photographed and catalogued in Ravelry!
Comments
Post a Comment