Stash Organization

Do you ever have a task that stands in your way and you spend all of this mental energy on it but just never quite accomplish it?  And when you finally do decide to tackle it head on, once you're finished you feel like you can move on with life?  Well, not that it's a world-ending, significant thing, but organizing the stash this weekend was exactly that for me.  And I feel a huge weight off my shoulders having accomplished it.

If anyone would have told me last week that organizing my yarn stash was going to take nearly the entire weekend, I would have thought they were exaggerating.  But, as it turns out, that's pretty much what it took to get it all in order.

Now, I'll be the first one to admit that I have a yarn problem.  I hoard yarn like it's going out of style, but I really wasn't prepared for the sense of being completely overwhelmed when I was in the thick of the organizational process.

Here is a photo of the before picture.  If you count you'll see 11 plastic tubs plus a random assortment of yarn out of the box, yarn in the box, yarn in baskets, and yarn in Ziploc bags.  I found out a little later that I had forgotten to bring one more tub into the photo, so that would bring the total to 12.

Yikes.  There's a part of me that thinks that it's really not as bad as I thought it would be.  But then there's the bigger part of me that realizes that I indeed have a yarn addiction.

Initially I thought that I would just dump all the yarn into one big pile to get the gratuitous 'flash my stash' shot.  But I quickly realized that I just didn't have the floor space for that.

So, I began by labeling a few different containers 'Bulky', 'Worsted', and 'Sock', the three main weights of yarn that I knew I had.  Then I began the process of separating it all out by weight.  Once I had emptied out a tub, I christened it 'Lace' and began adding yarn to that one too.  Eventually I outgrew the first Worsted bin and moved on to the next. And the next...and the next.  Four bins in all for the Worsted!  I ended up separating it even further into Superwash and Feltable.  Two bins each!

Here I am mid-organization.  I convinced Jeff to come upstairs and take this photo, although I thought better of it once he told me that he was immediately going to call the tv show "Hoarders" and see if they had any need for a new storyline.

(Sorry for the grainy photo...it was really dark and I tried lightening it up but it didn't work very well...)

So, after about 6 hours of sifting through the stash, I finally could breathe a sigh of relief when it all looked like this:

You'll notice that each bin has either just a letter or a letter and a number.  The ones that have just a letter mean I have only one tub of that weight.  For example:  Sock is C because there's only one bin.  And the bins that have a letter and a number mean I have more than one tub of that weight.  For example, in the category 'Worsted - Feltable', I have bins B1 and B2, which means there are two bins of that particular weight.

In going through all the yarn, I did manage to weed out some of it.  Two trash bags full to be exact!

This yarn had been segregated for awhile and I knew in my heart I was not ever going to use it.  But I kept hanging on to all of it just in case I changed my mind.  But I finally made the decision on Saturday to cut the cord and get rid of it.  I'm not exactly sure what to do with it yet.  I'll probably end up donating it.

So this was my progress on Saturday.  And I was pretty happy with myself, although I had initially thought I would be finished sorting and cataloging all in one day.

On Sunday I began the undertaking of lugging each bin one by one down our tiny spiral staircase so that I could sit at the computer and enter everything into Ravelry, and then lug it back upstairs when I was finished.  I was dreading this part, but it was actually pretty fun, as I was spurred on by the little tally count at the top of the page as it kept getting higher and higher.  When I entered yarn from a specific bin, I put the bin letter/number in the Notes section of the yarn, so that I can always know where each skein of yarn is in my stash.  If I ever need to know where that skein of Noro Kureyon in colorway 226 is, I'll know I can look in my Rav Stash, check its location, and head on over to bin B1 and fish it out.

And, 7 hours later, it was all entered and accounted for.  Go ahead, check out my Rav Stash.  The stats:  280 skeins/hanks of yarn!  Nearly 165,000 yards!  Holy moly, I was really not ready for that last number.

So, um, yeah, this only reinforces my need to go Cold Sheep in 2010.  And maybe 2011 too.  But I DID get organized and my mind feels so much less cluttered knowing my stash is now all settled.  *contented sigh*  Now, this paves the way for more time for bloggable knitting!