Thursday, 17 July 2014

How much yarn is too much?

Warning: all about yarn (no fabric here sorry!)

The week before last I assembled all my yarn in one place.

I didn’t intend for it to be there for long. Things happened (a story for another post) and I was just too exhausted in the evenings to do anything! By the time I updated my  records on Ravelry, it took me most of a week! However, I was able to look at the whole lot realistically and make some decisions about what to keep and what to give away!

To tell the truth, at first I was overwhelmed by the amount of yarn I had. However, the longer it sat in front of me, the more used to it I became and now it doesn’t seem so bad!

So we’ll begin with what I had before the cull!

The synthetic yarns were mostly on the table. Here is the view from the end of the table closest to my knitting chair

  2014 synthetics 2

and here are the synthetics (including baby yarn) again from the side of the table (yes, that is my fruit bowl lost in there!)

 2014 synthetics

That's a lot less synthetic than there used to be but still way too much for my liking!

On the floor, under the end of the table were the cottons and bamboos, with the sock yarns to their right

 2014 mostly socks

I discovered that I could knit a pair of socks each week for a year and not run out of yarn (I had no idea I had so much)!

Finally, in front of the television unit, are the wools, including UFO’s in that white box.

2014 wools with sock yarn on the side

One thing this exercise has reinforced is that my stash is mostly either 8ply (DK) or sock yarn. No wonder I never get around to knitting all those lightweight projects I have queued!

And, because we all need closure, here is my yarn collection now. Now I just need to find a permanent home for those nine 28 litre (7.4 gallons) tubs (left to right, top to bottom: baby yarn, two tubs of sock yarn, yarn for me, cotton and cotton blends, wool in weights other than 8ply/DK, UFOs for me, sock yarn for me, acrylic 5ply/sport-weight). The two large ones, which have a capacity of 80 litres each (21 gallons) live under the spare bed. The bottom one holds my 8ply/DK wool yarn, the other is full of 8ply acrylic!

2014 collection minus grab bags

This collection of tubs does not include my stash in “grab bags”; some of which are seen in this photo. These are housed in a drawer under the spare single/twin bed.

labelled grab bags

I did not take a photo of the yarn I gave away – that didn’t even occur to me, sorry.

Now that the yarn is sorted, I can get back to some stitching! Of course, there’ll be some music in the background while I sew or some television viewing while I knit.

What do you like to watch (or listen to) while you’re stitching?

8 comments:

  1. You did well sorting it all out and someone else was the lucky rescuer of your spare yarn.

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  2. What a fun cleaning project! If I came for a year and we did nothing but knit , we might make a dent in the stash! Lol. I love how you organized it! (Missed you lately...nice to see this post!)

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  3. Wow that's a lot of yarn. It looks so pretty all sorted in bins. It's amazing how fast our stash boxes grow no matter how hard we try to keep them under control. I made 8 rainbow scrappy quilts and gave a huge bag of bits away and can finally close the lids on my fabric scrap boxes....AGAIN. ug! Wonder how long it will last me this time:)

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  4. That is a lot of yarn! I guess if you consider fabric stashes it's really not that bad ;) Glad you feel organized!

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  5. That IS a lot of yarn! I guess you and WM didn't eat or watch tv for the week while you had it all piled up and taking over the house.:)

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  6. nicely sorted. I like to listen to country music while I sew or knit. you have inspired me to get busy sorting both my stash of yarn and fabric. right now I am on a clean up the UFOs kick

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  7. Lots of work, but it paid off.

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  8. Wow that heaps of yarn!
    Are you selling any of your sock yarn you don't want?

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