12/30 My Stash

30 Day Knitting Challenge Day 12: Where do you keep your stash? Post pictures!

I’ve been in denial: I really didn’t think my stash was this big (or this disorganized). I really need to sort and organize everything, and part with the yarn I don’t particularly like.

This is where I keep my stash officially, an armoire in The Yarn Office, the room formerly known as the formal living room.

I always think of my stash as being on the top shelf inside, but the bottom shelf has some yarn & FOs even though it’s taken up mostly by old journals and project bags and other stuff. The yarn and fiber bumps sitting on top of the armoire are my haul from MDS&W this year. And there is yarn in a few of the bags stuffed into the corner next to the armoire, yarn I was going to donate but then used to make a yarn ball wreath for my front door in 2010/2011. There are also 2 bolts of upholstery fabric tucked in there I’m never going to use – the sewing machine and I have a very tenuous relationship – and should donate.

My satellite stash is a basket next to my spot (my precious spot) on the couch and has yarn for current or upcoming projects. The big basket does have some FOs, but it’s about time for me to sort through this and return things to the mothership main stash.

The Yarn Office has another stash section. Two of these bins have batts that I’m selling in my etsy shop, also called The Yarn Office, one has leftover Knit Picks Comfy from a baby blanket projects my knitting group did, and another has sample skeins from a natural dye class I took in 2011, along with subsequent natural dye samples that I did on my own.

Here is the fiber basket stash that lives next to my wheel. The white fiber is targhee that I’ve had for 6 years now and the red is fiber I got in my knitting group’s Christmas exchange in 2011. There may be more hiding in the basket; I didn’t want to look.

This isn’t really my yarn – I’m just fostering it for a little while; it’s yarn my friend Cecily gave me when she was packing to move and realized she was never going to crochet. I think I need to pass this stuff on to someone else who would enjoy them more.

I almost forgot about this basket in The Yarn Office; it has most of my handspun, with some hand-dyed yarn & part of the commercially-knit sweater from which it was unraveled. I did that back in my thrifty/green yarn days, 2008-2009.

Except for the fabric and notions in the two closest bins and the giant tub, this is all fiber that I’ve processed from raw fleece (or plan to process). Also, there’s is an alpaca fleece hiding in the corner that’s peeking out from between the bin towers. Shhh – don’t remind my husband.

And I almost forgot; I have two drawers in a dresser upstairs that have yarn in them, so I guess that makes them part of my stash.

Most of this is from before 2004. Note the vintage yarn label on that skein of Knit Picks from when they first started their own yarn line. Also, the purple is Valley Yarns Berkshire; I used it to make the sweater on the Fall 2007 cover of Interweave Knits but didn’t like the end result and have been doing various other things with it since then.

Most of this is from before 2004. The orange thing is a sweater my grandmother knit, but orange isn’t my color and I unraveled part of it because I needed orange for something else. The pink is 100% wool I ordered for making felted slippers in 2003ish. I got the Dale of Norway Baby Ull (the small white skein) for a fair isle hat I never made, although I did use all of the blue I got with it for something else. There’s a partially finished modular blanket made with long-retired yarn, the hat that’s my first attempt at colorwork that’s too small to fit all but the smallest of human babies, and the swatch from my first sweater in 2004.

Memories.

I really need to sort through everything, organize, and donate/gift a lot of it. I hate not being organized, but when you live with 4 guys (well, now 3 since my oldest went to college), cleaning and organizing everything can be really frustrating – it seems like I’ll clean something, turn my back, one of them will wander by, and I turn back and boom: the clean thing is now dirty again. While it does occasionally bother me, they have taught me that there are more important things in life than having a clean, organized house.