Like many knitters I have little pockets of yarn squirreled away here and there.  Lately, with the move to smaller digs, I have been feeling overrun with yarny stuff.  Not yarny goodness but *gasp* clutter.  Not meaning to sound ungrateful or spoiled but I miss having a yarn room.  I haven’t had one since I was living la vida single.  Even then the yarn was too much to be kept in one room.  To take care of this I joined a group on Ravelry called Stashdown and it has been most helpful the past year.  To demonstrate lets share the stats for last year:

yarn in: 3665 yds

yarn out: 43,978 yds

Most of the yarn out, to be sure, were via sales pages here and there.  Plus they only count yarn out when you actually finish a project so some stuff I knit that needs assemblage doesn’t actually count.  This year I am aiming for zero yardage in which is going to be super tough.  Not totally tough since one can officially swap for new yarn with somebody else and as long as you are swapping out as much as or more yarn than you are receiving then you are still in the zero in column.  Only when you buy yarn or swap for more yarn does it count as insies.  Unless I totally misunderstand that rule.  I might check with the mods on that one but that is how it worked last year.

This only matters because of the grandmama business since I am spending much time on Ravelry at the moment looking at cutie patootie baby things and coveting other people’s FOs which I could theoretically duplicate if I get the exact same yarn.  And I am making it a goal to not acquire new yarn.  Quite a conundrum.  Swaps will be my saving grace should they still be acceptable given the rules above.

Spending time on Ravelry or other people’s blogs has been something I avoided like the dickens last year because I do have a covetous heart and know it.  Nothing wrong with that imo after all that is why sample garments and such exist~ooh ahh see how pretty come buy X yarn in Y color and  you too can have this.  Actually that is why magazines and patterns and such exist at all.  With photographs to boot 😛  Not just in the knitting business but any business.  It is called advertising and is successful for a reason.  Doesn’t really matter if you know there is an army of research going on behind it ~ it still works.   Which is why we need our handy dandy coping mechanisms.

Recently somebody emailed me asking for a particular yarn that I had adverted several years ago on a now defunct blog.  I just spent the last week going through bins of yarn organizing them into some semblance of order while looking for said yarn.  I still have more bins to go through but they are in a storage locker…. I did mention the smaller digs and lack of yarn room.  During this exercise I have set aside some yarn pockets, aka baskets in this case, to work my way through as well as several sweater lot of yarns in various weights in under the bed storage and such.  Hopefully this tactic will also help me be full of WIN this year with my stash down goals.

How are you dealing with your yarn organization this year?  Do you have any knitting goals?  I know a lot of people use the queue feature on Ravelry to organize such things and I suppose I should do the same as well.  After I finish rolling around in yarn 😀

yarny days and knitterly evenings, Elka