Tidying Up

We have a friend coming to stay for a couple of nights, and our spare bedroom is also the study and yarn storage (dumping?) room. We've been mostly keeping the door shut to keep little dog mouths off the yarn, so the stash management policy of late been very much a case of "throw it in and shut the door".

So I tidied up. I dragged out all of the plastic containers, and went through them all: three big bins, two smaller fileboxes, and then a few bags and smaller boxes.



(That's Dexter in the bottom left of the picture, looking on, incredulous.)

I've been utterly ruthless, and cleared out a lot of ends and bits and pieces and stuff I'll plain never use.

I'm not - and have never really been - a stasher of sweater yarn, so there was only five sweater quantities. (Not judging here, I just happen to not like buying large quantifies of yarn without a specific project in mind.) And of those, only one was something I'd actually bought - and even that was bought with a specific project in mind.

My Must-Have Cardigan. I feel about this sweater the way I feel about the music of the Kaiser Chiefs: I don't care if it's fashionable, I still like it.

You'll see how much progress I've made since I bought the yarn, oh, two years ago.



There's a sweater quantity of leftovers from another project for which I bought far too much yarn, although it's Cascade Eco Wool+, so 1.5 skeins is actually a sweater quantity. And I've got three others that were all gifts/destashes sent in my direction.

The rest, in all those boxes, was leftovers, sock yarn and lace yarn. Gulp. So it's not that I'm extraordinarily self-disciplined when it comes to yarn shopping. God no. I have a serious sock yarn problem.

Post clear-out, I have more than 40 pairs' worth of sock yarn. I won't tell you how many pairs' worth got cleared out.

Post cleanout, I've got one big box full of sock yarn



one big box half full with the sweater quantities



and one big box half full of laceweight.



The first file box is holding what I've classified as "bits and pieces" - some crochet cotton, and any leftovers that are enough to actually make something with - mostly hat quantities of stuff.



In that collection there is the big bag of the leftovers from my Lizard Ridge. Although it's tiny balls, I cannot bring myself to throw this away - I think it needs to be a crocheted lap blanket, or something.



The smallest box will hold scraps that I'll use for teaching and demos, and the other filebox will hold WIPs - to keep them away from the dog. That way, we can safely open the study door again.

In addition to clearing out and sorting, I've written an inventory. It will be useful in the future, if only to remind me that there are certain types of yarn I need never buy again.

I have found a few goodies that looking for homes. I'll put together a post on that in the next day or so.