Destash to De-stress

You're sitting in the living room minding your own business, having some fun crocheting, maybe drinking some tea. Everything is serene. What a lovely evening. That's when it starts, the low rumbling sound, a groan that emanates from every corner of your house. Zippered bags are bursting! *RIP* Drawers are busting open! *POP* Closet doors are rattling! *CLATTER* It's your yarn stash, it's out of control! ***BOOM*** All of those great deals, perfect colorways, and indie finds are now exploding all over the place. Yikes! Maybe it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Is your stash so large that it's stressing you out and taking over your home? Are you ferreting yarn in your linen closet, your dresser drawers, and the trunk of your car? It is hard to select yarns for your projects because you just don't know where to start? Are you worried you'll have to live to age 247 to have any hope of using all of your yarn? Maybe it's time to...

Today I'm going to give you some helpful tips on decision making when it comes to your yarn stash. Here's how to Evaluate, Designate, and Donate for a stress-free and well-organized stash. You'll want to set aside one to two hours for this process depending on how large your stash is.

First thing's first, you gotta know what you're working with. Find a clean place where you can lay out your entire stash. Yes, all of it! This might be your dining room table, your bed, the floor of your craft room, or your entire living room. Great! Now you're ready to ask yourself the following questions:

What needs to be tossed out right away?  If some of your yarn has unfortunately been attacked by wee beasties like moths, mice, mold, and the like, throw it out immediately. Some folks might tell you to try to save the yarn by sending it through the washing machine in a lingerie bag. I wouldn't recommend it, especially if the pest in question was mice. Machine washing yarn might work if you accidentally spilled something on it or if you'd like it to smell fresher, but pests are not something you want to mess with. Do you really want to risk contaminating more of your stash? Take a gulp and toss it. It's sad and a bit of a waste, but hopefully this can be avoided in the future by storing your yarn in a clean, dry place and discouraging pests with cedar or lavender sachets.

Where am I going to store my yarn? Notice this is not necessarily the same as "where have I already been storing my yarn?". Whether you've got an entire craft room, a closet, a chest of drawers, or a single plastic bin to work with, you need to build a stash that fits there comfortably without overflowing into other places in your home. You may wish to invest in some new containers or shelving for your yarn. I personally store my yarn in two three-drawer Sterilite towers.

How do I want to organize my yarn? If you like to pick a project and then find the yarn for it, you may want to organize your yarn based on weight. If you like to pick a yarn and then find a project for it, you may want to organize your yarn by color or fiber. If you have a ton of projects in mind you may want to group your yarn according to project. You'll likely use a few different approaches. Take a good look at the space you have set aside for your yarn and mentally label your shelves/drawers/bins.

What am I going to keep? This is the beginning of the hardest part of the process. Start by picking out the yarns that you are really invested in based on what's important to you. This could be cost based, brand based, weight based, color based, or similar. Go ahead and put this yarn in your stash location to see how much room you have left for the next step.

Do I already have a project in mind for this yarn? Now that you've already set aside your favorites it's time to be practical. Pull up your Ravelry queue. Pop open those Pinterest boards. Dive into your pattern library. Set aside yarn for specific projects. It only counts if you have all or almost all of the yarn required for the project. Mind the age of the yarn and think about how feasible it would be to get more in the same dye lot. Put away all of the yarn you've gathered so far. You may want to label it in bags or similar based on the project it's set aside for.

What else will fit? If you've still got some room left you can allow yourself to keep more of your stash based on impulse. For example, if I had extra room I would probably keep all of the purple yarn since it's my favorite color, or keep all of the softest yarn.

Whew! Give yourself a pat on the back. That was hard work. Maybe all of your yarn fit in your stash spot. Awesome! However, it's more likely that it *sniff* didn't. Now you've got some extra yarn on your hands. If you want to make some last minute yarn switches that's okay. Don't let yourself ferret the yarn somewhere it doesn't belong. Let's solve your problem once and for all!

There are many excellent choices for re-homing yarn that is perfectly good but doesn't fit into your new stress-free stash lifestyle. You may wish to sell your extra yarn on Craigslist, on Ravelry, or as part of a yard sale. If you're looking to donate the yarn here are a few options:

Make a friend's day. If you've got a friend (or two, or three!) who shares your love of fiber arts, see if they'd like to have any of your extra yarn. My friend Toni recently gave me some absolutely lovely yarn that she was looking to re-home and I am very appreciative.

Donate the yarn to a local community or senior center. Google community centers in your area. They may enjoy having your yarn on hand for kids crafts, crochet and knitting lessons, and more.

Donate the yarn to a specific charity. Many charities ask for finished objects but there are also a few that ask for yarn. Do some internet sleuthing. One good option that comes to mind is groups that teach prisoners to crochet and knit. Lion Brand Yarn has an excellent database of charities to explore.

Donate the yarn to Goodwill. When all else fails you can always donate your extra yarn to one of the major thrift store chains and feel good knowing that it will find a new home and help provide services to those in need.

There's one last thing you need to think about before you can consider yourself destashed. What kinds of limitations are you going to put on your yarn collecting? Decide how much yarn you need to use before you're allowed to buy more. That way your stash will stay organized and you can avoid another big explosion :)

Yay for Free Yarn!

So, I've mentioned before that I crochet with my friend Katie one evening each week. Recently we've been able to draw other folks who live in our apartment complex to our group. It's really exciting! It's so fun to see what others are making and enjoying each others' company as we crochet and knit. Just this past week one of our new members, Kerri, asked if I wanted any yarn. She said she had a bag of yarn that she was going to donate if no one wanted it. Picturing a small grocery sized bag in my mind, I said why yes of course! Who doesn't want free yarn?

It wasn't a small bag. It was a garbage bag of yarn. A garbage bag full of yarn! I couldn't believe she wanted to give it all away, but she insisted. Cue internal evil scientist laughter. Yes, all mine. My precious! This yarn isn't just some random mishmash of scraps. We're talking brand new skeins of Lion Brand Wool-Ease, Patons 100% Peruvian wool, Martha Stewart Crafts wool blend, Knit Picks Chroma Worsted, and a whole bunch of different fingering weight yarns. It's not enough for me to just talk about the yarn. You need to see it for yourself.

Yep, it's freaking amazing. I have a special project in mind for a good portion of this yarn and many of the remaining skeins are good matches for projects in my Ravelry queue. Hurray! I've always been happy-jealous (when you're kinda jealous but still happy for the other person) of users on r/crochet who show off yarn hauls given to them by a friend or family member. Until now I was incredulous that I would ever be so lucky. Thank you, Kerri!

A Practical Birthday Present

Today is my birthday! Yay! I love birthdays. I feel like there aren't enough special times in life dedicated to celebrating the people we love, so birthdays are important to me, both my own and others'. It irks me that some folks think excitably enjoying birthdays and holidays is childish. It's not childish, it's human. Happy Birthday to me! I think I'll spend the day making myself some orange flavored chocolate chip cupcakes, ignoring my chores, watching movies, and... you guessed it... crocheting!

I have such a dear husband. We decided to celebrate my birthday together this past weekend since it falls on a weekday this year. He took me to The Melting Pot for dinner. Yum! I feel so fortunate and blessed. When I was young I always wanted to try fondue, but it was so expensive. I am grateful for my life and the amazing, fun things Alex and I are able to do together. This whole year has been pretty incredible.

Wanna know what else we did this past weekend? We journeyed to Ballard to pick out my birthday present... yarn storage! Yes, friends, I am thoroughly enamored with storage. I love organizing and my yarn had gotten a bit out of control. I'm working on a few large projects at the same time, so the yarn for those projects ended up overflowing my old, modest storage and colonizing my project box, linen closet, and a dresser drawer. Yikes! Not to fear, my days of yarn ferreting are now behind me. Meet my new storage. It was immensely satisfying sorting my yarn into it.

Isn't it delightful? It enjoys a place of prominence in our dining/living area. There's my project box on top where I keep my hooks, notes, scissors, and whatever my current project happens to be (with the exception of the one I'm hooking up now, which is too big to fit in the box). This may be a modest yarn stash compared to some, but I personally don't like having a lot of stuff lying around. I only want to have yarn in the house if it is going to be used soon. In light of my preferences, this storage seems super large to me! Let's take a tour. Sorry for the poor lighting. Not much natural daylight to be had in Seattle in late autumn!

The top drawer houses my nicer yarns. Lots of Cascade Cherub, both Aran and DK. Be on the lookout for an awesome new pattern in that teal color in the coming months! There's some Berroco and some nice nylon cord hanging out in there. I also keep my indie yarn up top.

Next up is my Lion Brand Drawer. Lion Brand makes my favorite craft store yarns, of which I prefer Vanna's Choice. Vanna's Choice makes up 75% of the drawer, though there's some Kitchen Cotton, Lion Suede and Jiffy in there too.

Finally, I've filled the bottom drawer with Simply Soft plus a bit of Red Heart and another acrylic yarn by Caron. I have a somewhat lofty goal of slowly phasing out the yarns in the bottom drawer, moving the Lion Brand to the bottom, and filling the middle drawer with the same quality of yarn as the first. We'll see how that goes. Yarn can set you back a pretty penny, another reason I keep my stash small and make sure to use what I have.

Here's a gratuitous cat picture. Ranna has always loved sitting on my project box on the ground (and in it if she's sneaky!), and now that it's elevated she's positive we did it just for her. You have no idea how hard it is to take pictures of anything around here without a cat in them. She is the worst photo bomber ever. She's so friendly she just has to follow me around the house and climb in every shot. Every picture you see here had to be retaken at least three times as a result.

I want to show you what I upgraded from. I've also put some other supplies in the old storage. Let's check it out.

It sits in the corner of the nook next to my craft tower that's full of quilling, card making, and other miscellaneous supplies. Notice that it's like one third the size of my lovely new birthday storage.

The top drawer now houses all of my remnants/scraps. These balls of yarn are too small to be used in a substantial project but may be useful for appliques, simple baby hats, and other small projects. They look rather large in this picture but the largest of them would still easily fit inside a cupped hand, and my hands are fairly petite.

The second drawer is filled with odds and ends. Safety eyes, pipe cleaners, felt, that sort of thing. The bottom drawer is crammed full of bags of stuffing. I didn't open it because, ahem, it's rather hard to close.

Well then, now you and I have no secrets. I feel like showing you my stash is like showing you my diary or something. I'm a bit envious of those folks who can proudly and prettily display their yarns on shelves or similar out in the open, but my little yarn stealing fiend of a cat makes that impossible. Despite those limitations, I'm pleased as punch about my new storage. Thanks, Alex! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to enjoy my birthday :)