Stash Revisited

A while ago I posted about my stash reorganization and kinda sorta wanted to revisit the subject. Did things stay sorted? Is all of my stash in Ravelry? Have I been stashing more or whittling it down?

Did things stay sorted?

For the most part, yes. I removed sweater quantities from the cedar chest and placed them in the space bags that live under my bed. Single skeins that I found in the space bags went into the cedar chest. This was more shuffling around than organizing but everything is where it should be according to my Ravelry notes. I've been digging through it a lot lately so it's slightly messy but I can still find things.

Is my stash in Ravelry?

At this point I would say 95% of my stash is listed in Ravelry. I spent 2 or 3 hours Saturday afternoon logging single skeins and odd balls into my stash that for some reason or another hadn't been entered. The key to getting this done was using my ipad to look at my stash on Ravelry and my Yarma app on my iphone to take and upload pictures quickly. I could do all of the entry work while sitting next to my cedar chest and digging through it.

Is the stash bigger or smaller these days?

In general, the stash trend is downward which makes me feel really great. My numbers on Ravelry are higher ( I think) since I've been working hard at logging everything that got missed in previous stash organization sessions. I've been on a yarn diet since October-ish with a few exceptions and that has been a really good thing for the size of my stash and my pocketbook. My yarn diet ends for Stitches West where mayhem of the yarn buying type will surely ensue and then I'll be back on the Coldsheep bandwagon for the remainder of the year.

After exporting my stash into Excel via Ravelry last night I found that my yardage is 66,700. This may shock some of you but I'm pleasantly surprised since I thought my number was in the 75k range. If I knit as much this year as the last couple of years this is probably about 2 or 3 years worth of yarn. Not too shabby.

Motivation

I've been posting a bit this Summer about organization. While I've shared some things with you (my stash) there have been other things that I've done and habits I've established that haven't made it to the blog yet. I thought I'd do a round up of things I've read about, tried, and been inspired by in regards to organization. Without further ado:

UFyH.  The operator of UFyH has a no-nonsense, motivational, supportive, and humorous approach to "unfucking your habitat". You can follow via tumblr, facebook, or twitter and I've found it to be exactly my cup of tea. The idea is that something is better than nothing and even if all you do in a day is make your bed, it's an achievement. She doesn't advocate cleaning marathons but rather 20/10s (clean/rest) that eventually move your home toward a manageable state of cleanliness and organization. By the look of her followers' before and after shots it's working great for a lot of people. She even has an app available for iphone and ipad that provides random challenges, motivation, and a customizable list function (I own it, and it's awesome). Did I mention that she curses?

FlyLady. Similar but different to UFyH. Her method is "baby steps" toward organizing and maintaining a clean home. FlyLady is definitely geared toward the stay at home crowd but she does have modifications for working people/students. While I know her method works for some, I was turned off by the religious undertones and too-structured cleaning schedule. If you prefer more structure and email digests of stuff to do this may be your ticket to clean.

Apartment Therapy. This is a beautiful website full of inspiration for everything to do with your home. Small spaces, organization, green living, DIY, and more. They've got tons of guest articles, videos, and great advertisers that illicit lots of oohing and aahing.

How to Clean Anything. This website does exactly what it says, gives information on how to clean anything. If you've got kids, pets, a propensity for spilling coffee on yourself (me) then you can get information on how to clean just about anything and everything.

Ravelry. For the fiber enthusiast. The best tool I can think of in regards to my obsessive knitting habit. It indexes, categorizes, you know...organizes all of my knitting stuff. I've met a ton of great people and stayed in touch with a whole virtual community with this one tool.

 I am, by nature, an organized person and somewhat neat freak (thanks, mom) and I generally am an efficient manager of my time so I rarely feel too overwhelmed by either my home, work, or school life. However, clutter has a tendency to creep into my home and things get left "to do later" and I suddenly get tired of moving that bag for the ten billionth time and that's when I visit the above websites for inspiration and motivation to get things going again.

Have you tried any of these? Success? Failure?

Bigger Bites - Continuing the Organization Struggle

I've spent an unholy amount of time in my bathroom this week going through my medicine cabinet and drawers trying to sort through expired and unused items (plus thorough scouring/cleaning..ick). Yesterday afternoon saw the completion of that project and I'm on to bigger things. My yarn stash. I'm a pretty fast knitter and I like to use my stash so I generally have high turnover in there...generally. This last year I got a full-time job and started back at school to finish my degrees so my knitting time almost disappeared. I also was working six or seven days a week until January of this year so my stress level went way up, my knitting time went way down, and I started to accumulate a lot of stash that I just didn't have time to knit. Which led to this:

 The whole shebang. Unsorted. I pulled everything out and I mean everything. My scrap bags, my cedar chest bins, my space bags and random other small bags that I stashed around our apartment.

 The two bins usually live inside my cedar chest so things stay relatively sorted but they are filled to bursting with fingering weight yarn. There are definitely some things that don't belong in there like that skein of Malabrigo Worsted in Whale's Road that I can see peeking over the edge. Eek.

 The sweater stash, sorted this time. To be honest the oldest thing in this photo is that red O-Wool that I frogged from my Minimalist Cardigan (upper right corner). But I do have three dark-brown sweaters' worth of yarn and two are even the same weight yarn. That probably could have been planned better.

Sock yarn staring down DK weight yarn. While the sweater portion of my stash takes up the largest amount of real estate the fingering weight yarn definitely outnumbers it in the skein category. I get really excited about sock yarn even though I don't knit socks very often and I think it's because of the color and the price. You know, a knitting a project all bundled up in one little skein, in pretty colors, with great yardage. I just can't help myself and it shows. 

Before you get started make sure you have adequate time for the volume of stash you own. My stash took about three hours to sort through and put away and I went through it fairly quickly. So this is how I organize my stash:

1. Pull everything out. Everything!!! If you keep telling yourself that the mobile stash in your car doesn't count - it does. I had a huge bag of yarn in my car for over six months and I finally pulled it out, entered it in Ravelry, and integrated it into my stash. Any little hidey-hole of yarn counts, if you pull it out now you won't feel shock when you open that bottom desk drawer and find those impulse skeins of yarn you purchased "as a treat".

2. Decide how you want to sort your yarn. Fiber type. Yarn weight. Color. Autobiographically. It doesn't really matter as long as it makes sense to you since you're the one that will have to dig through your stash to find that skein that you know you have. I prefer sorting by yarn weight/project type. Sweater quantities of yarn live in space bags under my bed and single skeins and fingering weight yarns are sorted by weight and stored in my cedar chest.

3. Cull the herd. While you work through your stash make a pile of the yarn you don't love anymore. It may hurt a little bit since you truly loved that skein of novelty yarn when you bought it years ago but believe me, someone else will love it now. And knit it. And you won't have to store it anymore for that future day when you "might" knit it even though you've grown up as a knitter and don't really dig bright blue fringe yarn anymore. Bag those bad balls up and take them to your knitting group, send them off to charity, or donate them to Goodwill - someone else, somewhere else will want them. If you've loaded your yarn into Ravelry you can even offer it for trade or sale thereby getting new cool yarn (or money!) for something you'll never use.

4. Bag or bin it up. Once you've got your stuff sorted you'll know the size and amount of containers you'll need to store your stash. If you already have bins or bags you can reuse them or if you're just starting out on this venture you may need to purchase storage. I'm lucky enough to have a cedar chest my mom gave me when I was sixteen that I use to store yarn and space bags fit great under my bed once the air has been squished out. I prefer my yarn to be put away from threats of small children, damp weather, and insects. If you're purchasing new stash receptacles make sure that the bins or bags fit in the space they are going to live. Measure your closet, your piece of furniture, under your bed, or wherever you're stashing your stash to make sure that doors close and lids fit. If you're a person that likes everything out where you can see it clear bins are probably ideal since you'll want to see those yarny innards to remind you what you have. Households that don't contain moths, carpet beetles, small children, and/or yarn-eating pets may enjoy having yarn on display. I've dreamed about lovely glass-fronted cabinetry with drawers and bins galore but it's just not going to happen in my house.

5. Extra stash happiness. I try to keep my Ravelry stash updated to show my current at-home stash so I can easily match patterns and yarn. I've also used the stash tool do deter me from spur of the moment purchases since I can check my Rav stash out and see that I already have about 10 skeins of sock yarn in varying shades of blue. An added bonus is that you can put a note on each yarn page listing where in your home (or yarn storage facility) each skein is located. 

Going through my stash regularly allows me to plan projects accordingly. My three dark-brown sweaters of yarn? Yep. Not buying more dark-brown sweater quantities any time soon. If I feel the urge to purchase more sweater yarn I'll try to fill in the color gaps a little better.

Using what I have comes from knowing what I have and when I knit from my stash it makes room for more stash enhancement, what could be better than that? I managed to empty a large space bag and a small space bag in one organizing and condensing go-through. Sure, my bag of partial-skeins got larger but now I don't have those guys wreaking havoc and leaving their yarn trail all over the place. My scrap stashdown project is higher in yardage but the nice and tidy balls of yarn that I put away look much more alluring than the tangled mess that lived in my cedar chest this morning.

How do you organize your stash? Do you have one and if so how much real estate does it take up in your home? If you've recently re-organized, or are in the process of doing so, how do you feel about your stash now?

Bit by Bit

Organizing. There, I said it. I'm kind of obsessed with it. It kind of drives me crazy. I'm anti-clutter and anti-stuff but I live with a kidlet who continually brings home seashells, flowers, sticks, art projects, library books, and any manner of little thing that has to find a home. I also happen to live with a guy who likes to have everything out where he can see it/sometimes find it and whose closet does not contain clothes but boxes and boxes of.... I dunno, your guess is as good as mine. We live in an 800 sq. foot apartment and sometimes I feel like we're hemmed in by stuff.


After my last post about those Hiya Hiya needles I got to thinking about all of my stuff. The stuff in my life. The stuff I like to have and the stuff I like to use and how those things aren't necessarily exclusive but how they all need to have a place to live in our small apartment. So. I'm trying to streamline. Sort. Toss. Donate. Recycle. Tonight I cleaned off my very small desk space and tomorrow I'll tackle the single drawer that holds all of my desk "stuff". I've set a 15-30 minute limit for evenings so I can tackle small projects and feel like I'm making progress.* How about you? How do you go about organizing your stuff? Are you a stacker? A hider? A hoarder?


I'm sure this will spill over into organizing my yarn and knitting supplies so stay tuned for that post!