People who craft often like to have a stash. I'm no exception to this - I have several tote boxes full of yarn, one of fibre (fine, I have a tote box AND a closet full of spinning fibre) and all the tools to go with it.
The funny thing about a stash though, is we don’t tend to think about them in the beginning, they just appear in our house. I can’t tell you when I crossed the line from “having a few balls of yarn” to “having a stash”. But what I can tell you is that after going through the totes recently, I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that my stash isn’t working for me.
Stash Problems
Because stashes tend to grow without thought in the beginning, there are a number of issues that I think are common to crafters everywhere. These are the three big problems I see in my stash. Maybe you see something similar in yours.
1. It doesn’t reflect what I like to make
I'm primarily a knitter, and when I’m knitting for myself, I most enjoy making sweaters and socks. To be honest, I have loads of sock yarns i.e. single skeins of fingering weight yarn but I don’t have sweater quantities of fingering weight yarns.
2. It doesn’t reflect my preferred colour palette
This is a tough one because colour preferences can shift over time and I know some of the yarn in my stash is at least 15 years old, if not older. Some of it was absolutely my colour when I bought it but as I'm aging, my colour palette is starting to shift and some of those glorious colours are no longer so glorious.
In addition, some of the yarns are from subscription clubs where I didn't get a say in what colour was sent. This is the primary reason I no longer participate in these kinds of ‘yarn of the month’ subscriptions.
3. I don’t have enough
Don’t misunderstand me - I have plenty of yarn. But I often don’t have enough of a particular yarn to make a sweater. There are two things I know I do that put me in this situation:
a) Bulk Purchasing. I won't lie and tell you that I don't occasionally make a purchase for myself through the store, but that forces me to buy 10 (or more) skeins of something. I rarely need that much so I'm often left with 3 - 4 skeins at the end of a project and that usually isn't enough to make something else.
b) I tried too hard to be economical and didn’t buy enough. I'm notorious for this when travelling because I'm trying to be mindful of baggage restrictions and so I tell myself that I can shorten sleeves (because I do actually have really short arms) but too often I come up short and then have to figure out what I can add (preferably from my odds and ends of stash) to make the sweater work.
Stash Solutions
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past weeks, since I went digging through my stash and I’ve been thinking about how to be more intentional with what is there. The issues I’ve identified point to ways I can fix my stash to work for me.
1. Be honest with what you like to make
I’m a sock and sweater knitter. I make hats from time to time. This is what I like to make so if I want my stash to really serve me, it should skew in the direction of lots of sweater quantities for various weights of yarns. Getting more detailed, I prefer fingering and DK weight yarns to worsted (or heavier) so this is what I should focus on to grow my stash for sweater quantities.
Let me go on record and say I have so many single skeins of fingering weight yarn that I have absolutely no business even looking at pretty skeins for making socks. It's a hazard of owning a yarn shop.
2. Be honest with your colour palette
Mine is shifting as I age and some of the colours I wore even 5 years ago are looking too harsh on my colouring now. I don’t worry too much about fun or ‘odd’ colours for socks but I am getting fussy about colours for things that will be up around my face. Given the amount of money and time we spend on a handmade wardrobe, I think we can and should be picky about colour.
3. Know how much yarn you really need
There are a zillion online yardage estimators that will ask you what you're making, what size and what weight of yarn and give you a ballpark amount of yarn needed for your project.
I know that I only need 100g or 400m of sock yarn to make socks for anyone in my household. For sweaters, I generally know my numbers but I should really have a spreadsheet with the different sizes, weights and yardage estimates and would ideally have a column for everyone I knit for. This would be an easy thing to create and keep as a note on my phone so when I find a great deal, I know how much I should be buying.
Next Steps
Now that I've got some ideas about how to make my stash really work for me, I think the next step will be to analyze it. Do I have sufficient quantities of things to work with? And if I do, does the colour work and will I actually do something with it? It will probably mean a cull of what's there and I'll have to figure out what to do with yarns that, for whatever reason, don't make the cut. But hard as that will be, I know it will make my stash into a much better crafting tool.
