This year, 2019, I had done a decent job of not buying yarn . . probably the best I’ve done in the recent past but that was all out the window with the Madelinetosh sale. I’ve only received one order and it was for yarn for two sweaters so I’m not counting my chickens before they hatch but I foresee 2020 as being the best year yet . . assuming Miss Babs doesn’t have some crazy sale.
I’ve been frustrated with my efforts to sort and categorize my yarn. It’s so much easier to buy what I want than to find it.
Yesterday morning I woke up wanting to re-organize the yarn stash. I decided two things:
- My spreadsheet needs more info on it. Therefore I set it up so that I can put yards per skein and number of skeins and it will fill in the total yards of that particular yarn; and I want to track the total number of skeins that I’ve entered. That way, I’m always seeing if the stash is growing or going down. I can (a) only use stash yarn; (b) use more than I buy; or (c) buy way more than I use. I choose to (a) for 2020.
- I’m not going to enter every skein of fingering weight yarn I have. There are hundreds of single skeins of sock yarn. When I’m ready to make a pair of socks, all I have to do is open a tub of sock yarn, reach in and dig around til I find one. I don’t need all that entered on a spreadsheet. What I need on the spreadsheet are the skeins for bigger projects . . where I need multiple skeins of the same color yarn.
Another thing I decided to do differently: I’ve been categorizing the yarn in tubs according to weight: I had tubs for worsted, DK, Sport, etc. Now, I’ve decided just to fill a tub! One tub may have several different weights of yarn in it so, as long as I know the number for the tub, I can find it . . in theory.
Here you can see that I’ve numbered my tubs 2020-1, 2020-2, etc. because hopefully 2020 is the year I get this mess under control. From the above snippet, you can see if I were looking for a Juniper Moon yarn, I’d see that I have a bulky weight yarn in Tub 2020-8.
In the above photo, I sorted by weight. If I wanted to make a DK weight sweater and needed at least 1700 yards, I could easily choose which yarns would work. Since I am familiar with most of these yarns, I should be able to narrow it down to one or two, go straight to those tubs, grab the yarn and get the swatch done.
I hope to have this all finished by the end of the month. We’ll see!
Kathy says
Seems that sorting by weight would save you more time in the long run. If you know what weight yarn you need for a sweater it would be easier to look at options if all that weight yarn were together.
Judy Laquidara says
Sorting by any parameter takes just a second but if a sweater calls for worsted weight, it’s pretty easy to make a few adjustments and use DK or Aran, or any weight really. There are times when there are knitting challenges such as “Make something using the dyer whose yarn is most prevalent in your stash” so I would search by Dyer but I already know the answer is Madelinetosh. Or it might be to make something using the yarn in your stash with the most yardage.
Once I find the yarn I want to use on the spreadsheet, it only takes a second to find the correct tub since they’re all numbered and kept in order by number . . at least for now! 🙂
Liz says
Should you have a column to describe color in simpler terms- green, blue, etc.? I can see the need to use the dyer’s terms in case you need to order an additional skein of the yarn. But, if you want to do a blue sweater, you may not be able to sort according to blue since the color might be “sky”
Rebecca in SoCal says
I was wondering if you will remember what “Beautiful Liar” is. 😀
Nelle Coursey says
I envy you being so organized! I just have mine in tubs by colors!
dezertsuz says
It looks like you’re heading down a good road, one that is more meaningful to you than past organization. If I ever get my fabric room back, I might try that with my fabrics, too.