The State of the Stash, Spring 2013

Let's talk stash. Specifically, my stash, my lovely, lovely stash. Judging by the Flash Your Stash thread on Ravelry (a must read) and the sheer number of stash related posts on other blogs, knitters just love looking at other knitter's stashes. Which is great because one of the things I wanted to do with this blog is to try and keep a better track of my stash; whats coming in and going out, whether or not its growing exponentially (which is what it feels like) or whether it's slowly shrinking and I'm therefore justified in buying new yarn.

So, this is the first installment of the State of the Stash, which I'm going to try and post at quarterly intervals (as I don't knit fast enough to justify a monthly post!)

But first, some pictures, because it would be wrong to talk about stash without having pictures as that's the whole point of stash! First, where my stash lives:

That's just an Ikea Billy cupboard

 And here is the inside:

Lovely, lovely yarn!

Now, I must admit that I took these photos a while ago, and the stash has grown since then.... It's still all in the one cupboard (phew!) but the books have been taken out to make space for more yarn!

So, numbers, lets look at numbers. Thanks to the genius of Casey, you can export your Ravelry stash into an excel spreadsheet, thus making it possible to play around with formulas and traumatise yourself with exactly how much yarn you've got. Before I downloaded mine I made sure my stash was updated and all my projects had stash linked, so the numbers are as accurate as I can make them. So, here goes:

THAT'S 19.4 MILES OF YARN! Holy Batman, how can that much yarn fit in one cupboard? Is there a some sort of black hole in there? Should I call CERN?!?

The following Emergency Stash Reduction methods must be employed immediately:

• Relaunch the Single Skein Knit Up project (I shall blog about this soon)
• Cast on a damn jumper and use up one of the THREE jumper quantities of yarn I own
• Start some laceweight projects; those 800 yard skeins are not helping the numbers, damnit!

 

So, we shall see how well I get on with those in the next State of the Stash update, I bet you're all just GLUED to your seats in anticipation!

First, though, I must decide what knitting to take on my holiday. I'm off to the Lake District for a week on Saturday which I NEED LIKE BURNING after the last few months at work. My boyfriend and I will do lots of walking, eat lots of cake and enjoy lots of lounging about in our rented flat, which obviously means I need to take about 4 or 5 projects with me. To the Ravelry advanced search!!!!


ETA: (Okay, I've just read this through and the word 'stash' now looks COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS to me, I've used it so much! Maybe this is how non-knitters feel?)