Organizing Your Yarn Stash Or What Do I Do With All This Yarn???

Like many knitters I have a ton of yarn. Early on in my knitting days I would take any yarn people would give me, regardless of what it was, and I would routinely hit up sales at local big box stores (Michaels, Joann's) to pick up yarn, needles, notions, etc.

Once I was knitting for awhile, I got to be a bit of a yarn snob. I'll admit it. I love good yarn and I would buy what I loved with no plan of what to knit with it or what was already in my stash. As a result, this is what I had. This is just a small amount of the yarn I pulled out today while organizing. First, I divided it into piles: cotton, sock yarn, worsted weight, and bulky weight.

 I honestly had no idea how much yarn I owned or what I owned. Really, this picture just shows a tiny bit of the yarn I pulled, not to mention the unfinished projects, yarn left over from projects, needles, needle cases, needle gauges, notions, and patterns. Oh, and the piles of sock yarn minis for the sock yarn blanket I will start someday.

Once I started sorting, I quickly decided I had to divide both my sock yarn and my worsted weight yarn into solid and variegated. Yes, I had that much! I have not gone through it all yet other than to sort it. That's a project for another day. I belong to a yarn hoarders destash group on Facebook and plan to sell what I am not using.

Here is my drawer of needles that I need to sort and organize. I am really bad about returning needles to a case after fishing a project, so that's a project for one evening this week. I have a great case for circulars and another for DPNs from Erin Lane Bags (Erin Lane Bags). If you have not seen her bags, they are fabulous! She has bags to meet every knitters' needs. I plan to do a feature on her in a future blog as she just launched a revised website.  I do have to figure out a plan for my straight needles. I'm thinking there is probably an Erin Lane case for that!

Anyway, back to my stash organizing. I had the containers already, two three drawer clear plastic organizers and a five drawer one plus a three drawer colored one my kids no longer used. I just needed to organize what I had to fit into the space available and label what I had so I could find it easier. I decided to put each type of yarn into its own drawer or drawers depending on what I had. For labels, I had these very cool stick on clear labels (No idea where I got them years ago to use in my classroom). The best thing is they are clear pockets so you can write something on a strip of paper and change the paper at any time.

The good news is all of my yarn is organized and labeled! Yay! I have several skinny drawers in the five drawer organizer that I am not sure yet what I will use for, but I will figure it out soon.

The clear drawers on the left hold all of may yarn by weight as do two larger drawers on the right. The skinny ones on top are empty for now as I figure out what to do with them. The box on the top of the right organizer is what holds my "sock orphans" (leftover yarn from projects). I only labeled the ones on the left as the ones on the right top hold scrapbooking stuff that I don't use but still have) and the three drawer one on the bottom has patterns to organize, needles to organize, and unfinished projects.  The basket on top of the left organizer has my knitting bag (empty for now) and the leftover labels, some Post It Notes, and notebooks.  The stuff on top of the scrapbooking bin is scrapbooking stuff I need to organize and probably sell as I do not scrapbook and never have except for one book.

So there you have it, my nice, organized stash. The bad thing about doing this is 1) I realize how much yarn I have so I probably should not buy any for awhile and 2) I really, really need to figure out what I am keeping and selling so I can sell the unwanted yarn and organize my stash on Ravelry. 

I would love for my readers to share how they organize their yarn.  If you have not organized yours, hopefully this post gives you a bit of inspiration. This project took me about two hours. Of course it is just organized. I still have to go through it, but now that it is organized, that project is not so daunting.