Reduce...Reuse...Reorganize

It's time. 2010 is here. Stitches is but weeks away. It is the hour to clean out the stash, re-organize my yarn bin, toss barely readable yarn labels (after carefully making notes in my knitting journal and on Ravelry), and plan my upcoming projects and designs.

Reduce: I went through my beloved bin and cleaned out any and all yarn wrappers. Those that were repeats went straight into the garbage pile.

Those wrappers that were curious finds were compared against project information in my notebook and on Ravelry. If they weren't already recorded, I carefully put down all necessary info and then promptly threw them away. There were even a few wrappers that I had to look up online to figure out what the yarn actually looked like. They were identified, then thrown out.

Look at my garbage pile! "Melissa!" you exclaim, "There is yarn in your garbage pile!" Yes. There is. It is yarn that I a) hate and therefore will never use or b) have a plethora of so that I'm confident I will not need that extra 4 yards I've been holding onto for 2 years and haven't yet used.

All that trash was taking up useless space in my beloved bin!!! Think of all the yarn I can now put in its stead!

Reuse: Any yarn of which I have less than half a ball but enough to make some good striping goes into a quart-sized ziploc bag. All yarn of which I have more than half a ball goes back into the bin.


I'm limiting myself to one bag of this size because I figure that's a lot of striping. Besides, I usually buy all new yarn for projects anyway!


Reorganize: My bin is now re-packed, loose ends woven into balls, all balls, hanks or skeins gathered in sections by weight.

Ahhh...I feel so much more relaxed when things are all in order (I truly am a Penelope). Now, let the creative juices flow!

How do you organize you stash? How often? What do you do to keep the scraps from overtaking your stash? Please, enlighten me so that I may learn from your wisdom...