Bronx Girl Knits!

Ok, as promised I will share with you my adventure in organizing my stash. On Saturday I gathered up all my yarn from the various places it was hiding and laid it out on my living room floor:



Honestly it wasn't as bad as I thought. As I was saying to Tisha this morning, it can't be too bad since it still fits in one picture, right? The other thing I was happily surprised about is the quality of my yarn. When I first started knitting again 5 years ago, I didn't know anything about yarn. My grandmother used to buy yarn at Woolworth. The very first ball I bought was at Gotta Knit here in the city. I didn't like the people and the atmosphere so I didn't want to ask any questions. I bought a ball of nice yarn and a set of bamboo needles. Imagine my surprise when they rang it up and the yarn was $18. I still have this ball because of course it's too little to really do anything with (I also have my original swatch). I don't even know the fiber content because I was too ignorant to check it back then and now the ball band is in the middle of the yarn.

The next mistake I made was in the opposite direction. I bought a large lot of yarn and needles on e-bay. It was fairly crappy and as time has passed and I have learned about good quality yarns I have thought of this yarn sitting at the bottom of a rubbermaid container never to be touched. Surprisingly I seem to have worked through most of it. I was very pleased to see that most of the acrylic I have is pretty good and much of it was bought for specific purposes. Even Red Heart has it's uses.

I decided that I need to separate by fiber or use so I would be able to find yarn in my stash quickly rather than it being easier to just go buy new stuff. For example I had no idea how many colors of Paton's classic that I had. It is just shades or red and blue but still more than I thought. Lots of felting possibilities there.

So here are the drawers in my bedroom, the black ones are the new ones:



In the white ones I have all the yarn for specific upcoming projects and the bottom drawer is odd balls, of which I have far too many. What do you do with these orphans? Most of them are not enough for even a child's hat. I hate to see them go to waste but I don't have any ideas of uses for them. Any suggestions are appreciated.

The black drawers are broken up into sock yarn, cotton yarn and 2 drawers of wool.

My rubber maid container which I decided you really didn't need a picture of is filled with all my acrylics.

I straightened out the basket next to the chair I like to knit in. Now it only holds yarn for projects in progress or in the on deck circle:



That's Bob in the zip lock bag, the varigated is for the baby blanket I am currently working on, the Kureyon is for a Booga Bag and the blue chenille is for Ian's baby blanket which I will be expanding into a more appropriate size for him since he loves it so much.

All in all my stash reorganization project was a great success!

Just don't ask me about the sockapalooza sock ok....