23 January 2014

The Yarn Problem


Yarn is beautiful (well, most of it, anyway), I'm sure you'll agree. So many colours, so many textures. It's eye candy.

The problem is, and I'm sure you'll agree too, just like with candy, you can't really get enough of it. Your stash then grows out of all reasonable proportions and starts flooding your abode, like the prettiest, most colourful wave there ever was. It grows so much that it needs to be capitalised: the Stash. And when capitalisation occurs, chaos soon ensues. The Stash becomes alive. It controls you rather than you It. Whenever you come back from the shop with a new addition or whenever you need the one ball that's hiding at the bottom of the pile, the Stash has to be roused from its sleep. And it never takes it very well. It rolls over, tumbles down, coughs and splutters or unleashes the dreaded Yarn Monster.

Soon, your once carefully arranged Stash ends up like this:

This is not the worst mine's ended up by far, but it's messy enough.

The solution? Organization. Reorganization, even. On a constant basis. So, the other day, as I had made some free time, I proceeded to reorganize my Stash. I cleared all three shelves of the yarn balls, project baskets and sewing tins and laid out the yarn on the floor, roughly by colour. IT looked so scrumptious in its rainbow arrangement, that I couldn't help take quite a few pictures, one of which you have seen at the top of this post. I also got some help - of sorts - while I was proceeding:


The Cat and the Stash, a long-standing love story. Not one that I always look too kindly upon, but I have to say, this one time, there was no drama.

So once everything was out on the floor, it was time to put everything back in. By then, I'd had an idea. You may have noticed the empty shoe rack in the picture above. Well, said shoe rack has been sitting there, more or less empty, since we moved in three months ago. So why not use it to store my WIPs and non-yarn material? That would free one shelf on the standing shelving unit. A whole shelf. Luxury!

Shoe rack first, then:

And once the shoe rack was sorted, it was time to tackle the Stash. After a quick decision to use the newly freed shelf for black, white and neutral yarn, I proceeded to the task. After much more or less careful and gentle prodding and pulling, this is what I ended up with:

Not perfect by a long shot, but much better anyway. My next ventures will be to get some transparent dividers/mini shelving to maximise the space offered by the shelving unit, and to get a yarn winder in order to standardise the shape of my skeins a bit more. The ultimate goal would be to arrange my yarn like this, a truly GENIUS idea, but unfortunately this is not an option at the moment. One step at a time.

What about you? How do you store your yarn?

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