Organizing the stash

Here is where I reveal my embarrassingly organized side. Trust me, my stash may be organized but the rest of my office is a mess.

A couple of factors came together — including Annette Petavy’s recent article in Crochetme — to inspire me to sort and catalog my yarn stash and the patterns I’m interested in making.

Petavy suggests cataloging by colour, and that made a lot of sense given the way I tend to design and the number of one-off skeins I have. This photo shows my stash, all exciting and ready for a project. It’s kept in an Ikea Billy bookcase with cabinet doors. We had some extra Billy glass shelves and cd-storage insert so I used those to make it easier to see what I’ve got.

I also have a catalog of my yarns and patterns. Embarrassing, but so useful. I originally started keeping this list to make fabric care tags for gifts. Then a friend mentioned cataloging her yarn in order to figure out what project she could start next. A brilliant way to figure out how to match up my list of pattern ideas with my yarn stash…

I have two spreadsheets in Word. The yarn spreadsheet lists the gauge, content, yardage per skein, and number of skeins I have for each colour. For the pattern spreadsheet, I look up the suggested yarn online, and record the gauge, content, and yardage required for the project.

This system is working out really well so far.