Counting my Stash
I've spent a lovely hour or so this morning (whilst I was eating my breakfast toast and butter, and drinking my morning cup of tea) updating my Stash Spreadsheet to reflect what I've recently bought, sold or swapped. I have to keep my Stash on an Inventory Spreadsheet or I would lose track of everything that I had in it. I've kept a Stash Inventory on an Excel spreadsheet for around eight years because at one time my stash was enormous....... okay, it still is enormous, but it's getting a bit more under control now. I have all the yarns I want to keep and knit projects with on one sheet and all the stuff I want to get rid of on another, categorised by spinner, quality, quantity and colour. I have the cost of the yarns too, which is quite a scary number of £££s when it's all added together. I have a grand total of 529 ‘lots' of yarn for projects on my "I want to keep this yarn and knit it someday" sheet, which is rather a lot to say the least. I said in a moment of madness to John the Brit that I'd like to whittle down my existing stash so that it could all be stored in one of the drawers under the bed, two large Ikea storage tubs which are currently in the boys' playroom, and a large box in the wardrobe of the guest room (sounds posh that doesn't it??
Here is a piccie of my stash sort out in January 2006 ----



Some of these ‘lots' of yarn are one ball in some instances, a bag of yarn for multiple projects in others, or maybe a cone of 4 ply for whizzing up on the knitting machine, so it's hard to quantify exactly how many actual projects I have stored away for a rainy day. And this, dear readers, is exactly why I decided to join the Summer Stashalong until September 30th. I rather liked Cheryl's idea for a Stash Giveaway that I read about on her blog, and I have recently given a couple of large sacksful of yarn away to other people who knit for charity of some description. Around two years ago, Jon of Colorado Knits gave me a much needed kick up the proverbial bum to sell some of stash on eBay, and I've managed to swap stash for cash this way ever since.

I've recently sold some of my yarns on the Angel Yarns forum, which I mentioned in an earlier posting, and the idea was to sell some yarns and then use the money that I generated to buy a Kim Hargreaves knitting kit for myself. Although I converted enough stash into cash to be able to buy a kit, I haven't bought one as yet...... trouble is that once I start destashing, I find it difficult to spend that money again on yarns!!

My sock yarn stash hasn't ever been inventoried though - is that a word?? - I just keep it in three large boxes in the guest wardrobe and in the boys' playroom:







I just know that I have a fair old bit of sock yarn going on in those boxes.....

An edited note: I've been struggling with blogger today as it wouldn't let me add any pictures at all to this posting; but I managed to find a sneaky way of doing it and eventually beat Blogger into submission with a bit of lateral thinking *wink*