Like many knitters, I have way more yarn than I need. In fact, due to my borderline obsessive habit of quantifying my yarn stash and usage, I can tell you for a fact that if I knit all my yarn without buying any more, it would be 18 months before I ran out of yarn.
And hey, I'm lucky! There are a lot of knitters out there who have reached SABLE: Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy, meaning that even if they stopped buying yarn now, they would be able to knit their entire lives without using up all their yarn stash.
Every knitter's yarn stash gets out of hand, though, even if you don't quite reach SABLE proportions, you may be looking at your stash and thinking about setting some goals for the new year. It's called "going cold sheep," like going cold turkey, except instead of quitting smoking, you're quitting buying yarn.
Yarn shops hate it, because every person who goes cold sheep is a customer that store loses (at least for a little while). And yarn stores are having a tough time of it. But hey, you have to think of yourself first. Your pocket book and your storage bins have to come first.
The first step to cold sheeping is to take a fearless inventory of your yarn stash. This will seem daunting, which is good! The more daunting it seems, the more motivation you will get to keep up your cold sheeping. And nothing gives you a feeling of abundance like digging out all of your yarn and really looking at how much you have.
I recommend using Ravelry's many features for figuring out what to do with a particular yarn. Look up that yarn in Ravelry's database, then click to see the recommended patterns, and the projects that other people have done with it. You can sort Recommended Patterns by type, so that you can only see hats, or only sweaters. It's a great way to find a use for those single skeins.
Good luck, and be strong! Think about how much space you will free up... to buy more yarn! (Later.)
Image courtesy Flickr/LornaWatt
0 comments