Voila...La Stash..ou peut-etre...La Cachette de Chelle?

Ok, a brief preamble.

First of all, if you are my husband and you want to avoid the mess and expense of an ugly divorce, hit the back button on the browser immediately and clear the cache. For that matter, if you are a non-knitter...refer to the above instructions directed towards my husband.

I've never had all my stash in one location before and I admit, it was a bit frightening.

(Larger Picture here)

I'm not sure how it got like this, I've been working hard all year to wear down my stash into a more manageable amount. (Say, no more than two or three times what I could reasonably expect to knit up in the course of my lifetime. Implicit in this calculation is the assumption that I, like both my grandmothers will live into my nineties.)

It's not as unorganized as it looks. Beginning from the top step is my collection of cottons, mostly mercerized...flowing down into cotton blends. Then there are a couple steps worth of merino wool, and a Noro and sock yarn step. That flows into the random wools and other feltables. Fluffies are next, Snowflake, fun furs and mohairs. Next is the summer stuff, excluding the aforementioned cottons, notice all the Easter Egg colours! At the foot of the stairs is a spill of chunky acrylic stuff...everything from Sirdar Denim Chunky and Kool Kidz to a heap of multi-hued Lion Boucle (stolen from Walmart at a buck a ball!)

Some good came from this humiliation. I was able to repackage everything into zippable plastic bags and store it according to fibre content.

Eighteen months ago, when I photographed my stash piece-meal (September 12, 2004 entry) I entered it all into a neat and tidy excel spreadsheet so that I wouldn't have to root through a half dozen Rubbermaid totes to figure out if I had 3 or 4 balls of the salmon mercerized cotton. Unfortunately, this allowed me to easily calculate the number of balls of yarn I had on hand. Four hundred and eighty six (486).

I've been working really had since then to wear this number down a bit.

I "donated" 75 small balls of feltable yarn to my lunchtime knitters.



I've been knitting from stash... a lot!

Well, all these efforts have paid off and I've brought the total number of skeins to...(drumroll) 507! (cough, not including single skeins, the unfeltable balls of yarn purchased for felting a couple years ago, odds and ends, etc...so probably another 35 balls ...cough)

Ok, maybe I could have exercised a bit more restraint with respect to the "acquisition" half of the

"current stash minus yarn used in projects plus LIMITED yarn purchases equals reduced stash"equation.

Oh well, at least Zibobbo will have good chuckle.