Day 3: Tidy mind, tidy stitches.
Tidy mind, tidy stitches.
How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised?
Well now isn’t that the question. If you look at this:
You might thing oh not bad, the bins are even sorted, Top – left overs, acrylics, and other washables. Middle, lace and sock weight, bottom worsted and bulky.
If pretend there isn’t yarn all over the living room and in other parts of the bed room, I could even pretend to have visual organization system. Its not like I have bags of wayward balls or anything…
But I know where most of my yarn is, yes there are 3 skeins of Lace I haven’t seen since I opened the package they came in, but they are around, somewhere. Over there.
But honestly my real organization isn’t there its here.
My knitting spreadsheet. I’m an analyst, I spend all day in Excel, yet I could not think of any other place where I would want to keep my information organized.
My first tab, Yarn – catalogs my yarn, the color, brand and yardage, to the best of my ability. There are somethings that I have had so long and lost the tag so long ago I can only guess. Brown lace weight, worsted that might be Cascade 220, Ella Rae, Lion Brand Wool ease or some thing else entirely.
The second tab is for new yarn, to compare my output and intake. Not that the tab has influenced me yet but I very quickly went from almost no yarn, to enough to knit a house cozy.
With the yarn sheet I know it the number of skeins I have (168) , yardage (currently my stash is resting at 42,798 yards), what is planned for it if anything, and what is on my needles.
I find a spreadsheet easy and intuitive, and simple to tailor to my needs. I can check the yardage on a yarn I have, when looking up a project to gauge if I have the right yarn, or need to make a change.
I know what projects I started when to get a better idea on how much I knit throughout the year. March seems to be a bad knitting month, but a good one for other crafts. Did I mention I keep track of beading and Clay work there too?
I track my spending, hence the knowledge that I needed a yarn diet in January. I have ideas for projects and their matching yarns, I know how much Yarn I have been using and what kind of dent I am making in the 42K. Sometimes it helps with the guilt of buying more.
Even with the yarn there, there, there, and a bit over there, I can know in a glance what I have, and if that red cashmere wool blend is enough for a shrug without having to hunt down the ball and pray the band hasn’t wandered off. I will know that yes, you do have 2 skeins of that purple, you just have to find the other one. And alas you did use the last of that yarn in that other project.
Needles on the other hand…
We can talk about that later right?
