Stash OCD: A Beautiful Thing

I confess to being a little bit quirky about organizational issues.  I like to keep my spices and cds in alphabetical order.  It's all a woman with four children can do to keep control of the world around her — or at least of her house.

But my yarn has been something of a disaster for quite some time.  It was stashed in cubbies in my studio, it was in trash can sized ziploc bags in the closet, there were two hollow tables in our living room that were full of yarn.  Basket stand in my daughter's room?  Check.  Full of yarn.  Sideboard in the dining room?  Bought for the sole purpose of storing yarn.  And then there were the onesies and twosies — bags, a few baskets, even a crystal bowl with yarn decoratively placed.

That all changed when I saw Billie's post on Ravelry.  For those of you who aren't on Ravelry, Billie suggested organizing all of one's stash yarn in one place, creating a local yarn store of your own, in your own home, to shop from when you wanted to take on a new project. 

This was something of an epiphany for me.  My randomly located stash was overwhelming me a little bit.  I decided to try Billie's approach.

It took about a week of working while watching TV with the kids, but I'm done.  My yarn now owns most of the cubbies in the yarn closet in my studio.  And I have a neatly photographed and precisely catalogued stash.  Really.  You can go and see it here.  I am so pleased with it that I like to keep going and looking at it over and over.

I've already had a stash shopping success when I discovered that the yarn that Mary-Heather Cogar's Simple Things Shawlette was written for — Pagewood Sock — existed not one, but two places in my stash.  And I have many other suitable choices.  I've been wanting to knit this pattern — seemed like a good late summer knit to wear in the fall — but hadn't made it to my LYS.  Now, thanks to Billie's in-house yarn store concept, voila!  I have plenty of choices, including this lovely yarn.

Pretty neat, isn't it?  Thanks Billie, for a great idea.  Despite the weekend of obsessive stash organization and cataloging and a little time spent getting everything into Ravelry, or perhaps because of it, I suddenly feel like a highly organized knitter who can accomplish anything!