This month I started cleaning my craft room, and one thing has come to my attention:
I could knit for YEARS with the supply of yarn that I have right now.
Between sweaters to be unraveled, commercial yarn, and hand-me-down mystery yarn from friends and family, it’s likely that I would not need any more yarn for the next ten years. Yet I still have that craving the creeps into my fingers. It helps not to see new yarn, not to get close to it or feel it. If I touch it, it’s so much harder to say no. After all, it’s just one skein…come on, just a little hit. You know you want it…
The crafter’s stashing habit is a well-known animal. I believe the phrase “She who dies with the most yarn wins!” sums it up nicely. (Not to exclude blokes who knit…it’s just a saying.) It’s no wonder so many people are swapping and destashing these days. With so many delicious yarns available to us (oh internet, how you taunt me), how can we not answer their siren call?
Enter the yarn diet. Everyone who goes on a yarn diet does it a little differently. Mine has four simple rules.
- No net gains in the stash are allowed. Before I can buy new yarn, I must sell yarn. Alternatively, I can swap one yarn for another.
- Yarn you won’t use will be sold or swapped. I have some yarns that were given to me that I just don’t like. Most of these are colors or fibers I will never use. Time to send them to a better home; to facilitate this, I put low prices on them.
- Finish a UFO before you start a new project. This has two purposes. Once I finish a project it comes out of the craft room yarn area and frees up space. Also, once finished I know if I have any leftover yarn to destash.
- Patterns for your yarn, not yarn for your patterns. My Ravelry queue is 4 pages long. There are also patterns I have not queued available to work from. Surely, with all those resources, I can find an appropriate pattern to make something with the yarn already in my stash. Narrow it down by weight and yardage and find yourself a good pattern!
There is one exception to this diet: I occasionally do commission work, for which I must buy yarn. However, this yarn doesn’t really get stashed, so I don’t think it counts.
Starting today, I’ll be blogging my progress on this attempted diet. Now, if only I could do something similar to use up all of my fabric!
Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian “Nuri” Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
