Dyet Yarns: reuse, recycle, reinvent!

Today I photographed all of the additional yarn I have gotten since my last adventure with my Ravelry stash. (I’m CandyCornStudios on Ravelry, in case you were wondering.) WOW. Most of this is stuff I picked up from my mother. Much of it is unlabeled, which is kind of a pain. However, I’m putting in the work now to weight and measure it so that I can use it. Otherwise it will end up sitting in my stash indefinitely because I don’t know if there’s enough there for the project I want to do!

To me, Ravelry is a great tool. I can log on and see my entire stash without having to paw through drawers and space bags and bins to find out what I have. I can see yardage and weight at a glance. I can make notes about the yarn. It’s the perfect way to see how many yards of a certain yarn I have, then go search for a project that fits the yarn.

If you’re a fiber artist and you’re not on Ravelry, you probably should be. As an organizational, motivational, and social networking tool it is unrivaled (for fiber artists, anyway). The first step for my yarn diet is to inventory what yarn I have. After all, you don’t know how much weight you’ve lost unless you weigh yourself at the beginning of the diet, right? So today I updated my stash.

I found out 3 things:

1. I have a fairly minimal number of UFOs. 5 is minimal. Yes, it is. Shut up.
2. Large amounts of yarn on cones are hard to weigh to determine yardage when you can’t remove the cone!
3. I have way too many small remnant balls.

Most of the unlabeled stuff is hand-me-down yarn from family and friends, so I have no idea what the content is. I guess I can burn swatches to find out, but for less than 50g it just doesn’t seem worth it. Maybe I’ll do some charity squares with it. Some of the yarn (the cones, mostly) is labeled for content but nothing else, so I have no idea of yardage. I’m probably going to ply it and possibly dye it before use/sale anyway, so I guess that’s not terribly important.

Hooray for organized stash!

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian “Nuri” Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: diet, labels, mystery, Organization, Ravelry, stash, yarn