The stash

The start of a new year is often the time people start new big projects, and I make no exception to that. I tend not to make any big official promises, but I do usually do some inventories of things that I hoard - tea, yarn, cosmetics...

So, the crazy person that I am, I wanted to see how much yarn I actually have in my stash even though I was scared that the end result would be horrific. It was and it wasn't as bad as I was afraid it would be. I had less yarn (in terms of weight) that my worst-case-scenario-thought was, but then I took it a step further and made a rough estimate on how much money was attatched to my stash. That almost made me faint.

Result: almost 6,7kg of yarn which cost me around 276€.

And I wasn't able to count the whole worth of the stash (probably a good thing), since some of the yarn is actually old enough that it's not in production anymore and I can't remember what one skein of it had cost me.

But it really was a good thing that I did the inventory. First off, looking at the list of yarn, and how much I have, helps me to cut back on buying any more yarn before I've spent some of the old out of the way. I do need to figure out some sort of a deal with myself on how much yarn I need to spend before getting anything new, but at least I haven't bought anything new since doing the inventory.

The second "good" thing was that it kicked me into storing them with more care. Because I found insects in there. Nothing big, not a hellish invasion, but still. And since there is quite a lot of money invested in the stash, it would really be stupid not to take better care of it.

Knitted ombre beanie, made with
Novita 7brothers yarn from the stash

Before, I had the skeins in an Ikea box (around 32cm x 37cm x 32cm) just mish-mashed and bundled up, with the box overflowing. Because of the small invasion in the stash, I bagged the yarns so that the same yarns (for example all of my Novita 7brothers-yarn) was in the same airtight bags and threw as much of the bags in the freezer as I could fit for one week. After a week I switched the bags to unfreezed ones.

From now on the yarn will stay in those bags and any new yarn will be stored in bags as well
. In case some hardcore insects survive, they won't be able to spread to other bags and ruin more than one bag of yarn and more than likely any new yarn I buy won't be infested. I might also consider freezing all new yarn before I mix them up with my existing stash.

For the preemie babies

Ideally I think it would be a good thing to have a stash that weighs less than 3kg, so that's what I'll be aiming for. I don't have any goal as to when my stash should reach this goal, but a goal is still a goal. I might also add this as a permanent part of my knitting/handicrafts updates in the form of a question dreaded by most women: "How's the diet?"

So, how's the diet? Last week the situation was just a bit over 100g on the plus side because of the yarn I bought before my inventory project. But then this week came and I slipped up a bit. At the start of the week I heard about small crochet toys for preemie babies that help them lay off the tubes and wires that hook them up on essential, helpful machinery and the slip-up started by getting a new crochet hook from Lankaidea-yarnstore. It felt silly to just buy a crochet hook, so naturally I looked for some yarn too (for the toys, but still), and I ended up buying three balls of Schachenmayr Catania cotton yarn. Lovely colours and just 150g all together, but still.

I also did my first online purchases, because I have been wanting to knit a shawl for myself for a while now and wanting to use some less-basic yarn for it. So first I bought my first not-for-free pattern on Ravelry and also some yarn from an online shop (they do have a physical yarnstore, too, but it's in Jyväskylä). I have been very sceptical about buying yarn online so far, because I'm really more of a need-to-touch-before-I-buy-type of a yarn shopper. But the yarn I bought is 100% superwash merino, so I think I'm quite safe with that.

So far I've used stash-yarn for a pair of socks and a beanie hat, which took a total of about 150g of yarn, and I've also almost used up the Catania cotton yarn (I think I have about 15g left) so that leaves my yarn diet situation to around 400g on the plus side.