the stash

Some little snippets of reality that I’ve come to face:

1. Vacation is almost over.  By the time you read this, I’ll be getting ready to go work.
2. My stash is huge, at least by my standards.
3. There was a whole lot of it not in Ravelry.
4. Sometimes I take pictures of stuff, blog about it and then not put it in Ravelry.  I don’t know why.
5. Some days, I have the attention span of a small child who’s been eating candy.
6. I was really, really lazy during vacation.
7. I totally deserved #6 because I work my flippin’ ass off.
8. I remain one of the world’s Great Procrastinators.
9. When faced with a deadline (self imposed and otherwise), I can accomplish a whole lot.
10. I can’t organize after 7 pm.  Any attempt to do so will inevitably result in wandering from pile of crap to pile of crap, poking at a bit and then saying “fuck it”.
    

Needless to say my put the stash in Ravelry project, with my self-imposed deadline of the end of vacation – not done.  But a significant part of it is done – a partial success.  I’ve got all of the yarn that’s in my hutch in there, along with all of what I gathered up from various spots around my apartment.  I made room for more.  I organized a lot.  I gathered up scraps for donation.  I still need to do my fiber stash, make another pass through to see what remnants are around and go through my project bags to organize stuff.  The bookshelf – still a disaster — see #10.

The revised deadline – this week.  I’m on a roll and have free evenings in front of me.  Onward!

Wish me luck on the re-entry to work.

“Sock yarn doesn’t count as stash.”

“Its just one little skein.”

“I’ll knit this right up into ____.”

How many times have I uttered those words?  As many times as there are skeins above, and then some.

That pile is my sock, lace weight and single/two skein project yarns.  All those little purchases amount to a huge quantity of yarn.  And no, I didn’t count.  Having it all out was enough.

All of that is now in Ravelry.  Its also all put away in the top shelf of my built in hutch/yarn cabinet.  It was a full afternoon of work.  There was a lot of it to put in Ravelry.

I’m hoping to get through the next 2 shelves today, in between baking for turkey day.  They contain bigger quantities of yarn, much of which is already in Ravelry.

I’m already more organized – after clearing out that first shelf and going through it, I went hunting through the shelf from hell and my various nooks and crannies for more lace and sock yarn and small quantities of stuff.  A lot of the random is put away.

No doubt at the end of this project, I’ll be more organized.  I may also be on a yarn diet.

Maybe…

I’m gonna do it – I’m spending part of this vacation organizing the stash and putting it ALL in Ravelry.  Every last bit.  I’ve wanted to do this for ages but the final push really came when I decided I can’t take this anymore:This is the bookshelf in my office/Painted Sheep World Headquarters.  A more appropriate title would be Dumping Ground for All Things Fiber.  The bottom shelf and a half are relatively organized, containing Painted Sheep records and some storage for office supplies.  Relative being key here – in the interest of full disclosure, exactly none of this year’s business records are in the neat, well organized files there.  Instead, they’re in 2 piles elsewhere in my office.  The further up you go, the more chaotic it gets.  The middle shelf has a project bag with an actual WIP, a magazine that should have been recycled months ago and a few other pieces of random crap.  The monstrosity that is the top two shelves is a mix of Painted Sheep stuff (patterns – the only organized thing there – are on the left in the notebooks), empty/half empty project bags, finished projects like my nephew’s hat,mittens and scarf, recent and not so recent yarn purchases, fiber, leftover yarn, needles, etc, etc, etc.  Even poor Julia is stuffed into a corner up there.  As if it weren’t bad enough, every few days a bunch of random crap will just fall off.  Its like the bookshelf is belching.  I’ve mistakenly taken this as a sign that it can now fit even more and continued to stuff crap up there.  And again, in the interest of full disclosure – the bookshelf looked very much the same when it was in my old house.  I hated it then.  Instead of cleaning it out, I packed it up, moved it all and basically reassembled the mess in my apartment.

So why am I showing you this and confessing my fibery sin?  Accountability.  In order to clean this mess up, I need to go through the rest of the stash, sort it, clean out the leftovers that need to be donated to charity and re-organize.  In the process, I’ll put everything else into Ravelry.  Once that’s done, I can clean out this mess and store things properly.  My ultimate goal – to show you a picture of a newly organized bookshelf by this time next week.

With that, I’m off.  Later today, I’m setting up my photo studio on a folding table in the dining room and getting ready to start tomorrow morning.  I can’t wait to get organized – and have my hands in all of my yarn and fiber.