It’s no surprise, especially after the photographic proof in my last post, that I have numerous one-off skeins.  Many are from when I first started cultivating my stash.  Let’s be honest, though – I’ve accumulated single skeins of yarn throughout my knitting lifespan.

It’s Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival weekend.  So what does that usually mean for me?  An excessive amount of yarn and fiber purchasing.  Though it’s true that I seriously limit my craft-spending throughout the year, I do tend to go a bit overboard when I’m at festivals and retreats.

To counterbalance the overwhelming feeling of needing to purchase every beautiful skein of yarn and braid of fiber – I decided that the couple weeks before the festival would be a great time to go through and reorganize my stash.  What better way to remind myself that I already have plenty of amazing yarn and fiber?  Plus, I had let things get a bit out of hand in the craft room and was no longer certain what had and hadn’t been entered into Ravelry.

I started with yarn – I pulled out and sorted all of it by weight.  My yarn stash had originally been sorted this way, but over time a few added bins had entered into the mix and not necessarily following this guideline.

M decided she should give some perspective, so you can clearly see just how much yarn this is 😉

Once everything was sorted and it thoroughly sunk in just how much there is…. I started the fun and exciting job of confirming my stash listed in Ravelry.

I’m not going to lie this took forever.  This maybe might be why I didn’t finish this step for my next two sections of stash….

Next up – handspan yarn.  I definitely hadn’t realized how much of my handspun I haven’t knit up yet.  I usually am immediately inspired once it’s finished to find a project to knit.  However, I think once I started spinning and completing handspun projects more quickly, my knitting wasn’t able to keep up!  I also didn’t realize how many skeins I hadn’t entered into Ravelry…. not even the fiber prior to spinning.  This was a bit discouraging and I found myself placing these mystery skeins to the side as I will have to do some research to determine the fiber content.

Finally, I took out and sorted all of my fiber.  This included two Jacob fleeces (one of them I promise I have started spinning!) as well as samples I received in fiber boxes and my batt carding stash.  This is where I definitely still have an entire bin to catalog, but at least it has been isolated so that I don’t end up spinning it assuming it’s in Ravelry and somehow losing all the information in the process!

So now the question is – how good was I at Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival earlier today?  You’d think that after seeing all of my stash spread out in all it’s glory across my craft room floor I would definitely have kept myself in check?  Right?!

That would probably have been the case if it hadn’t been for M – the other spinner and new knitter in the house who has decided she needs a stash too…… (plus the tons of other goodies we picked up!)