The Great Personal Destash Challenge of 2015

There comes a time in (nearly) every crafter's life when they have to admit they have a problem. Mine time came about a week ago.

I've been wanting to use up some of my yarn stash and do some work with my rigid heddle loom but was short on inspiration.  So when someone mentioned Deborah Jarchow's class, Simply Stunning Scarves, on Craftsy, I signed up right away. I promised myself that I would  not buy any new yarns to do the class projects - surely I had enough already that I could easily find what was needed.

Wrong!  I had yarn stashed all over my studio, in closets, under tables - any place you could hide something, I had squirreled away a little (or a lot of) yarn.  I did find some lovely vintage handspun from Switzerland, and made the first scarf in the class (more on that at the end of this entry).  BTW - I highly recommend this class to rigid heddle beginners. 

When it came time to start the second scarf, I started the whole frustrating process of searching high and low again.  And quickly got fed up.  The result was that I collected my nine tubs (!) of yarn and all the bags and baskets hidden around the house and dumped them in the middle of my living room floor.

Here I have to confess three things:

1) this is after a major destash just last month.  I've already gone through my yarns and donated several cartons to my weaving class.  This is just the stuff I wasn't ready to part with.

2) this isn't all of it.  There are at least four or five different yarns I'm certain I still have hidden somewhere in the house - probably several skeins of each. 

3) this really isn't all of it.  I've deliberately excluded my sock yarn collection, my unspun fibers, and my handspun.  And the cones of yarn for machine knitting. Those are all problems for another time.

Phew, glad I got that off my chest.

So I thought I'd spend an hour or so sorting into neat little groups by texture.  I've already tried sorting by color and then by fiber content - neither method worked for me.  Six hours later, I had this:

In the process, I found half a dozen projects I've started in the last few years and lost track of.  They're now in buckets and baskets (about 9:00 in this photo) where they will remind me that they need attention. What you don't see here is the huge bag of yarn I culled out to donate to my weaving class.

Anyway, I put all the yarns tidily in their respective tubs, and was ready to get back to the business of weaving.  While sorting, I chose the yarn for my next scarf project, and actually got the loom warped.  Then decided I should probably find the yarn for the third scarf while I had all the tubs out.  And realized that I still had to go through every single tub to find what I wanted.

I bit the bullet, and have spent all of my spare time this past week updating my stash on Ravelry.  Every skein of yarn I own (with the exceptions confessed above) is now listed on my stash page with a photo.  This comprises 592.5 skeins of 221 different varieties or colorways of yarns weighing just over 105 pounds.  Egad!   This afternoon I finally finished and now have my tubs neatly put away on top of the bookshelves in my studio like so:

Each tub is labeled with the type or purpose of the yarn, and the date it was last sorted through.  Wonder if I'll be able to maintain this?








So here's the challenge part of this post.   I have promised myself that I will not buy any new yarn for the next six months.  Ok, so I originally promised myself no new yarn for a year, but who am I kidding?  I think I can make it for six months.  Or maybe three.  In the meantime, I will try to use up at least a quarter of the stash. That's 25 pounds of yarn in six months.  This could be either by finishing projects of my own, or sharing with one of my sisters, who has just begun her transformation to the darkside.  (She ordered her loomette last week  and I'm seeing a rigid heddle loom in her future,  mwa-ha-ha.)

To shame myself into completing some projects I started and set aside, here's what I've already committed to finishing:

A triangle shawl.  I finished the weaving part a couple of weeks ago but still need to finish the long edge and add the fringe.

The unused yarn for this project is not included in my stash.  Make that 106 pounds.

Another triangle shawl.  This is made with Lion Brand Homespun, which I will never, ever use again.  Any ends that aren't tied off unravel spontaneously.  Yuck.  I'll be looking for a crochet edging pattern to finish this one off.

A ribbed keyhole scarf using a pattern found on Ravelry. 

And a second scarf using the same pattern and chunky yarn.  How I came to start the same pattern twice, I have no clue.

The Bella Lana Reversible Cable Scarf, another pattern found on Ravelry.

 I’ve wanted to learn to knit cables for ages. I started and re-started this scarf half a dozen times before I put it on the shelf ‘temporarily.’ Unfortunately I think I gave away the other skein of yarn I had reserved for this scarf in my destash of February 2015. Guess I’ll be starting it again in a different yarn because I still do want to conquer cables.

The "Crammed and Spaced" scarf currently on my rigid heddle loom. 

















And a few projects waiting in the wings:





Planning to use this fun eyelash yarn on my Spriggs adjustable rectangle loom.  I actually started it a couple of years ago but made a mistake right at the beginning that I discovered after  weaving about 15 rounds.  Couldn't figure out how to fix without frogging the whole thing.  Which I finally did last week.

I was given this bag of gorgeous Chinese red yarn and discovered last week that a warp had already been cut from some of it. Looks to be about right for the length and width of a scarf, so I'll do this as a project in weaving class. Thinking about whether to just do a simple tabby or if it wants a twill tie-up.

I took a class in December 2013 on making Felfs - got as far as knitting my test swatch and dropped the ball. Will have to start over testing because I have no clue what happened to my first test and notes…

I think one skein should be enough to make one pair but I bought a second skein just to be safe.

And just to prove that I can actually finish something I start:

This is the open weave felted scarf from the Deborah Jarchow class I mentioned earlier.  I warped it on a Wednesday night and had it felted by Saturday night.  Note - the color looks different in each of the photos - this is due to my poor photography and not changes to the yarn.  The photo of the finished scarf is closest to the actual color of the yarn. 

This is the tag from the yarn I used.  It's part of the stash I was given when I bought my Gilmore loom from an estate.  Despite being handspun, it worked beautifully for both warp and weft and I didn't have a single break.

Project on the loom.  The purple strips are scrap-booking paper cut to 1" widths used for spacers.

The scarf after twisting and knotting the fringe, but before felting.

And (tada!) the scarf after felting. Since my washer is front-loading, it can't be used for felting.  I used a little countertop washer and checked the scarf every 2-3 minutes.  It took 21 minutes to reach this point.