The unloved yarn

Do you have an outcast in your stash?
The yarn that you just can't seem to find that perfect project for?
The yarn that you can never get the right gauge with?
The yarn that you must have been crazy to purchase?
The yarn that has been frogged so many times it has that funny halo?

Oh, surely I'm not the only one!

This is Regia Hand-dye Effect, my outcast yarn.  It is fingering weight 70% wool (scratchy wool...), 25% nylon, and 5% acrylic, so I was already destined not to like it because I strongly dislike most yarn with that much nylon and acrylic content.

It also has this odd thread plyed into it (to balance? to make it hold together? to make it fancy?), which drives me crazy.  At the time I probably bought it for the colors, perhaps I was mildly intoxicated as well, who knows?

It has almost been three separate pairs of socks and a shawl, and each time frogged violently.  I've been gradually trying to force myself  to do something else with it.  Seeing Lisa magically turn her skein of this stuff into the most gorgeous Wingspan certainly gave me courage. 

So now every last yard will become a shawl (Azzu's Shawl), which will not be immediately frogged, if it's the last thing I do!

Now come on, I can't be the only one with problematic yarn

                                           do tell. 

Hiding the stash (and making it pretty)

I've been organizing everything in my room at my parent's house in the desperate hope that it will make me more prepared for the big move in August.  Today I focused on stash storage, because it is obviously vastly important that the stash be organized, protected from moths, and be attractively displayed.

This morning, this is how the stash looked:

The plastic bags.  The heaping.  The horror!  Shame on me, I'm not sure if I am qualified to have a stash after this.

In addition to saving large quantities of yarn, I have also been quietly amassing shoe boxes.  I've always felt badly about throwing them away because they are such a great shape and made of a fairly sturdy material.  So, they usually end up hibernating under my bed for a couple of years.

In a burst of inspiration, I pulled out these shoe boxes and some old fabric bound for Goodwill.  Then I decided to cover the boxes in fabric and use them to help organize my stash!

 I assembled all of the necessary crafty materials (not pictured here: awesome moving 3D dinosaur ruler):

A couple of hours of diligent work (and $0) later and look what I came up with:

 I happily arranged my handspun in this box, and the rest of the stash in the rest of the boxes.

Are you ready for the before and after comparison?  Here we go!

Overall I'm very happy with this project.  I have a little bit of a situation going on up there still, but that just means I need to cast on some exciting new projects very soon.  At the very least, I've removed the need for Stop and Shop bags for the time being.

Also, to those of you who have commented on how small my stash is, remember that I have two stored in different states.

Any ideas on how to attractively and neatly organize the stash?  I'd love to hear them!

Exploring the stash

After reading Truly Myrtle's post on "stash grooming", I was inspired to reevaluate my own stash.  I actually have two stashes as many college students do, one at my parent's house and one at college.  Inevitably, I often forget what I have in my home stash.

So, this morning I broke out my stash, organized it, and entered it all onto Ravelry, and it felt great!

Here it all is (not counting a bag I'll mention later):

I've got a healthy mix of handspun, luxury, self dyed, and acrylics (that people always seem to gift me).

I remembered how much I loved to dyed yarn a couple of years ago.  I've had some pretty experiments and some not so pretty experiments.  I'm definitely going to make time to dye some more this summer.  I especially want to try dyeing with tea again (the brown skein below).

Some wonderful family friends gifted me some amazing new yarns that I've never tried knitting with before.  The first two are Cascade Sierra (cotton/wool blend) and the third one is Manos Silk Blend.  Didn't they pick out the best colors?

Lastly I dug through my undyed base yarn bag and I have a lot of yarn to work with.  I have a skein of Knit Picks Bare DK, 6 skeins of Cascade 220, and 5 skeins of Cascade 220 Superwash.  This was excellent news because Lisa and I have been planning a yarn dyeing party this summer, we are going to have a blast!

I've always been proud of being able to maintain my stash at a reasonable size, this summer I'm planning on downsizing it a lot with some great new projects.

Have any exciting stash plans?

QR Code Tutorial

By popular request, I'm very excited to show you all my method of organizing using QR codes.  It is really simple and, seriously, so much fun!  Well, fun for me, the nerdy scientist.

Step 1 - Generate your QR code:

I'm sure that there are numerous places on the internet where you can generate the codes, but I'm fond of the Kaywa QR code generator because it is free and not cluttered.  It appears as though you can program these to either give you text (my method) or link to the Ravelry stash page where you might have information about the yarn stored.

I just typed in the text I wanted to be stored in the code, just some general information about the handspun that I might want to remember.

So, then the program generates the code, which I then saved to my computer and then printed (I tried to print them pretty small so that they would fit onto tags.

This time I made little tags out of some old flashcards:

Step 2: Read your code:

In order to scan these codes, you will most likely have to download some kind of QR reader program.  Androids might have it preloaded, but I'm not sure, someone please let me know if you find out.  For the iPhone, you have to download one.  I have Scan for iOS, which is free.

So, then you read the code and it will display the text you programmed in:

I'm having a lot of fun labeling my handspun stash, it was starting to get out of control and needed some taming. 

I hope that was enough information for you to be able to make your own QR codes!

***A few months after I first wrote this post, Sava from Sava Stitch made this idea her own by securing the tags in a much more efficient way.

Organizing Stash!

For a while now I have been struggling to come up with a good system of organizing my unlabeled stash yarns, especially for handspun.  I do keep my Ravelry page fairly up to date, but I really wanted a simple, but fun system for tagging my handspun.

This is what I came up with:

I'm sure many of you have seen QR codes before, they are easy to generate and people often use them to link to websites from advertisements.  Basically, the image stores information kind of like a barcode, which can be scanned using a smartphone camera. 

Me being the nerdy person I am, decided that this would be an awesome method of tagging my handspun!  So, if I quickly want to remind myself of the fiber content or yardage of a particular skein of handspun, all I have to do is quickly scan the code with my phone.

Some of you might be asking, why not just make cute little handwritten tags?  To which I respond, this is way more fun and I like the neatness of having everything barcoded like this. 

I've just started figuring out how I want the tags to look.  If I like the system enough, I might also tag some stashed skeins for which I have lost the packaging. Also, next batch I print are going to be smaller.  I'm also planning to use these to label my boxes when I move next month!

Do you have any awesome organization tools that you love?

Also, I wanted to thank all of you who kindly sympathized with me on the subject of part of Tuesday's post. To be honest, I'm still pretty shocked.