Yikes.

I got a new camera for Christmas this year. Nothing fancy - in fact, less fancy even than the point and shoot my husband and I have been fighting over sharing, even. But it's wee, and easy, and lacking my least favorite feature of the other - the power button is no longer in the spot my finger thinks should be the shutter button. Three cheers for not accidentally turning off my camera anymore!

The new camera, combined with my usual New Year's urge to de-clutter, re-organize and just basically clean stuff up, meant I spent all day yesterday pulling out the stash, photographing it and jotting down its vital signs. Today was painfully slow at work, so I spent most of the day entering the newly photographed yarn into Ravelry, marking off the ones I'm willing or happy to part with.

The final tally is a sobering number, as I've calculated out the mileage. While not as bad as many, I'd say that nearly 20 miles of yarn in my wee little house may be a wee bit more than I need. Of that, about 13 miles is yarn I really want to keep, and the stuff I'm happy to see go to new homes makes up almost 7 miles. All the to-go yarns are sequestered in their own big Ziploc bag, and there's a Stash Bash to which they'll get carried at the end of the month if I've not moved my posterior about selling them before them.

That leaves me with a dresser full of yarn that I really do love.

I think this is the year that I focus on trying to knit from the stash full of yarns I adore instead of having my head turned by all the pretty shiny new yarns I come across. We'll see how well that works for me. It shouldn't be that hard to start, as right now, having it all laid out in front of me like fresh sparking new yarn, my main problem is that I can't decide where to start, but we'll see how well I can stick to it once the like-new freshness wears off again.

To close, on this chilly New Year's Eve, I'd like to wish you all the happiest of new years to come!

Flashing my Stash

The knitting secret pal swap I'm participating in for the next few months asked us to post pictures of our yarn stashes this past week. Since I'd already gone through the work of pulling it all together for ElJay, I thought I'd post it over here. Compared to a lot of the knitters in the swap, I have a lot of yarn. Im guessing compared to some of you, maybe not so much.

I realized as I was doing this, that I have a LOT of yarn. A LOT. And having my husband watching while I was doing this, now HE knows just how much I have, too. I think I'll need to lay off the yarn buying for a while. Heh. I'm okay with that - it's gotten to the point where I almost feel overwhelmed by the stash - there's just too much of it that I love and want to work with to keep buying yarn. It meant I went to NH Sheep and Wool last weekend and bought a grand total of 3 skeins of yarn - two to make hats for the husband and daughter, one to send off to my secret pal.



I'll start with some of my tools, though, since I've got a lot of those too.

First off, my needle cases. I got these from Crippenworks Needlecases, and I love them


Here's all four of them - Circulars on the left, crochet hooks and DPNs in the middle, and straights on the right.


The insides of a couple of the cases.



My swift



My ball winder. The dresser that it is attached to is where most of my yarn lives.



Most, but not all of my books.


And now, the yarn. On all the yarn pics, if you click through to Flickr, I've added notes and stuff to the pictures too.


This is my collection of ends and bits and bobs. I do actually go back to these for some projects, which is why I keep them around. There's all kinds of stuff here - cotton, wool, alpaca, silk. If it's natural, I'll knit with it, pretty much.



These are my one-offs, those single balls that you acquire either as gifties or at swaps, or because they were so divine you have to have them. I'm sure you all know what I mean. My favorites in the batch are the purple boucle and the silk my friend D brought for me from Japan.



Here's all the sock yarn - Clockwise, from the top left, Schaefer Anne, Fleece Artist merino, Running Wild cormo wool, Great Adirondack silk/wool, three colors from Sunshine Yarns on etsy, Cherry Tree Hill supersock, Koigu, Fleece Artist merino, and the few balls of Regia and Kroy. Lots of sock yarn. The koigu is officially no longer stash yarn, since I ended yesterday's session by winding it up and starting a new sock with it. Since I took this, I've added two new skeins of Sunshine Yarns - one in the Ravenclaw colorway for a friend, and another all for me!



This is my current collection of project yarn - I'm still stuck in baby knitting hell, and all of this is for that. Jaeger Matchmaker (car seat bunting), Kareoke (baby sweater), Cascade superwash (Widget sweater), Jaeger baby Merino (baby sweaters), Kertzer Butterfly Super 10 (Baby Surprise Jacket, if my figuring for stockinette stitch works).



Most of the rest of my project quantity yarn collection - Dale for ladybug sweater, Fleece Artist Thrummed mitten kit, with extra skein for hat, Alpaca from New Mexico, Mostly Merino yarn, Cotton Comfort mill ends, Touch of Twist silk-merino laceweight, Frog Tree Alpaca. My favorite out of this batch is the NM alpaca - because we got to meet the alpacas from whom the yarn came, and toured the spinning mill where it is made up in Ruidoso when we were out visiting my MiL last winter. It was a really neat side trip. I'm most excited about the Fleece Artist thrummed mittens kit that I just got.



This is my Sea colors yarn. Solar dyed in sea water, no photograph can convey the depth and pure gorgeousness of this yarn. The blue is destined to be a sweater for myself. The pink and green I bought just to have.



This last one isn't technically stash yarn, since, as you can see, I've started the project. But I love this yarn sooooo much, I had to include it - it's a lambswool cashmere blend, in a fantastic shade of true red with all different colors speckled into it - blue, yellow, purple, white. It may be my favorite yarn I've ever seen or worked with. The kicker is that I can not remember who makes it.

Well, that's my stash. There's actually more, but it's pretty boring collection of wools in natural colors, and I couldn't bring myself to haul those last bits of it out of storage yesterday afternoon.

The other thing I realized when I was pulling this all together is that I like to buy yarn when I travel, which means that a lot of the yarns in my stash have stories to them, even if it's just "Oh yeah, I found that yarn in this little store in Cleveland when I went out there for that server upgrade..." It's like a mini personal history.