Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Moving Again and Yarn Storage

While I was away, we moved again.  The past few weeks have been spent on opening boxes and reorganising things in the new house.  The house where we currently live is unfurnished, so we're having to make do with what furniture we have to hand. Currently my room looks like this:






I still need to put together a canvas wardrobe so I have somewhere to hang clothes, but I've been able to assemble a bookcase to store a few things and decorate the place a little.  My substantial stash has proven very useful as room decor.  I am using a ceramic bowl that I got in Seville back in March and a glass one from Tiger in order to display some pretty skeins of Hedgehog Fibres and my Boo-Knits Shawl-a-long yarn.  With this rainy "summer" we're having, I need all the shine and sparkle I can get.



The lack of storage space has caused me to rethink my knitting plans for next year.  I don't really have much room to store more yarn other than a bit of space under the bed.  I technically shouldn't be buying yarn anyway since I vowed to stashdown 10km of yarn by the end of this year, which is going rather disasterously I have to say.  It's clear I need to knit up what I've got here before I can bring anything over from the Mother Stash, which rules out all the plans I had made.  I looked at my queue and saw that most of the yarn I had here already were either for shawls or sweaters.  Since it's physical space that is the issue, I decided to "air" the stash and pile up the yarn according to project type to see which was bigger.  The sweater pile looked like this:


The shawl piled up like this:


I think you can tell just by looking that the sweater pile takes up more, but just to be sure, let us compare them side-byside, bearing in mind that I took away a few skeins from the shawl pile before taking this photo:





Yep, sweater pile is bigger.  There are about eight sweaters/tops' worth of yarn in there, so I think I will join IntSweMoDo or International Sweater-a-Month Dodecathlon for 2016.  12 sweaters in a year is a bit nuts to say the least, but I will need sweaters more than shawls next year.  I've also learned that to have a project-oriented approach to stashdown is much more effective than trying to reach a number.  I'll just be having to pick up four more sweater quantities to make this work, which should be easy enough as I tend to go home twice a year.  Most of my Irish Stash is 4ply/fingering weight, so I'm leaning towards my sweater quantities in heavier weights to fill in the gaps.  Perhaps in 2017 when I'm in my fourth year of Ph.D. I'll declare it Year of Accessories as that might be all that I'll be able to pull off while I finish my thesis.  It's the plan for now, anyway.

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