Little Knitting Projects to Slim Your Yarn Stash – Knitting

Getting our yarn stashes in order seems to be a common New Year’s resolution for knitters, or a target of our spring cleaning efforts later in the year. It looks like it’s been a while since I’ve talked about how to organize yarn, so let’s get into it. 

A good first step is trying to get all of your yarn into one location, whether that’s the dining room table, the floor of your craft room or wherever else you can spread out, contemplate and organize it. If the idea of all your yarn in one place sound intimidating, you can start by cleaning up one storage area at a time, but ideally you’ll want to look at all of it at once. 

When you can see all of your yarn you’ll probably find some things you don’t remember buying, that you don’t remember why you bought, that don’t suit your taste any more or were for a project you never made and don’t want to anymore. Set those aside to be donated and then consider the stuff you want to keep. (And if you need more help decluttering yarn or other craft supplies, I can help with that.)

There are lots of options when it comes to organizing yarn that you might want to consider:

• By yarn weight: I have all my sock yarn together in one box, but if you want you can store all your yarn by weight. This can be helpful if you need to store yarn in different places, so if you’re looking for DK weight yarn for a project you know exactly where that is. 
• By color: most of my yarn is sorted by color on a set of shelves, because I like the look of it that way (though it should really be in rainbow order). Neutrals and some multicolored yarns are kept in another section. If color and texture inspire you, this might be the way to go. 
• By yarn content: if you have a lot of cotton yarn you might want to keep it all together, for example. If you love Fair Isle knitting you might keep all your wools together. 
• Combination: as I said my sock yarn is in its own place. I also have a box for odd balls and leftovers that I think are too small to put with the rest of the yarn. You could sort by color and within each color sort by weight or fiber content.

Some of this may also be determined by the amount of space you have. Whether you’re working with a bookshelf, an old fridge, a peg wall, a bookshelf or a closet, how best to store your yarn may depend on how big your space is and how it is configured. If you need to separate into different places or different types of storage, then you’ll also need to think about how you know where particular things are in your stash. 

I still love these printable yarn stash organizing sheets, though you won’t be surprised to learn I never used them. Some people successfully log their stashes on Ravelry, where you could add a note about where the yarn is. 

This year I’m hoping to make more holes in my stash by doing lots of knitting and crocheting. Have a great storage solution in your space? I’d love to hear about it!