KonMari Yarn

I’ve been watching Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix while working on deadlines recently. Watching led to a pretty big kitchen declutter which led to decluttering in other areas of the house. Then on a recent weekend while the husband and boys were at a winter camp (camping in the winter is not my thing AT ALL) I decided it was time to try to work this magic on my yarn stash.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know that we had some major remodeling projects in 2018. We remodeled what used to be my craft room into a sorely needed second bathroom. And then we started remodeling an unfinished storage space into my new craft room. As with any home improvement project, things took longer than planned so at a certain point I simply moved all my yarn and tools out of the younger boy’s bedroom (he was beyond thrilled to get his space back) and into the “still unfinished but no longer scary” craft room. The remodel stalled at that point but I was so happy to be able to start spreading out my yarn and tools again that I didn’t care. Now we’re at the stage where every few weeks the husband has time to go work on a bit of something in that space. That’s excellent! But the fact that all of my stuff gets moved around to reach the something and the room is constantly covered in remodeling dust and debris is less than excellent. So I’ve kind of been avoiding that space.

The lighting is not sorted yet so please bear with me on the lighting in this post. I currently have one light fixture that needs to be plugged into the wall each time I want to turn on the light. I decided my first steps were to find a power strip and then to pull out the photography lights. I don’t use them all that much since I much prefer natural outdoor lighting for photos whenever possible. Now that the lights and stands are out one of my next projects will be to set up a light box area in the new space. But for now I just pointed them towards the yarn to help me see.

I decided to start with the easiest task in the stash – to reorganize the sample garments for my designs. They started out piled and stuffed into two over-full plastic bins.

At first I took the garments out of their protective bags and tried stacking them horizontally in one level. I’ll admit this sparked joy for me. I love yarn and I love knitted garments (obviously since I’m building a career out of it). It is much easier to see the beauty of the yarn in one layer and out of the plastic bags that dull the colors. But it only took me a handful of minutes to realize that just isn’t a viable storage option for me at this stage. Problem # 1: We have three cats, we live in on old farmhouse and we live on the outskirts of a tiny town with farm fields just beyond our back yard. So for my peace of mind I have to keep the finished garments in plastic bag storage to protect the yarn from possible damage by cats, mice and bugs. The cats are the real concern since having three of them in the house means only the stupidest of mice actually enter the house and in any event we’re slowly closing off any rodent entrance points. But with our youngest cat named Blargnarf Destroyer of Worlds at about the stage she started moving, you can imagine the damage she is capable of if left unchecked. Problem #2: I don’t want to spend money to purchase different storage bins when I have these perfectly good bins available.

So the larger garments went back into the bags and I stored them two-deep in the bins. I did sort them together into similar categories. And I made detailed notes about each garment stored in the bin. Now I can find a garment with a quick glance at the top of the bins. They are not nearly as pretty as they were without the bags. But the added protection is definitely worth it for me.

I decided to be more daring with the smaller sample garments. These represent much smaller amounts of work and time in each piece. So I decided the joy it gives me to see them free of the bags and stored in the nicely folded and upright KonMari way was worth any possible disasters. Again I didn’t want to buy any storage containers if it could be avoided.

So I appropriated a flat, clear storage bin from it’s natural habitat of Lego storage in one of the boy’s rooms. And love, love, love it! Now it will be so much easier to see what I have and I plan to be wearing them much more often now that they aren’t buried and stuffed in with all the larger garments.

Also? I very much have color preferences. I love the natural hues of browns, greens, reds, golds and deep blues. Don’t worry! I’m not crazy. This bin has a lid that fits tightly so I’m not leaving these small lovely things completely out and unprotected from the Destroyer of Worlds.

Next I decided to work on my project quantities of yarn. The main problem with my storage was that I was keeping these yarns in multiple locations. So each time I went to find a specific yarn or just to browse my options, I had to look in several places and I couldn’t see all the yarn at once. I decided to combine all my yarn in one location. My two storage options were free book shelves I’d saved from my neighbor’s trash pile or wire cubes purchased cheap when our LYS closed. After really looking hard at the yarn in the two choices I realized I could see the yarn on the bookshelves much easier.

So I moved all my project quantities of yarn over to the bookcases. Again the protective plastic bags make the pretty, pretty yarn harder to see. But again I decided I just couldn’t leave the yarn out to be found by Blargnarf (we call her Blarg for short) and the other two less destructive cats. I sorted by size of projects. Sweater Quantities on the left-hand bookcase, smaller projects on the right-hand book case. I’ll be honest. I didn’t hold each of these yarns to see if they spark joy in me as I was rearranging and sorting. All of these yarns had already sparked joy for me at some point to get into my stash and that is good enough for me.

After considering it for a while, I decided to try turning the bags outwards and storing them more vertical to get a batter look at the colors of the yarns. I haven’t sorted them by color yet. But I do think I’ll be doing that at some point. I’m much happier with this storage now. Also, seeing all the yarn together makes me want to cast on ALL.THE.THINGS.

I still have one last category of yarn stash that needs sorted. I have two more over-stuffed bins I call “Odds & Ends”. They are full of different categories of yarn – quantities that are too small to be actual projects but still enough to be design submission samples, large enough quantities for projects but I no longer love the yarn, colors that don’t spark for me, leftovers from larger garments that could be a project someday, abandoned projects and leftovers from projects that I haven’t had the heart to discard.

I started trying to pull all of this yarn barf out of the bins and it somehow seemed to multiply. I sat staring at that yarn barf for a while, I thought really,really hard about appropriating more of the storage bins from their natural habitat of Lego storage and then I simply gave up for now. I think the solution might end up being that I need to purchase new shallow and clear storage bins, then sort by yarn weight and color and also toss some of it. I’m hoping to think of a different, clever solution that works with items I already own. But for now I shoved all that yarn barf back into the Odds & Ends bins and I backed slowly away from them.