Spring Cleaning - The yarn Stash

This weekend I would love to be working on my little loom but I'll be heading to New Jersey for my best friend's Baby Shower. We also got the news of the start date for our kitchen remodel so I've started to pack things away and make room.

I finished this little project on the loom which will eventually be a camera strap. I had forgotten that I didn't have all the components to sew it into a functional strap after my weaving. You'd be amazed how specific you need to make the fittings to attach to the camera to make sure it will work. You wouldn't want your $500+ DSLR to hit the ground due to a  faulty strap, so I am going to do a good bit of research on the best attachments.

With all that being said let me show the Stash you came to see. This is just the yarns that are stored in the basement. I have about two other stash areas for yarns that are in more frequent rotation in upcoming or envisioned projects.

Blush colored yarns in silk and wool blends fill this 2x3x2' bin.

4 of these 5 bins are full of yarn as well. One of them was the above blush colored stash.

This is the majority of my stash of Cone yarns which can happily be used in weaving as well. A lot of this yarn was inherited from diligent dumpster diving when CCAD moved the fashion studio to their new home at the Design Studios on Broad a few years ago. Each of the bins has two layers of cones so I have easily close to 35-40 cones of yarn. Now I need to condense it all down even more and move it out of the way. Unfortunately my studio space is right where they need to do all the plumbing work for our kitchen and half bath.

One day my knitting machines are going to go crazy eating all of this up in the next few years. This isn't any cheap yarn either.  They are all wool, silk or cotton blends. You won't find any nasty acrylic in here.

I hope my stash and projects inspire you to start something fun from fiber this weekend! I'll be taking my tatting and knitting with me to the airport to keep me company.

Clean House

A few weeks ago I spent the entire weekend cleaning up my stashes and my upstairs craft room which is also our guest room.  They were all disasters.  Above is my stash after the clean up which I am also sharing with my shoe storage because I have just as many shoes as I do fat quarters.

I decided to try and organize my fabric by themes.  So we shall see how that works out. In my head I do all my projects by themes so hopefully this will help keep it all together for me, otherwise I need to work up a new system which I am not keen on.

This is the guest bedroom/craft room.  Total anarchy!  I have this bad habit of stacking things on the bed and piling up stacks of magazines that I don't have time to flip through.  when I am in a hurry I am also terrible about putting things back once I pulled them out and leaving it there for days (or weeks).  I know that when I lose a cat in this mess then it is high time to clean it all up. One of the hard lessons I am still working on as an adult owning our own home is that there is no one else there to clean up after you and we certainly need to get that lesson learned before we add some human babies in our lives rather then furbabies that can fend for themselves mostly.

Once everything is clean and organized it does feel fantastic! Sure there are still some small piles on the bed but these are different.  These are things on the bed because I can not have a guest here till the prints are hung or things that need to be moved to the basement studio because they never belonged in this room in the first place.  Keeping them on the bed is like a visual to do list instead of piled up catch all.

In addition to cleaning up I found the perfect solution of what to do with all my mini buttons I've been collecting and the fact that I have several inspiration cork boards with no pushpins. I simply bent the pin out and use them just like normal push pins.  It makes for a double inspiration!