Six Simple Steps to an Organized Yarn Stash | Podcast Episode #122

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Is your yarn stash out of control?

Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us! I usually need to sort through and organize my yarn stash at least once a year. Admittedly, this isn’t something I love scheduling time for but it does save me time in the long run!

Here’s the deal – organizing your yarn stash can do four things for you. First, it will save you money because you won’t buy yarn you already have (that you forgot about). Second, it will save you time when looking for the right yarn for your project (because you’ll know exactly where to look). Third, it will get you excited about the yarn you have (just like when you bought it the first time) and lastly, it will reignite your creative fire!

Are you ready to organize your yarn stash?

Episode Transcript

Brittany: 0:00
You’re listening to the Be Hooked Podcast, episode 122 with Brittany.

Hello and welcome to the BeHooked podcast, the place where we love yarn, we love to learn, and we truly believe yarn can do more for us than just make pretty things. It’s a little line that you may have been hearing on my tutorials, and I want to extend it here to the podcast because this is really something I’m truly passionate about.

We love yarn. That’s something that you and I share together. We love to learn. We’re really passionate about expanding our skills and being better. And most importantly, I think we both understand that yarn is not just yarn. It’s something that does more than create things. It does more than make projects. It occupies our minds, our hands. It makes us happy. It does all the things.

We’ve talked about that a lot on the show. And so I feel like it’s so appropriate. I just wanted to share that with you today.

Well, I hope you are having an amazing day wherever you’re listening, and I would love to see what you’re seeing. Let’s do something a little fun today. Now, unless you’re driving a car right now, snap a photo of what you’re doing while listening to today’s show and tag me on Twitter.

Yes, Twitter. I’ve been dabbling and spending some more time on Twitter lately. It’s pretty fun. I’m kind of loving it. So I would love for you to share a photo with me on Twitter. You can tag me @bhookedcrochet so I can see what you’re doing right now.

Well, if you’re brand new to the show, welcome. First and foremost, I am your host, Brittany, and I am a passionate yarn lover, passionate learner, and just all things crochet and knitting. Well, that’s what fuels my fire, and that’s what we talk about here on the show.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to hang out just you and I. That’s a little different than normal. Sometimes I’m joined by an amazing guest who has some great things to share with you about knitting and crochet. But every now and then we take it to just a solo show where it’s me and you and we talk about something that’s good for you to implement. It’s going to help you accomplish something, help you be more organized or help you learn something.

So in the next couple of weeks, I want to talk about yarn. So it’s a little yarn series, if you will. I’ve been spending some time organizing and sorting through my stash, something I like to do in the spring or summer every single year just so I can get a handle on things.

And it’s not always easy. I sort of had to come up with a little system that makes it easier and quicker because as much as I love to clean and organize, I don’t always love to spend a lot of time on that. And to be honest, we don’t always have time to do stuff like that, right? We’ve got other things to clean. We’ve got other things to do, errands to run, jobs, children’s responsibilities.

Organizing the yarn stash is like pretty low on the list, but hear me out. We love our yarn. And when we just want to start a project, if it’s really cluttered and messy and we don’t know what we have, well, that’s just sort of starting that project off on the wrong foot. And that’s what I realized.

That’s why I started organizing and trying to prioritize organizing my yarn so that I don’t have to spend time sorting through what I have. I can just go to that space spot where I know I have that yarn and start working on the project because that’s what I want to spend my time doing. But in order to get to that place, I have to invest a little bit of time and I think you’ll have to do the same thing too.

But even if you’re not an organizer or a cleaner or you just don’t love doing that, it doesn’t sound fun, hear me out. What I want to do today is share my six steps to an organized stash. Just six steps. It’ll take you a little time, so you will have to dedicate maybe a few hours to this. Maybe a little longer, a little shorter if you have a bigger or a smaller yarn stash.

But I want to share the exact things that I do that I’ve sort of streamlined so that you don’t have to invest as much time into this process. And you can just jump right into the project from an organized standpoint. And you know exactly what yarn you have, so you’re not spending money on yarn when you really don’t need to.

See, that’s the thing. It’s really easy to lose control of your yarn sometimes. Am I right? Before I do this yearly organizing, I have little bits, full skeins, half skeins, works in progress in several rooms of my house. They just end up there over time. I’ll carry them, I’ll leave them, forget them, they get covered up, whatever. There’s pretty much yarn all over the house. And that drives me a little insane sometimes.

Here’s the thing. When you don’t know exactly what yarn you have, you buy when you don’t need to. And if you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you know I don’t like to spend money unless I absolutely have to. There’s nothing worse than the situation where I’ve just bought yarn for a project and then I realize I already had that in my stash.

And yeah, it’s okay. That yarn’s not going to go to waste. It’ll get used for something else. But I just like to be more organized so that I don’t have to spend that money unless it’s absolutely necessary.

When your yarn is really messy and not organized, you may not even start certain projects because you don’t know what you have. You don’t know if you have a particular yarn. You might use a yarn for a project that you wouldn’t have chosen had you seen some of the other options that you already have.

So these are two really big benefits. But honestly, if you’re anything like me, the biggest benefit for me to organizing all of my yarn is really just so I feel less stressed.

If you are buying yarn and you don’t need to, or if you are just not feeling like you have what you need to start a project, just try organizing your stash. You might be surprised at what you actually have there that maybe you bought months or even years ago and you just don’t remember you have it.

You’ll invest a little time up front for organizing and sorting, which we’ll talk about today, but it will save you money in the long run, and it will save you time in the long run. Those are two pretty valuable things. Money and time, right? We always want to save those, and this can help you accomplish that, even in the smallest little sense.

So, are you in?

Okay, before we get started, don’t feel like you have to take notes here. I’ve done all of that for you, and I have the resources listed in the show notes page at behooked.com/122.

All right, now let’s get into my first step for organizing your yarn stash.

Spread it all out on the floor. Sounds like a disaster, right? But whenever I deep clean a room, a drawer or a closet or pretty much anything, I spread everything out so I can see everything. My husband laughs at me when I do this because he’s just like, you’re supposed to be cleaning and now you’ve made this big, huge mess.

But I always laugh and I tell him that in order to clean, like really clean, I have to make a big, huge mess first. And that’s because you can take a mental note or an inventory of what you have to go in the space that you have for it.

Now, if you’re like me and you have a tendency of carrying yarn off to various places in your home, gather them all up and we’re going to dedicate one space to this whole sorting process, this whole cleaning and organizing process that we’re going through together.

If you can designate one room to your organizing efforts here over the next few days, that’ll be best. So if you have a craft room, a spare bedroom, living room, doesn’t matter, kitchen table, anywhere, gather all of your yarn up from all of those various nooks and crannies and take it to that designated spot or that room and spread it all out on the floor wherever you can, wherever you’ve got space.

You want to be able to see each individual skein, each scrap, each little yarn cake, each little bit of half-used yarn. Spread it all out so you can see everything that you have.

Now, the idea here is to get your hands on every single one of those skeins, hanks, balls, donuts, whatever, in your stash and take an inventory. Not necessarily a physical inventory. You don’t have to write all of it down unless you want to. That would be a really extreme step, but man, that would be really organized.

I don’t take it to that level, but what I do is just take a mental note of everything that I have. So when you have it all located in that one space, you’ve got it all spread out on the floor, we’re ready to follow up with step two.

Now, step two is to sort by category. And I’m leaving that one a little vague for you because I want you to fill in that blank. Fill in what category means to you.

Now, you can do this several different ways. So to find the way that makes sense for you, think about that first checkpoint when starting a new project. Do you typically think about the fiber first or maybe the texture?

For me, it’s the weight. When I am getting ready to start a project, the first checkpoint is what weight of yarn do I want to use for this project? This doesn’t matter if I’m brainstorming a new design or if I’m following a pattern.

The first thing I do is think about the yarn weight when referencing if I have what I need for that project. That’s the whole purpose of organizing your stash—so you know what you have and you’ll know what you need or what you don’t need when you start a project.

So I’ll sort my yarn into different piles for each yarn weight. I’m not typically one to use threads or really lightweight yarn very often so I have very little to none at all in that one and two weight category.

So I will typically have four piles: worsted weight, bulky weight, chunky weight, and then lightweight to some extent. They all get a pile.

Now we’re still pretty messy here at this point, but we’ll start to get a little more organized soon, I promise.

That way people who are listening to this later on, they can reference that if they know they want a hand crank ball winder or if they want something completely different. There are a couple of different options out there. Leave that in the comments for them so that they can hear your recommendation.

All right, with all the little bits wound and in neat little cakes, let’s do one last round of sorting for step five. This time, I like to sort by fiber.

So typically by this point, I have my eight piles of yarn. Remember, I’ve grouped it into four main categories and each of those two categories are broken into basically used and not used. So that makes up the eight.

This time, for step five, I like to sort by fiber, and I take each one of those individual eight piles and I sort it by fiber.

Here’s the cool part: when you’re starting your project and you’ve thought to yourself, “Okay, I want to do a project with a chunky weight yarn, and I think I want a wool or wool blend yarn,” well, then you can go to this specific spot in your stash that you’ve designated for chunky yarns that are animal fibers or blended fibers. And you know exactly every single thing that you have on hand. It’s so nice.

So now the sixth and final step to organizing your yarn stash usually takes me the longest—and that is to designate a spot for each of those many sorted piles you have.

For you, it could be 10, 12, however many. It really doesn’t matter. What you’ll need to do is figure out a spot for each one of these piles.

Now, don’t lose hope here. If you don’t have an entire yarn room or a fancy bookshelf, you really don’t need that stuff. You just need a single location for each pile.

If you’re limited on space, try using bags like grocery bags, project bags, and then store them wherever you have room. It could be a bare spot on your closet floor. It could be in a cabinet—just wherever you have space for that pile of yarn in that little container, whether it be a bag or project bag or something like that.

Plastic totes are another really great option for storing these piles of yarn. I’ve tried that before in the past. You can pick them up at your dollar store usually, and I find that that’s a good value.

Now currently, I have a spare dresser here in my office, and that holds most of my yarn. The bigger drawers hold the piles that I have most of—so that’s usually worsted weight acrylic. I have a lot of that on hand. I do have quite a bit of chunky yarn. I have quite a bit of blended yarns as well. So those piles that I have more yarn of, those sort of get those bigger drawers.

Then I have smaller drawers in the same dresser that hold the piles that I have less of. I don’t use a whole lot of cotton. I don’t use a whole lot of lightweight and that sort of thing. And so each one of my piles has a drawer in my dresser.

When I want to start a project, I go to that specific drawer. I see everything that I have for that project. And that tells me right away: can I start on the project now? Do I have what I need on hand? Or do I need to place an order? Do I need to run out to the store and pick something up?

Now, have you ever seen those wooden crates at Joann’s or Michaels? Those are another really great option for holding sorted yarn piles. I currently have four of those right now. I collected mine one visit at a time so that I could use that 40% off coupon. Again, bargain hunter here.

And now my next step is to stain them and display them here in my office as well. As you can imagine, acoustics are kind of something that you may not think about as a listener, but it’s something that I certainly have to think a lot about as a creator. Producing video, producing a podcast—the sound bounces around this room. And the more I have in here to absorb the sound, the better the experience is for you.

So that was the idea with getting these extra crates—so that I could stuff them with yarn in hopes that they’ll absorb some of the sound and therefore reduce noise.

Thank you so much for watching.

A blog post that Jess from Make and Do Crew did—she bought a bunch of these crates and I think her husband helped her to attach them, like nail them together. And she stained or painted them and made this really beautiful yarn shelf. And it’s super affordable.

I know shelves can be very expensive. Bookshelves can be hundreds of dollars. But this would not be hundreds of dollars, depending on how many you buy and how many coupons you have and that sort of thing. You can put together a yarn shelf on a budget. So I will link to her blog post in the show notes. You can check that out as well.

Another option for you is shoeboxes or those photo boxes. I know for a while I would always find those photo boxes clearanced at Michaels. You could get them for like one or two dollars and I would pick them up here and there. I like to store some of my other crafting tools in there, but they’re also really great for tidbits of yarn.

If you have just little scraps from various projects that you just don’t want to get rid of, that you think you might incorporate into another project later, those little scraps can go in there.

So I know that’s a lot for you to take in right now, but what I want you to do is—before you do anything—first think about the space that you have to store the yarn.

Now I know I am very grateful and very blessed to have a home office here where I have a spot for my yarn, but I want you to think about the space that you have to store the yarn.

That wasn’t always the case. I used to have to find creative places to store it, but I know that’s not the case for everybody right now.

So think about the space that you have to store your yarn. Is it a dresser? Is it a closet? Is it a guest bedroom, a spare bedroom, in the basement, wherever? Think about the space that you have and how big that space is.

Is it floor space? Like, do you just have a spot maybe on the bottom of your closet, like the floor of your closet? Is it wall space? Do you have a spare wall in a spare bedroom or a guest bedroom that you can put a shelf?

And then think about what you already have on hand—like what items you have to keep those piles sorted and in the same spot.

Remember, it doesn’t have to be fancy. You could use garbage bags. You could use grocery bags. You could use project bags, wooden crates, shoeboxes, little hampers or baskets, hanging shoe racks. That’s another really good option.

What do you already have and how can you use that to organize those piles that you have sorted?

If nothing comes to mind—if you don’t have anything to help you keep these piles sorted—well, then ask yourself, do you have a small budget that you can dedicate to keeping it all organized?

Remember, for me, it was enough to say that I’m saving myself time and I’m saving myself money. And those are two very valuable things to me. I can never get my time back, so that’s really valuable. And I don’t like to spend money where I don’t need to.

And keeping my yarn organized and in a space where I can see it all—that saves me the time and it saves me the money because I’m not buying yarn that I don’t need to.

So can you buy some bags, some bins, maybe pick up a dresser or a shelf at a yard sale this summer?

If you’re just not ready to start the actual process of organizing, just write some of this stuff down right now. What space do you have? What things do you have to organize these piles? And what budget could you potentially assign to this project so that you can help save yourself some time and a little bit of money in the future?

Now, I know it seems like a lot of work—and to be honest, you’ll probably have to go through this process more than once.

Like I said, I do it pretty much every single year, sometimes twice a year. But although we’re setting aside the time to get organized now, inevitably we’ll be busy and a little less diligent at keeping it sorted.

I know that typically happens for me in the winter months. I get a little bit more flexible, if you will, with keeping my stash organized. And then spring rolls around and I’m about to pull my hair out because I can’t find anything.

That’s okay. I love this process every single year. I think you might enjoy it more than you would think. And if nothing else, like I said before, it’s a great way to get excited about the yarn you have—and who knows, you might even spark a new project idea.

Now I do have one more bonus tip for you today.

Back in episode 62, Bren from Snurb Yarn mentioned her fiber notebook. And then most recently in last week’s episode with Kate from Jelly Bean Junction, she mentioned her scrap box.

Now both of these ladies used a similar but different method to accomplish the same thing: keep track and identify scrap—what they have—when a label isn’t available.

This is something that I would love to implement in the coming months. If nothing else, by next year, I would love to have a binder with a piece of a particular yarn and the yarn label. So that way I can reference that.

If I have a yarn cake and I have no clue what it is, I can reference my binder and be able to identify it.

If you’re ordering yarn online (which, here’s a hint—we’ll be talking about that in next week’s episode), and you don’t know what color to get, you can reference your notebook. And you can know with confidence that you’re ordering the right color.

So that’s just something to keep in mind. Give that a try. Get the wheels turning on that one—to maybe start a binder or a box to keep your scraps with the little labels on them so you know exactly what you have.

And I’m sure you’ll find plenty of little tidbits of yarn as you’re going through this organizing process.

Now, one last thing before I set you off on your yarn organizing retreat: when you’re sorting, organizing, winding, and sorting some more, you’ll need something to listen to.

I cannot clean or do anything without listening to something in the background. So keep yourself company with an ebook using Audible and take advantage of the special offer that they have.

Okay, so now it’s up to you. Set a date to organize your stash and get to it. Remember, if it doesn’t get scheduled, it doesn’t get done. And so we need to make the time so that we can save the time later.

Now, this yarn series will continue here next week with my tips for ordering yarn online—because the struggle is real, right? Buying yarn is a tactile experience, but sometimes we just have to order online. There’s no way around it.

Well, I’ve done a ton of online ordering and I’ll share how I go about it so I’m not disappointed when I order yarn and it finally arrives.

I don’t want you to be disappointed with your purchases, so subscribe so you don’t miss that one. And until then, have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.