Stash Management

There's good news and there's bad news.

Bad news: I used to work in a yarn store...with a really good employee discount. Not only did it have a really good employee discount (well over 25%), but when an employee made a store sample, she received as compensation the full retail value of the yarn used in the sample in store credit. That combined with a really good discount spells trouble. On the bright side, the owner and I had very different taste in yarn, which helped curb my enthusiasm.

Curbed enthusiasm or no, however, I live in an apartment, and my stash lives in one of the cabinets in my pantry. In the beginning, that arrangement went very badly. We thought of calling in the Red Cross for help with the disaster area, but there seemed to be no solution. Aid is of little use in the absence of a solution.

Good news: I used to work in a yarn store! The owner bought for the store compulsively! A lot of the yarns she purchased were those higher end yarns that come in cardboard boxes of ten, fifty gram balls. The boxes are long and skinny, with little cellophane windows in the front. And when they were from a company called OnLine, the lids were actually attached to the bottoms, so the lids could fold down into the box. The quality of the cardboard was pretty nice, and they were always glossy and white. The yarn companies wanted their yarns to look fluffy and poofy straight out of the box, so the boxes fit ten pretty loosely. Best of all they stack and the store simply recycled them when they were empty.

Best news: I knew all about it, because I did most of the restocking, organizing, and putting away of new shipments. One day, I loaded my teeny tiny little car full of boxes in reasonably good condition, and took them home. I stuffed them full of my yarn (organized according to fiber content), stacked them up in my pantry cabinet, and suddenly had room for more yarn. It also turned out that these boxes are shallow enough to allow one to find specific yarn easily. Best of all, the Yarn Riots ended, and the Red Cross was taken off alert. And they all lived happily ever after.

So how does all of this help anyone else? Most people do not work in yarn stores (no matter how much they would like to), but most yarn stores Do buy yarn that comes in these little boxes, and those boxes are eventually empty. Sooooo, head on down to your favorite yarn store. They will have the boxes I'm talking about if they carry:

Karabella
OnLine
Mondial
Grignasco
Adrienne Vittadini
various flavors of Plymouth, KFI, or JCA

Do any of you have favorite stash management ideas? Let's compare notes.

Comments

Ruthie said…
Yay! What a happy solution! :-) I have this fantasy of never owning more yarn than I can use. Fantasy of a newbie I suppose :-)

I love your blog so far!

Ruthie