Knitter Monkey

Our SP hostess sent out an e-mail a couple of days ago with a challenge to post a photo of your stash. It also sounds like there have been other challenges (?) but this is the first e-mail I have received since the initial swap e-mail, so Kerry, if you are reading this, I am so sorry I have not been participating! If they went to my bulk mail, they are long gone, but hopefully this will make up for it because in trying to take a photo of my stash, I have determined that my stash can not be contained in a single photo. It is almost embarassing, the sheer quantity of not just yarn but pricey luxury yarns that I have accumulated with, in many cases, no real purpose. I'm guessing that I am not the only one though, and surely someone out there has a stash that puts mine to shame.

To start this off fittingly, tonight I received my order from the insane sale at Knit Happens. The sale kicked off while we were out of town, and so by the time I learned about it, all of my favorite yarns were long since sold out (hello, Koigu for $4.50/skein? Sheer insanity.) and for a while I refrained. Earlier this week though, I decided the prices on some yarns I was curious about were just too good to pass up, and I ordered, well, a buttload of cheap yarn. My husband was like, is that all yarn? When the box showed up. It was all yarn.

Specifically, it is RYC Soft Lux in a pretty green, Nashua Creative Focus Worsted in Goldenrod, and Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk in pink. 10 balls, 12 balls, and 20 balls, respectively.

What the heck, man, add it to the stash.

That is the yarn in my knitting room. It desn't include my WIP and orphan skein bags or my big tote filled with all of the KnitPicks Palette I'm using for Venezia, but you get the idea. That bag on the left? is just full of Malabrigo Worsted. And that's not even all of it.

In our bedrom is my main stash, organized in this IKEA storage unit by types of yarn - sock yarns, bags of yarn, "special" yarns, cotton yarns, etc. If you ever want to kid yourself, your significant other, or your family and friends about exactly how much yarn you have, get one of these. There is so much more yarn here than you even realize - before I got this, I had filled up an entire laundry basket and one of those kid's toy storage containers plus random bags of overflow that didn't fit, and then I got this and I had extra space.

Which didn't last for long ... There are also boxes above the unit with yarn for projects that are farther out or yarn I just don't feel the need to look at all the time once I had to start discriminating.

I am pretty sure I have another stash somewhere with mostly acrylics from when I was learning to knit and didn't even know LYS existed, and there is definitely a bag of Tahki Cotton Classic in like 12 colors for this kind of nutty Care Bears intarsia project I have been scheming about for a year now.

It is ridiculous, and so much of it is, well, kind of expensive. I have always been the kind of person who will pick the $800 shoes if you show me three with no price tags, and my yarn choices are no exception. I fear for the day we have to save for something - Dan will have to take the Internet away. I went on an Etsy spree a few months ago, buying gorgeous hand-dyed laceweight with no projects in mind:

I have enough Koigu and Lorna's Laces to knit nothing but socks for the next year:

But nothing even comes close to my enormous pile of Malabrigo - that bag in the the first picture was only about a third of my Malabrigo stash.

This post brought to you by the letter "S," for "Stash-tastic."