My Yarn Stash Part 2: What I’ve Added, What I’ve Used, and Where Things Stand Now

If you’ve been following along since the first stash post, welcome back. If this is your first time here, the short version is that I am a person with a yarn problem, and I have decided to document it publicly rather than deal with it privately like a sensible person. Either way, pull up a chair, because there is a lot to talk about.

Stash posts are one of my favorite things to read on other people’s blogs, and I’ve been meaning to sit down and write a proper update for months. Life got busy, the yarn collection kept growing, and every time I thought about photographing everything, I found something better to do, like adding more yarn to the collection. But here we are. Part two. Let’s get into it.

A Quick Recap of Where Things Were

When I wrote the first stash post, I organized everything by fiber content and gave myself a little speech about being more intentional with my purchases going forward. I had a very specific plan. I was going to work from my stash exclusively for three months, use up my sock yarn scraps, and resist the siren call of indie dyers at every opportunity.

I’ll let you guess how that went.

The honest answer is that I did work from my stash more consistently for a while. I finished several projects that had been lingering in the planning stage, and I made real progress on some of the yarn I’d had sitting around for an embarrassingly long time. But I also went to a fiber festival, had two birthdays during which people gave me gift cards to my favorite online yarn shops, and discovered three new dyers whose work I simply had to try. So the stash did not shrink. It shifted and transformed and took on new dimensions, but it did not shrink.

That’s okay. I have made peace with the fact that I am a yarn collector who also knits, and those are not always the same thing as a knitter who uses up yarn.

What Left the Stash

Let me start with the good news, because there is genuine good news to report.

I finished the big temperature blanket that had been eating through my fingering weight solids for the better part of two years. If you’ve never done a temperature blanket, the concept is that you knit or crochet one row or round per day, choosing your color based on the day’s temperature, and at the end of the year you have a blanket that is basically a visual record of the weather. Mine is mostly blues and greens with these gorgeous streaks of orange and red in late July and August, and I love it completely. It used up a significant portion of yarn that had been living in one of my bins for years, which felt like a real accomplishment.

I also finally finished a sweater I had been procrastinating on for an almost comical amount of time. The yarn was a beautiful single-ply merino that I’d bought at a guild sale with absolutely no plan, and it had been sitting in a bag with a sticky note on it that said “someday sweater” for two and a half years. I finally wound it, swatched, found a pattern that suited both the yarn and my willingness to commit, and made a really lovely top-down raglan that I have worn constantly. There is something deeply satisfying about wearing a sweater made from yarn that had been waiting that long.

Beyond those major projects, I worked through a fair amount of smaller things. Several hats were made and gifted. I crocheted a bunch of granny squares from my acrylic scraps and sewed them into a lap blanket for my mother, who uses it every day and that honestly might be the project I’m most proud of from the past year. A pair of colorwork mittens. A tiny collection of washcloths and dishcloths from cotton that had been sitting in a basket doing nothing. Some wrist warmers. A shawl that I gave away almost immediately because the colors turned out to be not quite right for me but perfect for my friend.

None of these are glamorous stash-busting stories. They’re just the ordinary work of actually using what you have, one project at a time.

The New Arrivals

Now for the part you probably actually want to read about.

The fiber festival was the single biggest event for the stash this season, and I went in with a budget, which I mostly kept, and a list, which I mostly abandoned within the first twenty minutes. What can I say. There were so many beautiful things.

The most exciting purchase was a large skein of hand-dyed BFL from a small indie dyer who was making her first festival appearance. The colorway was called something like “storm before dawn,” and it was exactly that — deep navy and charcoal with these sudden explosions of pale gold and dusty rose at irregular intervals. I talked to her for a long time about her dyeing process, bought the skein, and then went back two hours later and bought a second one. I have no project planned for them yet. Sometimes you buy yarn for the yarn.

I also picked up a set of gradient minis from one of my favorite dyers, a color progression that goes from a warm burnt orange through terracotta into a deep burgundy. I’ve been mentally auditioning patterns for this set since I got home from the festival and haven’t committed to anything, but I have a feeling it will become a large shawl of some kind. There’s something about a gradient that just wants to be a shawl.

From my birthday gift cards, I spent one on a sweater quantity of a yarn I’ve been eyeing for a long time — a linen and cotton blend in a color that the shop describes as “faded eucalyptus,” which is a perfect name for a color that is simultaneously grey and green and slightly blue depending on the light. I have a specific pattern in mind for it, a loose boxy pullover with minimal shaping that seems designed for exactly this kind of drape-y plant fiber blend. That yarn is living on my desk right now, not in a bin, because I want to look at it.

The second gift card went toward sock yarn, because it always goes toward sock yarn. I bought four skeins of a hand-dyed fingering weight, each one a different colorway from the same dyer’s “low-contrast speckle” series, which means they’re all tonal with just a few carefully placed bits of contrast color rather than full-on explosions of hue. I’ve been leaning toward calmer colorways lately, I think because I’ve been doing a lot of colorwork and my brain appreciates some visual rest when I’m working plain socks.

I also made a somewhat unplanned purchase when I found an incredible deal on a lot of discontinued worsted weight from a mill I love. It was a significant amount of yarn in a color that I would describe as “deep teal that can’t decide if it wants to be green or blue,” which happens to be exactly the kind of color that lives in my house already. This one I actually do have a plan for — a textured blanket in a simple slip stitch pattern that I’ve been wanting to make for a while. I’ve started it. It’s going slowly, as blankets do.

How the Stash Is Organized Right Now

I talked in the first post about my organization system, and I want to give an update on how that’s holding up because organization is genuinely the part of stash management I find most interesting to think about.

The broad category system still works. I keep everything sorted by weight first, then by fiber content within weight. So all my fingering weight is in one section, all my worsted is in another, and so on. Within each section, I’ve been more consistent about keeping things in project bags or large ziplocs with a little notecard that has the yardage, fiber content, and any project ideas I’ve had. This has been genuinely helpful, because there is nothing more frustrating than pulling out a skein and having no idea how much yardage is in it or what you were planning to do with it.

I’ve also started keeping a running list in a notebook of yarns I’ve used up. Not a formal log, just a quick note when something leaves the stash — what the yarn was, what I made with it, when I finished it. Looking back at this list has been surprisingly motivating. It makes the stash feel like a living, changing thing rather than a static pile of intentions.

The part of the system that still needs work is my single skein collection. I have a lot of individual skeins that I bought because I loved them, with no particular plan, and they’ve migrated to a basket that I keep meaning to sort through. Some of them have been there long enough that I’ve genuinely forgotten what they are. This is not ideal, and I have made a vague promise to myself that the next rainy weekend afternoon with no commitments is going to be dedicated to going through that basket, writing notes, and either assigning each skein a project or making peace with the fact that some yarn exists purely as an object to be appreciated.

Observations About My Tastes

One thing that stash posts have taught me about myself is that looking at your full collection at once is a genuinely revealing exercise. You start to see patterns that aren’t obvious when you’re acquiring things one skein at a time.

My color palette has shifted noticeably over the past few years. I used to buy a lot of very saturated, high-contrast colors — bright pinks, vivid teals, acid yellows. Most of those are still in the stash and most of them are things I look at and feel uncertain about now. My more recent purchases lean heavily into muted, complex tones. Dusty rose instead of hot pink. Forest green instead of lime. Ochre instead of golden yellow. I think this reflects a genuine change in what I want to wear and make, not just a passing mood, so I’ve started thinking about whether I want to try to use up those brighter skeins in projects that don’t require me to love the color from the outside — things like gifts, or the insides of project bags, or scrappy colorwork where lots of colors are mixed together anyway.

I also clearly have a merino problem. I knew this, but seeing it laid out confirms it. A huge percentage of my fingering and DK weight is merino or merino blend, which makes sense because it’s the workhorse of the knitting world, but it does mean I have very little of some other fibers I genuinely love and could stand to have more of. I’d like to work more with silk blends, with alpaca, and with linen. That’s not a shopping list — it’s a reminder to pay attention to fiber diversity when I do buy things rather than defaulting to merino every time.

Projects Currently in Progress

It wouldn’t be a proper stash update without a glimpse at what’s actually on the needles right now, because the in-progress pile is its own category of yarn commitment.

The worsted teal blanket I mentioned is slow going but genuinely enjoyable in the way that big simple projects can be — it’s what I pick up when I want to knit but don’t want to think. I’ve been carrying it around the house with me and knitting a few rows in whatever room I end up in, which is a good strategy for making progress on something large without it feeling overwhelming.

I also have a pair of socks on the needles that are nearly finished, using one of the low-contrast speckle skeins from the birthday gift card purchase. They’re plain vanilla socks because the yarn is interesting enough on its own, and they’re in that sweet spot of almost done where every session feels like real progress.

There’s a colorwork hat I started impulsively using two contrasting skeins from my leftovers bin, and it’s either going to be wonderful or it’s going to teach me a lesson about impulse-starting new projects when other things are already in progress. The jury is still out.

And the linen-cotton sweater is swatched and measured but not yet cast on, which is the most terrifying moment in a sweater’s lifecycle — the moment when you’ve committed enough to swatch but haven’t yet begun, and the potential for it to be perfect is still completely intact.

Where Things Go From Here

I don’t make stash resolutions anymore because they never work, but I do like to set loose intentions. The intention for the next few months is to get through some of the longer-standing residents of the stash, the things that have been around for more than two years with no movement. Most of them are still there because I haven’t found quite the right pattern, or because the quantity is awkward, or because I was saving them for the right moment. At some point the right moment has to be created rather than waited for.

I also want to actually start that eucalyptus-green linen sweater before it becomes something I look at wistfully for another year.

And I want to go through that basket of single skeins. I really do.

If you have yarn you’ve been sitting on for too long, here’s the encouragement you came here looking for: cast it on. Find a pattern that’s close enough. Wind the skein and put it somewhere you’ll see it. The yarn is not going to use itself up, and the project you make from it — even if it’s imperfect, even if it’s not what you originally imagined — will always be more interesting than a skein sitting in a bin.

I’ll be back with part three eventually, probably after I’ve made more things and bought more yarn, because that is apparently just the rhythm of this now. Thanks for reading.