A conquering stash: year two

Well, another year just began and I tough I would give you all a second update on my stashing situation!

First, I would like you all to visit my new website: www.tricotbec.com! This very important step into my designing career was just achieved and I am very proud of it! I will also encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter, as I mean to use it a lot for shameless self-promotion, special discount coupon codes and giveaways!

To be honest, last year my stash won the battle fair and square by more money than I care to admit! See, I am one of those people who buys yarn because it is on sale, or because I have very optimistic plans, or simply because it was a crappy day and I felt like indulging myself. The later happens too often for my needles to catch up, as I have an incurable penchant to indulge myself!

So I my resolution for the  year 2013 is not only to knit from stash until I finally win the war, but to design from stash as well. Again, same as last year, see: A story about a conquering stash.

Now, my stash is actually way to big to list the content of it here (and this would be a quite boring post). The fact that last year was apparently a very humiliating failure leads me to search for another way of organizing this war.

I have decided to focus on collections to help me get the motivation to actually use up my stash instead of day dreaming about all the possible things I could design with other yarns!

After analyzing the content of my huge piles of yarns, I was able to sort them into groups easily identifiable by the end products I can hope to get from it.

Here are the groups I ended up with (more or less):

Hats, mittens, cowls and other small accessories

My accessories stash

Now you may look at this and see that I seem to have a weird color theme: not a very wide palette of colors here. I made myself the same comment and arrived to the conclusion that I must widen my color palette in the future!

I am making a separate post for the plans for the accessories stash here : Frugal Knitting, a collection of accessories!

Garments for my son (size 4T to 6 years old these days)

Children's garment stash

Here I have to say is the lion's share of my stash. It was actually too big to fit on my kitchen table, so I stuffed it in this bin to show you the extent of my yarn-related expense relating to knitting for my only child! Way too much yarn for so little finished projects: I do solemnly swear to turn this around this year, and soon I will be posting about my plans for this, because I do have one!

Garments for a full grown women

Women's garment stash

Looking at this you will probably think again that I have a weird color theme. You will be right and I was weirded myself, because I don't wear that much purple and yellow! I do have plans for at least 3 out of the 4 garment quantity yarns you see here, so you can expect some garment designs from me in 2013!

Lovely fingering weight yarns for luxury items

Shawl stash

Now at least here we can see a wide palette range! I do have a lot of these, though less than last year because I designed my first collection out of last year's stash (my only victory of the year....). As I had a lot of fun last year designing a themed collection, I will do it again this year with another collection of small shawls. Follow "Ode to the Spring: a collection of sideways shawls" !

Now that I did sort my yarns into these useful groups, I am expecting this will help me get the motivation to work with the yarn I have instead of letting my imagination get the best of me!