Organising the stash

My stash is getting out of control. I have most of the fleeces, washed, in buckets up the loft. The spun yarn is under my bed, in a variety of stacker boxes. I have no idea what is there. I'm not even sure what I'm spinning right now. What can I do?

Back in January I admitted the exact nature of my wrongs to my eight year old, who put his fearsome problem-solving powers to work and came up with this answer: colour coding! Red for the coarsest of longwools, working through to purple for the alpaca. Colour code the stash buckets, colour code the pillowcases of fleece inside them, colour code the skeins of yarn to be washed, colour code the cakes of finished yarn. Genius! That boy will go far.

Looking through the finished yarns made me realise how really, really helpful it would be to label my yarn cakes. I like grey Romney, grey Gotland, and grey alpaca. They all look the same spun up. But they certainly won't knit the same. I had to make my best guess and sort out like with like into carrier bags. I put them into two large stacker boxes, one for longwools and another one for sweater and sock yarns. I also bought some luggage labels and vowed to label all skeins and cakes from now on.


Assigning a colour to each and every fleece in my stash really sorted out the sheep from the....er....alpacas. Why did I have so much coarse longwool? Why so little next-to-the-skin-soft wool? Why so many downs fleeces of short staple length, when the love of my life is Romney? Now I feel the need for an annual fleece-purchasing policy, where I actually take stock of what I need and buy that. That's starting to sound a bit too sensible for me, but the alternative is a loft full of Herdwick and a desire to knit vests.

Once the fleeces were sorted into the various hues of course longwools, fine longwools, medium downs, fine downs, very fine and alpacas, the skeins could be colour-coded too. I was lucky enough to be given several sacks of rug yarn recently, of varying hues. So I have plenty of nice, strong wool to use as skein ties. Each skein has ties which show the softness of the wool, in addition to a luggage label giving the date, the thickness, type of draw, weight, length and type of fleece if I can remember it.

For a couple of weeks I was stymied by the washing process. I draw a trug of warm, soapy water, take 4 to 6 skeins, remove their luggage tages and wash them. Then I have skeins with no labels, and labels with no skeins. The solution? More colour coding, this time on the tags and an extra tie on the skein. So the red tag goes back on the skein with the red tie, and so on. It takes lots of coloured wool, but I have lots, so that's fine.

Romney lambswool, coded yellow for "fine longwool"

The final complication is that I don't do my own caking. I outsource that to my eight-year old, who doesn't always respect the labels. I have to be careful to ask him to only cake one skein at a time, and to put the label back on the cake myself, before putting the cake in the appropriate stacker box.

It's not as cumbersome as it sounds, now that I'm used to it, and when I send my MWAS up the loft for wool, I can just ask him to "grab and bucket of green and a couple of blue" and there is little chance of confusion. Likewise, when I want to knit my little yarn caker a vest, I can just grab a handful of blue skeins of double knitting thickness and know that it will all knit up together, whether they were spun in one batch or not.