Stash

It's an old joke with knitters that we collect much more yarn than we have projects for. We refer to those bins, bags and piles of fiber as our stash. The Yarn Harlot (a knitting-humor celebrity) has written hilarious bits about stash management, including how to hide it around the house and what happens if your stash outlives you.(Gratuitous celebrity photo here).  

Like any obsessed collector, I like to spend some quality time with my stash. It's a pleasant way to spend an early weekend morning, sorting it, reviewing amounts, thinking about potential projects, and just kind of playing with it.

I've talked about Ravelry a bunch - it's an online community of knitters (and crocheters, though I don't fraternize with them much) with a hyperlinked inventory system of yarn, patterns, people and ongoing projects. We photograph our stash and projects and post them in our notebooks for others to search and explore. (This is where hours of my life have been whiled away, and no, it's not a waste of time.) One of the best uses of stash listings is to find that last critical skein needed to finish a project, then swap or purchase.

It's a thrill to track down the needed yarn and make a trade. It's also satisfying to fulfill another knitter's desperate search with some odd skein in my stash.

For example, here is a pic of a happy transaction. I had one skein of this sock yarn, not enough to make a pair of socks. 

I found the one person in the world who still had this yarn and was willing to part with it. Now my skein has a twin and everyone is happy.