Walk On Wednesday through Stash Busting

My yarn drawer was getting out of control, as they do, and I had been urged to stash bust by the members of Knitwits and Hookers, my local knit and crochet club, so I decided that it was time. I am going to walk you through my stash busting process and hope that you will find some fun, some inspiration and some useful information in your own stash busting quest. 

I realize that I said yarn drawer and most of you are thinking "Yarn drawer, how is that possible? I have a yarn room." I have one yarn drawer full of yarn that is not earmarked for a specific project or part of a product I make. It's mostly full of yarn I have used in gifts, products that are no longer in production or yarn that someone has given me that I had no specific project for. So yes, one yarn drawer, but by no means the amount of yarn I have in storage. 

Now on to our walk. When I first decided to tackle my yarn drawer I walked into the craft room and found this....

I had to come back when the princess had left the yarn drawer. (Which is why the lighting in the next few pictures is not ideal) I sat with my  yarn drawer next to my feet and, needless to say, it was definitely more knots than balls. 

 I sorted through the mass tangle, untangling and untying as I went. 

Tip: While you sort and untangle, pile yarn in color groups. If multi-color or variegated, make those their own stack. 

I then create a color wheel with my yarn. 

You do not have to know a lot about color theory to deal with a color wheel. There are a lot of resources online. You do have to have a general idea of where things go, so here is a color wheel that you can work from.

Color Wheel

Colors flow naturally from one to the other in a large circle. Grey scale is outside of the color wheel. 

Grey Scale

Now you might not have enough room or too much yarn to actually lay your yarn out in a color wheel, so here is a printable color wheel that you can use to kind of fill in the blank. Just make sure that you know which ball of yarn fits into which blank. 

Thank you clicky nicky.  

Tip: If you have a ball that no longer has a label, label it yourself and stick your new label into the ball with a T-pin. 

(Completely off topic note: if you ever have a few hours to wander around Deviant Art it is definitely worth the time.) 







So now I have my color wheel. I generally work two ways around the color wheel, Around the World or Opposites Attract. (For more explanation on those terms see next Tuesday's blog.) This time I chose to go Around the World. I chose a square I fell in love with on Pinterest. I used two coordinating or matching colors for the flower and bright white for my edging. Then I worked 

Thank you My Rose Valley 

around my color wheel starting with green to yellow, yellow to orange, orange to pink, etc. 











It turned out gorgeous, as de-stash projects always do. 

Please share your de-stash projects with me. Love to see them in progress or complete. 

Back next Monday for more coffee and crochet. 

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