It's All About The Planning

 My small stash of Shetland Spindrift for my Fair Isle Knitting class at this year's Yarnover Event.

There's a group I belong to on Ravelry called Pre-process Yarnies.  They are knitters who love the planning of projects possibly more than the actual knitting itself and tend to get themselves into trouble by acquiring too much yarn and more patterns than they could ever knit up.  Loosing themselves down the Ravelry rabbit hole for hours on end.  Does that sound familiar?  The hope of these knitters is to have more yardage go out, in the way of completing projects or selling yarn, than comes in over the course of a year.  It all started with the group leader's blog post which you can read here.

 

The leader has developed a great Spreadsheet to help the group members track their progress oddly called The Spreadsheet of Doom. It helps you track the yardage of the yarn you knit up, bought and sold (as well as fiber and spinning if you are so inclined.) So far mine spreadsheet numbers are abysmal as so much yardage has gone into my stash with my local yarn shop closing.  Also, since I am in the midst of a large knitting project I have only been able to add 2 small projects to my finished knitted items column.

To help get me an accurate picture of what I have on hand I dove into my stash (yes, again) and pulled all the yarn I haven't yet photographed to get them listed on my Ravelry Stash page.  I do love this process, the organizing and cataloging, as well as just tossing the stash to say "hi" to all those beautiful skeins of yarn.  It was a pretty enlightening.  My stashed yarn listings went up quite a bit more than I expected.  Remember this photo?  Well, imagine adding 3 more of those tubs and you have my current stash.  I'm going in the wrong direction folks.

The yarn budget now has only one fourth left with less than one month of the year gone, but the stash looks like about 3-4 years of solid knitting.  I have a lot of sweater quantities which got me to thinking of a challenge for myself:  I am going to try to knit and complete four sweaters this year.  Basically a sweater per quarter.  Definitely doable don't you think?.  Probably there will be a little room leftover for sock and accessory knitting too, at least that's my hope.  A girl doesn't want to get too sweater crazy right?