One of the fun things about being part of the knitting community on Instagram are the Instagram equivalents of 'chain letters', so to speak, where one person tags others to share a particular type of photo or factoid about themselves. Yesterday I was tagged by fellow designer Andrea Rangel to share what color dominates my stash and I admit, I wasn't sure going off of just memory! I decided to cure my curiosity and take some time to reorganize my stash, which has been on my to-do list for awhile. I started with the konmari method of emptying all of the possessions in question (yarn) out on the floor so you can see them in their glory--and maybe so you can be shamed by how much you actually have? Whatever works! Then I got inspired and arranged my stash by color:
ALL THE PRETTIES! This photo (and the corresponding data in the rest of the post) includes my unused stash and any mostly-full balls I intend to keep. There is a whole pile not shown of yarn I am destashing and leftover bits I am tossing out. Remember: I am coming up on 5 years of being an employee at the largest yarn store in America, so not only do I have access to a lot of yarn I also have a sweet employee discount. Sowwy! I would estimate that I paid full retail price for less than 10% of this, what with that awesome discount plus there is some free yarn support for upcoming designs in there. (Design yarn gets stored in a separate bag but joined the rest for this photo!)
I'm not really a stats person but I decided to play around with some numbers after seeing my stash laid out like this. Here are two ways to process that picture: stash by color and stash by weight! For both I counted individual skeins, not by potential project.
Green is my favorite color so no surprise that it takes the top spot with 21%! Grey is next with 14%, followed funnily enough by natural and pink at 12%--both colors which I like but don't particularly feel are favorites of mine. If you asked me what my favorite colors are, after saying 'almost everything' I would settle on green, yellow and orange. Yellow is in the middle of the pack at 9% and shockingly....no orange yarn! Though I do already have an orange sweater, I guess it filled my orange yarn urges well enough that I didn't buy anymore. (And I have an orange purse.) I'm not surprised at blues, purples and reds making up the bottom of the pack since I don't feel a strong attachment to any of those colors. Seeing as there is no clear majority (I don't even have a color with 30% or more hogging my stash) it's obvious from this photo that I am rainbow-friendly. I feel this is an accurate representation of my openness to colors in my yarn stash and by extension, in my personal wardrobe!
Sorting my stash by weight surprised me more than the colors did. While I'm not surprised that worsted holds the majority share at 34%, I'm surprised to see fingering come in at second place with 27%. I am not a huge shawl or sock knitter, though I do like knitting and designing both. When examining the fingering weight pile more closely, however, a trend emerges--I stash sweater quantities of fingering weight faster than I design/knit fingering weight sweaters. Oops. Guess I gotta get on that for 2015! I feel like I knit with DK weight a lot but quite possibly I wound up using all the yarn for those projects, or they were for outside publications in which case I don't get to keep any leftovers. I have two sweater quantities of bulky weight which drives that up to 13%, and since I rarely use laceweight I'm not at all shocked that comes in last place with a measly 5%.
What does all this mean? Well, odds are that if you reach into my stash at random you are most likely to pull out green, fingering weight or worsted weight yarn! Aside from that....I have too much yarn! Keep an eye on my Ravelry destash page this week if you want a chance to get a piece of this pie.