Tossing the Stash

  

Saturday night, I wandered into my studio to get something, and lo: a pair of powdery brown wings fluttered gently near my yarn.  My heart nearly stopped as the word etched itself across my grey matter:

moths.

I was standing in the middle of every knitter's worst nightmare.  The mere threat of moth infestation is something to be taken very seriously; it's not unusual for the average knitter to start twitching uncontrollably and stuffing yarn into freezers at the word alone.

So, I promptly killed the trespasser and set about scheming how to make sure that my stash was undamaged.  I started moving and reorganizing the first cube on Monday night, and did the bulk of the rest of it yesterday.  I moved all the yarn out of each cube, dusted, then put it back, examining (and okay, maybe fondling) each skein before it was returned to the stash.

I found nothing.  Not a casing, not a chomped strand.  Thank goodness.  I still need to go through a few of the pink baskets, but I'm pretty reassured that my yarn is safe.

In the process, however, I fell in love with my stash all over again.

I organized it a little differently this time around - where before I kept similar weights of yarn together and then organized it by color, this time I organized it more by type and fiber content.  So now I have a Rustic Yarn cube for all my Brooklyn Tweed and Shetland.  My lace cube is organized by fiber, going from Pure Merino (with a special Madtosh Prairie section!) to Pure Cashmere, to Cashmere-Silk, to Silk Blends (Alpaca, Llama, or Merino) to Pure Silk.  Sock yarn is organized by weight and twist.  Luxury fingering weight has its own cube, as does Single Skeins of handpaints, which share a cube with my little Handspun stashette.

Not to toot my horn - okay, maybe a little - but I have awesome taste in yarn.  And to be fair, so do the people who give me yarn!  And rediscovering this love for my stash has given me a renewed desire to knit from it.

School is keeping me super busy, and I have lots of knitting obligations to complete before I can cast on for something fun and new, but I'm going to be keeping my eye out for stashbusting projects.  In the meantime, I'm going to keep on popping back to my studio every five minutes to look at all the pretties.

The clean, blessedly moth-free pretties.