It was time to do a bit of organizing before the flurry of fall crafting and gift making. This fall is going to be stuffed full of non-crafting things, but I also want to be making a million things.
Step one: export my Ravelry stash file to a spreadsheet (there’s a little button on the top right of your stash page). Then delete all the columns I don’t need. I need names, colours, number of grams/skeins left, that sort of information. With a stripped down spreadsheet, I can print it more easily.
Step two: gather the stash.
Step three: make an ungodly mess. Turn the entire main floor into a sorting station as I put all the yarn in groups by weight. This was my approach in principle all along, but of course things get a bit less precise over time. I had kept all of my sweater quantities in one seperate box, but decided to try to sort them back in with the rest of their weight. Could be madness. Who knows yet?
Step 4: determine what’s real and what’s virtual. Once things were all in their places, it was time to cross-check the real stash vs the Ravelry stash. Since the default setting will have the stash spreadsheet sorted by weight, having it all the yarn sorted by weight made this part less like a treasure hunt.
I grabbed a marker and a pen. If I confirmed something was there and the number of skeins was right, it got highlighted. The pen was there to mark off things that were missing or needed changes.
Step five: ride that high and organize the projects I know I’ll be working on this fall.
Step six: go into Ravelry and tidy up the listings so they match reality.
Step seven: go knit.
Do you have a stash management philosophy? Routine?
I keep saying I’ll do the same.
In the past I’ve resisted printing out my ravelry stash. I keep trying to update it directly in ravelry instead. Time to admit I like the “tick and tie” with paper.
I need to quit talking and do it. I’ll start before the end of the month. For me the first step will be to gather all my yarn into one place since its spread between two rooms.
I need to do this! Just moved and will be changing up how I store my stash, so reorganization will definitely be happening. And I really need to update the virtual stash!
I love the ideas! The size of my real stash to my virtual stash is huge, especially since I have almost 3 bins of wool in my real stash and only 5 entries in my virtual. The thought of how to add this all into Ravelry has seemed overwhelming. I love your idea of printing the spreadsheet and going from there.