I often find dealing with my stash daunting. I dream of being a lace knitter with just one large skein of laceweight yarn keeping me knitting for long periods of time. The sheer numbers of colors you need for my type of knitting make the stash much larger. No matter how big my stash is, I always wish I could find yet another color during a project.

Above is a photo of my current stash - I still try hard to keep it under a certain size because of all the insects in the southwest. I recently knit up and donated my DK weight stash and most of my Shetland yarns.The empty containers are yarns that are in the freezer - I rotate all of them in and out of the freezer for moth prevention purposes.

One of the ways stranded color knitting is different from other types of knitting is that when you finish a project, you have many more partial skeins of yarn than someone who knits with just one color. After multiple colorwork projects it can become a challenge not just to use up all those little bits of yarn but also to store and label them. I definitely try to keep all my weights and brands together but I still end up with small quantities of mystery yarns.

I occasionally measure the wraps per inch of an unidentified yarn to determine the weight but more often I just eyeball a yarn to determine if it is the same weight as the others I want to use in a project. I also have no problem mixing fibers to get the colors I want. Occasionally (gasp) I don't even care and use different weight yarns in the same stranded project.



For my current chullo project I have three yarns of varying fibers and varying weights in the colors shown above. I have some Knitpicks' Andean Treasure (100% alpaca, sport weight), some Elann's Pure Alpaca (100% alpaca, worsted weight), and some Cascade Lana D'Oro (half alpaca/half wool, worsted weight) and I want to use them all for this project. What I'll probably do is use the sport weight for a child's chullo and the other two yarns for the adult hat. If I wasn't going to write up the pattern I'd probably use them all in the same hat just to give me some extra color choices.

Another issue is my need for different color combos to get inspired for a new project. I can knit 3 pairs of Arctic Spring Mittens out of the 4 skeins of Elann's Pure Alpaca Fina sportweight needed for the pattern just by switching the colors for the hand. I wanted to make a few more pairs but did I use the yarn I already had? Of course not - I bought two new colors to make additional color combos instead! sigh