Oh yarn! Come out, come out wherever you are!

Stash: noun
1. Hiding place
2. Something stored or hidden away
Courtesy of merriam-webster.com

One of my favorite threads over on Ravelry is the Flash Your Stash thread on the Main 6.  I am in awe over everyone's stashes - small and large, fancy and plain.  On my to-do list at the beginning of the year was to get out all my stash for a photo-shoot.  In December, I was very diligent about photographing the skeins and cataloguing them in my Rav-stash page.  However, I did not take a family portrait of my kiddies.  So, one Saturday while the husband was at work, I got it all out of its various hiding places... bins, bags, nooks & crannies.  And I came to one conclusion... I need a bigger bed:

This is only about 95% of the stash.  And in some places it is a few skeins deep.  Along the headboard and the right edge are my kits and yarn purchased in bulk.  Clockwise from top right corner: kitchen cotton, Palette fingering weight, sock yarn (lower right corner), worsted and DK (lower left corner), sport weight, back to worsted, and then in the top left corner is the acrylic.

I think I've come a far way from my baby stash of 5 years ago:

Where does this yarn live when it's not lounging on our bed?  Well, I store the acrylic, bulk yarns, and kits in the spare bedroom in a tall bookshelf I bought several months ago.  Originally it was for the entire stash.  However over the past few months I have added to the stash quite a bit and needed more space.  The husband agreed that I could put another shelf unit in the living room as long as it didn't overflow and look icky.  In this unit, I store my higher quality yarns and the yarns I am using nowadays - Cascade, sock yarn, Palette, Malabrigo, and Madelinetosh to name a few.

Living Room Stash.  Top shelf: Sock yarns in the side baskets; notions, needles & tools in sunflower box; Clockwise from top left corner: Palette; sock yarn; Madelinetosh (2); various worsted; Cascade 220 & Malabrigo; various worsted; Cascade 220 sport superwash.  The center block contains some of my favorite books.

[As an aside - that pink tool bag you see in the photo?  It was a Christmas gift from the husband.  I spotted it one day a few months back while we were walking through Sears.  C took note and surprised me with it under the tree on Christmas morning.  I should note that we usually both know what we're getting for Christmas because we shop together, so this really was a surprise that he remembered :-)]

I do not have a recent photo of the spare-room stash.  Mostly because that room is forever a WIP and has piles of clothes and such to be donated to Goodwill.  I'm also re-organizing all my scrapbooking supplies now that I have space on the tall bookshelf.

And with that, I would like to amend the dictionary definition of stash from something hidden away to: collection of beloved items to be treasured and given a proper home.

Happy Knitting everyone!