Stash Flash 2019
Ravelry, the website I have potentially had an account on the longest, has several threads in the forums where people post photos of their yarn and spinning fiber stashes. It's fun, and a good way to remind yourself of what you have and why, perhaps, you don't need to acquire more.
I've also studiously avoided the practice, thinking I knew pretty well what was in my stash and not needing a reminder of how very much I haven't yet used.
But actually, this was fun, and nice, and a good reminder that I am flush with joys of the fibrous kind. It also brought a few yarns I vaguely remembered having back to the front of my mind, where they're likely to stay remembered for a while, and inspire me to look for patterns that'll work with them.
In the upper left section, laceweight and weaving yarns, including some on old wooden bobbins. I love working with fine yarn, but consistently underestimate how long it can take to make a garment, so that section is likely to stay much the same this year.
The upper right is sock and fingering weight yarns—obviously a great love of mine. There are two in-progress projects up there, too: A magenta and teal shawl I've been stymied on for some years, which I think I may simply modify slightly to get me past the confusing pattern change; and just below it, a gauge-and-pattern swatch in sage green and cream for a colorwork sweater I'll need to modify heavily to get a garment that fits me. It's based on one of those patterns where the designer simply wrote up what they did to make their garment, and you're free to do the math for your own size—a new challenge for me, and I feel most confident making changes to a colorwork pattern. Unlike lace or cables, minding the exact stitch count and decrease/increase patterns won't be as fraught.
Below, from right to left, are sportweight, worsted, and bulky yarns; I only have the really luscious ones left, because I'm just not a fan of working at large gauges—and the majority of the bulky yarns are destined for a rug or carpet, one of these days.
The black tote at lower left has my glorious (overwhelming) collection of Scalamandre silks. They're effectively mill ends, and I've mainly used them for embroidery so far, though I'm hoping to use some of them for weaving projects eventually.
But wait, that's not all the yarn! (Actually, even with this photo, that's not all of it...there's a skein attached to half a sock that lives at work, in hopes that I'll be inspired to take it up again.) This is the stuff I've spun, which I really should try to work with more often.
Handspun tends to feel extra precious because of all the extra time that's gone into it—and spinning fiber isn't necessarily a cheaper way to acquire yarn. Also, just like in knitting, I prefer to work with finer yarns, which makes the spinning take longer...and the knitting up of the spun yarn, too. The two pink hanks at lower left are each probably 700 to 900 yards of yarn, and the fat blue hank next to them measures about 1300 yards (that's about three-quarters of a mile, if you were wondering).
The others are thicker, and a lot of them have three plies; some will definitely be turned into socks eventually, and others...I'm not sure. Most of my spinning to date has been for the fun of spinning, which seems to mean that when I find a pattern or garment I'd especially like to make with a certain yarn I end up about 100 yards short. Something to muse on as I work through the spinning stash.
Okay, this was way less out of hand before I went to the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival last year. (It was still out of hand. Just less so.) The three biggest fleeces up top, plus the little ball of grey wool near center, and a few of the bits and pieces in the middle right, are all results of that trip. The two fleeces in canvas bags at left are from a college purchase where we split two fleeces among three of us. They're lovely fleeces, I just need to decide how I want to spin them.
The messy pile of white fiber at lower left, with the bright orange fabric bag and the (nearly-invisible) glass vase of pink fiber are one project in progress. I'm spinning the white and the pink separately to ply together into yet more pinkish laceweight yarn...
The row of plastic-bagged natural colors along the bottom are alpaca rovings, already separated and ready to be spun up into a gradient set of yarn; the all-black has been spun and is waiting to be plied now.
The colorful stuff in the middle is largely from one year of a monthly fiber club, plus an 8-ounce portion that might someday make a light sweater all by itself, and a pound of beautiful alpaca-silk blend that I need to figure out a plan for.
Aaaahhhhhhh!!
I have not been sewing even half as long as I've been spinning and knitting. Where did all of this come from?! (See also: reasons Sabine didn't have a credit card for a Very Long Time. Sabine knows herself this much.)
For scale, the bolt of white linen marking a divide just shy of the left side of the array is five feet long. Left of it are my few remaining polyester fabrics, and a work in progress I think I'm going to take apart and remake.
Right of the bolt, the top three rows are cottons—batting, quilt fabric, muslins and gauzes, a lot of pink sateen for an eventual Victorian project...there's a little handwoven sample in there, and a piece of corduroy, and a half-made skirt I'm also going to remake. I do actually have plans for most of the cottons, as I work toward a more heavily handmade wardrobe, but clearly I need to keep away from the tempting clearance quilt fabric sections at local fabric shops.
The lower two rows of the center column are linens—and you can't see, but the big blue folded piece is actually two six-yard lengths of the same exact color, bought probably a year apart. I don't know if I'd forgotten I already had some, or what, but I don't need more anytime soon. The bright red and orange will probably be used for scrap projects or padding; they're a heavier weight than I tend to like. The pink (there's very clearly one shade of pink I gravitate to) is a lovely lightweight, smooth weave, and of course there's the entire bolt I bought when I had greater ambitions toward medieval undergarments. I have four chemises now, which is probably plenty, so it's likely to turn into a very nice sheet set and a quilted fencing coat instead.
On the far right, wools and silks, and two lengths of rayon at the bottom of the column. Once again, mostly I have plans for these, I just haven't gotten to them yet—and in the case of the silk, I want to have a perfect pattern ready. I should probably just use it.
The boxes up top are muslin and other patterning bits, on the left, and smaller scraps and taken-apart shirts, on the right. I think most of the scraps are going to get pressed into service as the "darks" on a checkerboard quilt, to help me get better at machining fabrics, and to clear space in the scrap box.
This doesn't count for the regular fabric stash, because it's all fabric that has a very specific purpose—the pair of hexagon quilts I'm making in the slowest possible fashion. You may remember my struggles with geometric math from earlier; I've accepted that a 10x16-foot quilt is...slightly surplus to requirements, and well beyond the capacity of even the industrial washing machines I have access to, so now I'm making a slightly-more-than-king-size quilt and what I'm referring to as a lap quilt. It'll probably be closer to the twin-size end of the spectrum between twin and crib quilts, because despite careful cutting and eking of fabrics, the fat quarters I've gotten from Joanns have typically been slightly short of a full 18x22 inches. Which means they're throwing off the math I already did four times. So I bought ten more fat quarters to make up the shortfall, and that's likely going to give me slightly too many hexies, and I'm just going to keep tacking them onto the edges of the smaller quilt (as the one with more backing fabric wiggle room) until I run out.
Each pair of bagged hexies on the left represents two fat quarters' worth of fabric (44 so far; the incomplete stack at the bottom is finished now, too).
The rightmost column is washed and ironed fabrics, because I want to make the chances as good as possible that a machine wash and dry won't ruin the eventual quilts. There are 14 fat quarters there (or their equivalents, when I bought half-yards of a few patterns I liked and didn't see in quarter form).
The skinny column one in from right is all the fat quarters I've yet to wash and iron (32 of those), and the top half of the remaining column are fabrics I'm going to make only 24-48 hexagons each from. Other than the yellow at the top, which is plain yellow cotton and going to count for two more fat quarters...but the rest of the top half of that column are silks for texture contrast and some visual resting points in the otherwise extreme busyness of a slightly-more-than-king-size quilt composed of one-inch hexagons made of a dizzying array of fabric prints.
And the remaining two blue fabrics are backing for the quilts; a pretty floral lattice for the smaller of the two, and the nebula/night sky for the larger. I'm strongly tempted to embroider the nebula fabric with stylized gold stars, for extra ridiculousness points.
Last textile(ish) stash—leather! The roll on the left is some leftover furniture leather a neighbor gave me before she moved; top and middle are scraps from a friend who had no further use for them, and right is a roll of gorgeous heavy stuff I actually purchased meaning to make body armour from it. But now I'm not doing that type of fighting, and it's still beautiful...but I have no real purpose for it. Maybe I'll get into shoemaking, and use it for flashy soles.
I've also studiously avoided the practice, thinking I knew pretty well what was in my stash and not needing a reminder of how very much I haven't yet used.
 |
| It's better than it looks? |
In the upper left section, laceweight and weaving yarns, including some on old wooden bobbins. I love working with fine yarn, but consistently underestimate how long it can take to make a garment, so that section is likely to stay much the same this year.
The upper right is sock and fingering weight yarns—obviously a great love of mine. There are two in-progress projects up there, too: A magenta and teal shawl I've been stymied on for some years, which I think I may simply modify slightly to get me past the confusing pattern change; and just below it, a gauge-and-pattern swatch in sage green and cream for a colorwork sweater I'll need to modify heavily to get a garment that fits me. It's based on one of those patterns where the designer simply wrote up what they did to make their garment, and you're free to do the math for your own size—a new challenge for me, and I feel most confident making changes to a colorwork pattern. Unlike lace or cables, minding the exact stitch count and decrease/increase patterns won't be as fraught.
Below, from right to left, are sportweight, worsted, and bulky yarns; I only have the really luscious ones left, because I'm just not a fan of working at large gauges—and the majority of the bulky yarns are destined for a rug or carpet, one of these days.
The black tote at lower left has my glorious (overwhelming) collection of Scalamandre silks. They're effectively mill ends, and I've mainly used them for embroidery so far, though I'm hoping to use some of them for weaving projects eventually.
 |
| Yes, I do have an affinity for huge squishy skeins of handspun. |
Handspun tends to feel extra precious because of all the extra time that's gone into it—and spinning fiber isn't necessarily a cheaper way to acquire yarn. Also, just like in knitting, I prefer to work with finer yarns, which makes the spinning take longer...and the knitting up of the spun yarn, too. The two pink hanks at lower left are each probably 700 to 900 yards of yarn, and the fat blue hank next to them measures about 1300 yards (that's about three-quarters of a mile, if you were wondering).
The others are thicker, and a lot of them have three plies; some will definitely be turned into socks eventually, and others...I'm not sure. Most of my spinning to date has been for the fun of spinning, which seems to mean that when I find a pattern or garment I'd especially like to make with a certain yarn I end up about 100 yards short. Something to muse on as I work through the spinning stash.
 |
| I like the sort of Fibonacci spiral effect I seem to have made with the fleece bags. |
The messy pile of white fiber at lower left, with the bright orange fabric bag and the (nearly-invisible) glass vase of pink fiber are one project in progress. I'm spinning the white and the pink separately to ply together into yet more pinkish laceweight yarn...
The row of plastic-bagged natural colors along the bottom are alpaca rovings, already separated and ready to be spun up into a gradient set of yarn; the all-black has been spun and is waiting to be plied now.
The colorful stuff in the middle is largely from one year of a monthly fiber club, plus an 8-ounce portion that might someday make a light sweater all by itself, and a pound of beautiful alpaca-silk blend that I need to figure out a plan for.
 |
| Repeat after me: I don't have a problem, I have a carefully curated collection. |
I have not been sewing even half as long as I've been spinning and knitting. Where did all of this come from?! (See also: reasons Sabine didn't have a credit card for a Very Long Time. Sabine knows herself this much.)
For scale, the bolt of white linen marking a divide just shy of the left side of the array is five feet long. Left of it are my few remaining polyester fabrics, and a work in progress I think I'm going to take apart and remake.
Right of the bolt, the top three rows are cottons—batting, quilt fabric, muslins and gauzes, a lot of pink sateen for an eventual Victorian project...there's a little handwoven sample in there, and a piece of corduroy, and a half-made skirt I'm also going to remake. I do actually have plans for most of the cottons, as I work toward a more heavily handmade wardrobe, but clearly I need to keep away from the tempting clearance quilt fabric sections at local fabric shops.
The lower two rows of the center column are linens—and you can't see, but the big blue folded piece is actually two six-yard lengths of the same exact color, bought probably a year apart. I don't know if I'd forgotten I already had some, or what, but I don't need more anytime soon. The bright red and orange will probably be used for scrap projects or padding; they're a heavier weight than I tend to like. The pink (there's very clearly one shade of pink I gravitate to) is a lovely lightweight, smooth weave, and of course there's the entire bolt I bought when I had greater ambitions toward medieval undergarments. I have four chemises now, which is probably plenty, so it's likely to turn into a very nice sheet set and a quilted fencing coat instead.
On the far right, wools and silks, and two lengths of rayon at the bottom of the column. Once again, mostly I have plans for these, I just haven't gotten to them yet—and in the case of the silk, I want to have a perfect pattern ready. I should probably just use it.
The boxes up top are muslin and other patterning bits, on the left, and smaller scraps and taken-apart shirts, on the right. I think most of the scraps are going to get pressed into service as the "darks" on a checkerboard quilt, to help me get better at machining fabrics, and to clear space in the scrap box.
 |
| This is the first time I've had all the materials out at once to look at them. |
This doesn't count for the regular fabric stash, because it's all fabric that has a very specific purpose—the pair of hexagon quilts I'm making in the slowest possible fashion. You may remember my struggles with geometric math from earlier; I've accepted that a 10x16-foot quilt is...slightly surplus to requirements, and well beyond the capacity of even the industrial washing machines I have access to, so now I'm making a slightly-more-than-king-size quilt and what I'm referring to as a lap quilt. It'll probably be closer to the twin-size end of the spectrum between twin and crib quilts, because despite careful cutting and eking of fabrics, the fat quarters I've gotten from Joanns have typically been slightly short of a full 18x22 inches. Which means they're throwing off the math I already did four times. So I bought ten more fat quarters to make up the shortfall, and that's likely going to give me slightly too many hexies, and I'm just going to keep tacking them onto the edges of the smaller quilt (as the one with more backing fabric wiggle room) until I run out.
Each pair of bagged hexies on the left represents two fat quarters' worth of fabric (44 so far; the incomplete stack at the bottom is finished now, too).
The rightmost column is washed and ironed fabrics, because I want to make the chances as good as possible that a machine wash and dry won't ruin the eventual quilts. There are 14 fat quarters there (or their equivalents, when I bought half-yards of a few patterns I liked and didn't see in quarter form).
The skinny column one in from right is all the fat quarters I've yet to wash and iron (32 of those), and the top half of the remaining column are fabrics I'm going to make only 24-48 hexagons each from. Other than the yellow at the top, which is plain yellow cotton and going to count for two more fat quarters...but the rest of the top half of that column are silks for texture contrast and some visual resting points in the otherwise extreme busyness of a slightly-more-than-king-size quilt composed of one-inch hexagons made of a dizzying array of fabric prints.
And the remaining two blue fabrics are backing for the quilts; a pretty floral lattice for the smaller of the two, and the nebula/night sky for the larger. I'm strongly tempted to embroider the nebula fabric with stylized gold stars, for extra ridiculousness points.
 |
| I only bought one of these items. |
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