So, after a long hiatus from posting, I thought I’d start here… with my slow but constant effort to trim down the various nooks and crannies where I store things. Our move to Bend is only a few weeks away, and I just don’t want to move all this stuff across a mountain range just to realize we have no room for it.

I wanted to start with Cody’s stuff, or maybe JL’s, but let’s face it, I need to work on myself first. So behold—the bench next to our fireplace, the home of my yarn stash.

From this day forward, this bench will forever be known as the clown-car bench. I had no idea how much stuff I had jammed in there! Hundreds of spools of crochet cotton, half-used skeins, and a few dozen unfinished projects, instructions, and bundles of yarn that I had no idea what I’d bought them for.

So, my resolution with every one of these projects—whether it be my clothes closet, my cedar chest or the office supplies in my computer hutch—is to reduce it by 50%. Half must go.

I thought this was going to be difficult, but it was much easier than I thought. After going through it, I realized that most of my stash was yarn I really wasn’t ever going to use. Half-skeins of yarn with no label and indeterminate fiber content just isn’t useful to me anymore. If I don’t know how to care for it, I certainly won’t use it in something I’m giving as a gift.

All scraps–gone. All spools, balls, and skeins of questionable yardage–gone. No more crunchy, scratchy yarns I’ll never use. Nothing with weird stains, no tangles, no vintage stuff kept just because it’s old and someone I love gave it to me.

I filled an entire Priority Mail box with wool blends–mostly Lamb’s Pride acquired over a decade of knitting hats and felted bags and slippers. That is going to Paul Henry, my friend Lisa’s son who lives in New Hampshire. He’s taking up knitting, and this stuff might break a high-schooler’s budget. He is a creative person, and will probably find a delightful way of using up all the scraps and bits.

All the finished projects that wouldn’t work for Cody’s half-brother’s new baby (who’s due in a week or so)–off to Goodwill. All the half-done projects–gone. If they’re not done, I’ll never finish them. All the scraps and bits of knitting that aren’t being used–gone.

I started the project at about 4 pm… by about 6:30, I had a disaster in my living room, no dinner cooked, and the dog looking a little dejected that there wasn’t any carpet left to roll on. But I had separated the full skeins and organized everything by type and size, and had set aside a ton of stuff that would go… including the knitting looms that I bought when I broke my arm (pretty much never used), and a few other tools and goodies.

I packed the thread back in the snap case, and separated the Goodwill donations from the remaining fiber that was going to MECCA, the local art-supply recycling cooperative.

A drive-up dinner and a cocktail later, and here’s what the “after” photo looked like:

The only items I kept are on the right: one large blanket bag of nicer yarn, the middle sized blanket bag containing the rest of my bedspread cotton and and a few large hanks of vintage silk yarn, and the snap case with the smaller crochet thread. A few bags of needles, and that’s it. In all, I donated about 10 lbs. of fiber to MECCA, not including the half-finished items and odds and ends donated to Goodwill.

You might think I felt deflated after getting rid of so much, but it was liberating! I cannot wait to go through all of the beautiful, high-quality yarn that remains to find inspiration for my next project.