The short of it is that I reorganized all of my yarn leftovers by weight and separated them and put them on display in various dishes I had in my house.
The long of it is: I originally stored my yarn leftovers in a huge hurricane candle jar. They were so pretty and since they were on display, I started actually using my leftovers. I thought I'd never be able to fill the jar. I laugh at myself now for thinking that, of course. Never fill up a yarn jar, indeed!
Over time, the jar got filled to the absolute top. I had even reorganized within the jar and put all of the smallish balls in between bigger ones to make it all fit better. Eventually, because I couldn't easily get to the things in the bottom, most of my leftovers ended up being forgotten.
For a while now, I've been toying around with the idea to organize my yarns by yarn weight and store them in pretty jars that way. Alas, time passed, and the budget never really left room for frivolities like buying a bunch of jars to store different yarns, and the idea seemed to languish along with my poor, forgotten leftover yarns.
Today, though, something inside of me snapped. I wanted to organize my yarns. As I sat knitting, I thought of how I could possibly go to a thrift store and get jars, and that would be better than buying new ones anyway, right? I'd be reusing something that someone else had gotten rid of, keeping things out of landfills and all of that. Not only that (here's where I got excited), I could purposefully get mismatching pieces and make a cool, eclectic glass display of a mismatching, eclectic collection of yarns!
Then, since my new plan was to do mismatched glass dishes anyway, I suddenly remembered this cabinet I have in my kitchen that, quite frankly, scares the living daylights out of me every time I try to open it. Each time I open that door, I wonder if this is going to be the time that all of the glass dishes I have in there will go crashing down around me. There's a mixed feeling involved there, too, actually. I'm both horrified at the idea of losing the dishes and also thinking that if they all broke, I wouldn't have to store them anymore, and that would be pretty awesome. These are the kinds of dishes that are nice to have at holidays or parties, right? They're for decoratively displaying food at multiple levels, making even cheap things look somehow so much more fancy. I remember one time I piled Oreos, just plain Oreos, decoratively and in cute stepping stacks on my two tiered glass dish and out of all the fancy foods I'd prepared for that party, people got the biggest kick out of the Oreo display. These dishes always make my parties look cooler, but they take up a lot of room. I don't want to get rid of them, but I don't want to store them. It has always been a huge dilemma to me, every time I declutter.
Until now!
I adore this little display. It puts my yarns out and lets me see them. They're not going to languish anymore, forgotten and alone, the unwanted, unused little leftovers from bigger skeins that have already gone on to fulfill their destiny. No, these precious leftovers have a purpose and a destiny all their own, and now they get to fulfill it, too.
The yarns are organized by weight, clockwise from left to right: Lace weight (0), Worsted weight (4), Sport weight (2), Sock weight (1), and DK weight (3). The Bulky (5) and Super Bulky (6) container wouldn't fit on this shelf, so that yarn is tucked away a closet, but it's still organized and I can get to it quickly.
I'm already planning striped scarves, flowers, hats, striped socks, etc... I'm going to be unstoppable. The only problem I can think of with this is... If I knit all my leftovers, then my kitchen cabinet gets scary again. See? Buying new yarn and making new projects and new leftovers has now become practically essential to the entire organization of my house. (Bonus!) I wonder when TYF is getting its next Malabrigo shipment?
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