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random thoughts from my life & the universe

Wool. I haz it.

I like wool.
A lot.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing as I spin, and knit, and occasionally crochet…and run a wool business 🙂

As you might imagine, I do keep a fair bit of personal wool on hand – some of the wool may turn into business wool after it’s been spun, but a lot of wool comes into my house as “personal wool”.  As with regular housecleaning and organization, I usually dig out my entire stash to reorganize it and get some inspiration.  The last time I did this was about a year ago. I had a lot of wool then, and I still do – surprisingly, it does look like I have spun up the rest of my own personally dyed wool as I no longer have any Spritely Goods wool in the pile any longer.  Liberating the wool stash for organization always freaks me out at first, but then it brings me such joy and such inspiration!

Thought you might like a peek at the crazy organizational process:

First I dig it all out the wool and arrange in piles by fiber type…

So...it seems I have a lot of wool ;)

I usually separate out the large groups/sweaterlots (anything I have a pound+ of):

Sweater lots.  Lots being the operative word.

Then I cluster up the remaining bags for possible combos within fiber type. This time around I also grouped up all of the semisolids together similarly to how I group the sweater-lots since I have acquired a bunch of them for colorwork.

After enjoying looking at it all, I begin the daunting process of taming it back into its designated storage space.  I tend to pack it up clustered by fiber type and dyer – that way if I want to do some combos, the fibers that play nicely together are already grouped together.  After spending a good portion of the day with my wool, I have come to the conclusion that 1) I need more shelving and 2) I need more time to spin 🙂

One more view from another angle...

How do you guys organize your fiber?

One Comment

  1. Stephanie! Who are you? I live in Scottsdale and I just came across your web site and at this moment there are 25 lbs. of alpaca, both raw and processed, in my car’s trunk sent to me by a friend in Maine. I already have an agreement with someone I know to clean and spin it, but I could get more in the future.

    I’m a member of Cactus Needles Knitting Guild and you should come to one of our meetings. http://cactusneedlesknittingguild.com
    Among other things, we have a yarn swap every year run as an auction, and it is loads of fun. I’m sure you’d also pick up some customers. I’ve just started looking at your web sight but I can see it’s going to take some time! Do you spin/dye for others?

    And to answer your question, I have only 16 plastic bins with yarn sorted by weight, fingering, DK, etc. No acrylic, and all my Encore yarn (for kid’s clothes and charity knitting) is in my living room blanket chest/coffee table.

    Would love to hear from you.
    Lesley

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