When I began knitting nearly 15 years ago, I was living in a small apartment, and I only bought yarn for specific projects. I knit the project, threw away the scraps, and bought new yarn for the next project. Yarn storage wasn’t exactly a problem, as I didn’t have much stash to speak of. I also had recently gotten laid off from my job, so I didn’t have much cash to speak of either.

I started out with less expensive acrylic and wool yarns purchased from chain craft stores. After I found a new job and moved into a townhouse, I began to venture out to the few local knitting shops there were at the time to snap up more yarn. I’ll admit to initially being intimidated when going into some of these shops. I felt a little judged in some places and completely embraced in others. Participating in local knit crawls helped me learn which shops were right for me.

Then, I was introduced to knitting conventions, and that exposed me to a whole new world of yarn from shops and dyers around the country. I still remember saying to myself years ago when Plucky Knitter came to Stitches Midwest, “Who’s Plucky Knitter and why are people going so crazy for this expensive yarn? Who would pay that much?!” Now, it’s one of the few yarns I buy exclusively. I even made a trip out from Chicago to San Francisco to attend Stitches West just so I could go to the Plucky booth. Crazy, I know.

I won’t even get into online yarn purchases, which I believe is responsible for 90% of the yarn I have today. Oh, the Internet.

Then came the yarn subscriptions! When small companies like PostStitch and Kitterly started to package up yarn with needles and a pattern, I was totally sold. You mean to tell me that instead of buying random yarn for a someday project, someone will think through a pattern and the yarn for me and send it to me in one neat package? Say what?! Genius!

It wasn’t until I moved this past Summer into a bigger house that I realized just how much yarn I had accumulated over the years. To be honest, I was a little embarrassed by it. Friends who helped me move called me a yarn hoarder … in a joking way, I think. I hope they were joking. Oh well. I had an entire bedroom closet filled with bins of yarn and even more bins stacked inside that bedroom. I have no doubt that other knitters have a far greater stash than I do, but I’m not the type of person to collect things or hold onto things for very long. There’s not a whole lot I have an attachment to when it comes to stuff. Things are simply things. Yarn, somehow, seems to be the exception.

So, one afternoon, I sat down with all my bins in front of me and decided that it was time to part with some of my yarny goodness. I tried selling it online at a discount, but it wasn’t selling fast enough to even make a dent. One person suggested lowering the price more. As it was, since I was covering the shipping cost, most times I was lucky just to break even and sometimes ended up upside-down. Paying $4 to send someone a $3 skein of yarn isn’t exactly ideal.

So, what to do with all this yarn? I considered donating it to a local charity. And maybe that’s what I’ll end up doing. I know there’s lots of great groups out there. I even thought about teaching my mom how to knit so that she could use up the yarn.  I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I have enough stash to last my lifetime and beyond.

Epilogue
I wish yarn was the only knitting-related problem I have. I recently sold about 20 sets of circular needles (remember those knit kit subscriptions I mentioned?), and I spent two weekends going through stacks of knitting magazines while binge watching PBS shows. I flipped through every single magazine (oh, and there were lots) and cut out only the patterns I wanted. I recycled the rest. I can’t bring myself to part with my nearly 200 knitting books though. Every girl has her limits.