Cleaning House
Periodically I get the bug to go through all my stash. I have a large enough stash that I rarely remember what I have so churning it occasionally is a great idea. My stash includes cottolin for kitchen towels, rolags and bulk fiber to spin, art batts full of texture and color, interesting funky yarns for weaving or knitting, wonderful soft Merino yarn and patterns and yarn specifically designed to make something that attracted my attention as some point. It would be an impressive pile of stuff if I ever tossed it into one heap on the studio floor.
I pulled out much of my stash for evaluation and like sometimes happens, that triggered my need to clean house. I opened every single tub in the loft and found all sorts of yarn that I hadn't remembered was there. Much of it ended up coming downstairs. I rearranged everything up in the loft to make a clear path all the way to the back. Now I have the studio full of stuff that all needs to be looked at.
Over in this corner is my stash just waiting to be churned and evaluated. But over in that corner is all the yarn we have picked up over the last year or so. We buy yarn and supplies from our friends who are downsizing or moving. We buy yarn and supplies from estate sales. Occasionally we find great deals on yarn we can get for far less than wholesale prices but only if we take the entire lot. Sometimes its a reasonable number of skeins, sometimes its a huge number of skeins. It's always great yarn whether its something I personally want to knit or weave with. I have more than quadrupled my stash of Habu silk yarn that's not going anywhere for a while, at least till I figure out exactly what I'm going to use it for. Interestingly, we have ended up with a huge amount of pink yarn this time. In the abstract I'm OK with pink yarn but when it comes down to actually knitting it... well... it's just not really my thing. Even in this case where it is gorgeous organic cotton. But its still pink.
If I had a stash of my own knitting patterns I would be tempted to kit up all this yarn. I've designed a pattern or two but I'm not really a pattern person. I love well written patterns, especially the ones that push the boundaries of what I'm comfortable with, but I don't or can't create them. And then there is the knitting required to have shop samples. Peggy is much better at that than I am. If you check out all our shop samples, they are mostly Peggy's handiwork.
I've been working and cleaning and organizing and evaluating and assigning and reorganizing and moving furniture for the past couple of days. Slowly things are getting put away and the place looks much better now than it did when I started this adventure.
So it's time to think about having a sale. I mean a really big sale. In the future sometime. There wouldn't be space for it at the Houston Fiber Fest. We have a small booth for that show. Maybe at Kid 'n Ewe in November. Yes, that will be perfect. In the meantime I'll be finding and marking lots of yarn. Be sure to stop by and see us in Boerne, TX in November. We will have some great deals!