Making kits

Last week I was having coffee with my knitting friend Leah, yarnsytlist on Rav.  While we were sipping and knitting I was lamenting over my unwieldy stash when she volunteered to come over and help me make some sense of it.  At first I was embarrassed, I didn't really want anyone to see how out of control it had become, but she is sweet and non-judgmental and had a great idea to make kits.  She came over and WE MADE KITS!  Awesome kits from my own stash!  It took us two full afternoons to plow through it all, and all the work has paid off.  My stash is now organized into kit projects and I love it!  In fact, it was so successful, Leah went home and made kits from her stash!  Here's what we did:

First was to take out all the stash, but only the stash that enough yardage to make a sweater or other project.  The singles and partials were already arranged by color and divided into 4 bins, so this was just for yarn with multiple skeins.

Next we took out my favorite knitting books. For me it was all my Rowan magazines, the Rowan Studios and all my Kim Hargreaves books, plus a few other random books I love like Botanical Knits I and II. 

After that it was just a case of matching yarn to pattern making sure I had enough yardage and that the gauge and drape would work.  This isn't as easy as you might think and we had to spend a lot of time leafing through the books.  It was really helpful having Leah with me, I don't know if I could have finished it without her. Leah knows my knitting style and what I like and what will look good on me so we were able to go through it and decide fairly quickly, still I found it exhausting!

After we chose the pattern, I went online and printed out the picture of each pattern, then wrote the pattern name, the book source and page number on the picture.  The next step was to get large 1 gallon zip lock bags and jumbo 2.5 gallon bags.  Then it's just putting the yarn in with the picture and info, closing it up, and over two days we managed to make 16 kits. 

OK, so I'm a bit embarrassed I have all this yarn; but I'll tell you how I acquired it all.  For some reason, when a yarn was discontinued and gone half off, I thought I had to buy it in every color way.  I am proud to say I don't do that anymore, not for a year or more. I simply couldn't store anymore or imagine how I could possibly knit it over a lifetime.  I have slowly whittled away at my stash and determined to keep it under control.  Now, I do admit that I will be buying a little more in a month or so.  I've seen a preview of the yarns coming out for fall and there is no way I am NOT going to buy some of it.  There is some really gorgeous yarn that I know I won't be able to pass up, so I'm not going to!  But in the meantime, I absolutely love what we were able to do and now have a sleek and organized way to pick out my next project, and it's right at my fingertips. 

I cleared out two shelves in my sewing room to accommodate my new kits.

I added a picture with the pertinent info to each bag of yarn to make it easy to choose the next project.


My Kidsilk Haze projects, of course there will always be a few of those:  Charcoal gray for the Looped Stitch Collar by Sarah Hatton.  Also a new color, Strawberry for the Bow Cardigan from an early Studio.


Phew!  I'm done! My kits are ready to go and I'm feeling ORGANIZED!  My "knitting salon" was a total mess for a few days, but now it's neat and tidy again.   For the time being.  

These jumbo 2.5 gal. Hefty bags were perfect for the larger projects