I want to be organized, I love the look and feel of it when it’s done, but the actual getting there stresses me out and I usually abandon any attempts at serious organizing.

I’m trying to do better about that and actually do the things that are uncomfortable but will help me in the long run. One of those things is doing a deep dive of my craft supplies and not just organizing but cataloguing them. The first area I decided to tackle with this is my yarn stash.

I probably should have done this 2 years ago when we moved, but alas I was not that forward thinking.

I wanted to know not just what yarns I had, but how much yarn I had in each skein instead of just winging it with a project and hoping for the best.

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To figure this out, I needed a scale. I’m just using a basic food scale (I think I got this one from Walmart, but any cheap food scale will do. I also grabbed a notebook and my favorite Writech pen to write down everything (these things are so smooth to write with).

Then I got to work clearing out my cart ( I’ve used this as a storage method for years, see my original post about it HERE).

Doing this made me realize I had multiples of some yarns

As well as some forgotten about WIPS (works in progress) that had somehow gotten stuffed in between the balls of yarn.

For each yarn, I wrote down the brand, color, and weight of the yarn in grams. Why grams? Because they can (through the power of math) be used to find out the yardage of the yarn.

After about an hour, I had gotten all of the yarn in my cart weighed and documented.

While I was weighing it, I separated the yarn into two piles: neutrals and colors. When I put the yarn back into the cart, I organized it by those piles, putting the colors on the 2nd tier and the neutrals on the bottom tier.

The really impressive part (for me) is that I put it all away!

I could have been done there, but I decided to take it a step further and digitize it as well.

There are multiple ways to do this from a simple note on your phone to a fancy digital planner, but I went with Ravelry.

I’ve been on Ravelry for something like 11 years now , but the Stash feature of it was not something that really caught my attention. Then I saw a reel on Instagram that mentioned that feature and it inspired me to use this forgotten (to me) feature to catalogue my own stash.

While I was in the process of doing this, I recorded the my process of doing this on Ravelry incase you want to do something similar.

How to add yarn to your Ravelry Stash

All you have to do is put in the name of the yarn, and hit “Continue”

The color way drop down gives all of the color-ways for that particular yarn. You can also do by closest color which is what I had to do for some of these yarns where I didn’t have the original label.

It will pre-populate the yardage and weight based on the yarn label and it will let you enter the number of skeins you have of that yarn. This is great if you either have whole skeins or you want to just catalogue that you have a yarn.

If however you want to be more specific, you can hit “enter totals instead” and it will let you put in the weight of your skein, which for this particular yarn was 140.7 grams.

What makes this option great is that once you add the brand of yarn and the weight, it will tell you how much yardage of that yarn you have without you having to do some Cyberchase style math problem. (Although if you need to figure it out the old fashioned way, I do have a post on that HERE)

You can also fill in the store you bought it at and how much you bought it for, but I was not that dedicated. Nor was I dedicated enough to photograph each yarn (that may be a future project).

Also if you have multiple color-ways of the same yarn , just hit “Add a colorway” at the bottom and it will pre-populate the yarn for you except for the colorway and the amount.

It’s way easier to do than I thought and now when I look at a pattern on Ravelry it tells me what yarn I have that’s similar and also the amount.

I am so happy with the results of my being organized and my next step is to nicely type out my written log into something I can keep in my yarn cart. I also am working on an additional step to keep this permanently organized, so stay tuned for that!

This post first appeared on yarn-bending.com