2010 Stash Down

I moved to South Korea this weekend, which was pretty much a non-event, since I've already spent one year here, was always planning on coming back for a second and was only home for a few months between contracts. I started packing with my yarn and spent an enjoyable afternoon going through my pretty pretty yarn and deciding which of my preciouses I couldn't bare to be parted from for a year. As I surveyed the results, I realized that when your hobby takes up a quarter of your luggage for a year long trip abroad, you might just have a stash problem.


It is not physically possible for me to knit all that in a year.
Then I arrive in Korea and started to unpack in my shoebox of an apartment, and I realize that I don't know where I'm going to stash my stash. I currently have the Noro shoved into the shelves in the bedside table; the alpaca, Malabrigo and sock yarn are taking over the cupboard by the door that I think is suppose to be for shoes; and for lack of a better place, the cotton is stashed in the shelves above my sink in the kitchen. There are ten random skeins sitting on my couch because I haven't figure out where I'm going to be them (maybe I'll just turn the entire shelve over the sink into a yarn shelve?) and I still need to retrieve the huge bag of yarn I left with a friend when I went home in September.

My stash is out of control!

Over at the cold sheeping threads in the Stash Knit Down group on Ravelry, there's lots of talk about a yarn bank. If you knit a certain number of skeins, you allowed to buy more yarn. I think it's time for me to institute a yarn bank. For the next twelve months, I must knit five skeins of stash yarn for every one skein I buy. No exceptions, not even for sock yarn. I've added a yarn bank box to my sidebar to help me keep track of how much yarn I've used and to keep me honest. Maybe the next time I fly back to America, I'll have room for something besides yarn in my bags.