Fiber Arts Friday: Organizing the Stash

On my To Do List since before we decided to move our house and farm has been to update and organize my Stash.

I'm generally pretty organized here, but with my Scrappy Palindrome and the recent Frogging of WIPs, I know that everything is not in my Ravelry Inventory nor is it in the proper bins.

I believe that all of my clean fiber has made it's way to this area of my studio since our move, but it's lack of order has been annoying me for a while now.  So I've been thinking a lot about how I'd like to organize this area...

I've noticed that Tapestry Weavers tend to organize by color.  Conversely, Knitwear Designers seem to organize more by weight (gauge).

Either display/organization strategy is nice to look at.  I especially like the gentle gradient of color across a wall of yarn. However, I don't think there's one best way to organize anything, as long as:

1. everything has it's place and
2. you can find what you're looking for when you're looking for it.

So, after contemplating these strategies for some time and then taking advantage of a few hours of alone time, I took the first step... emptying everything out of the bins.

I piled according to fiber content, then within each pile I sorted by color and format.

What I learned from this exercise is that I really don't have a lot of dyed fiber, that my formats are all over the place, and that I have a lot(!) of silk to spin.

So ultimately, I decided to stay organized by Fiber Content.

I don't love having a variety of bins stacked against the wall... but this is now taking up half the floor space.  Each bin is a unique fiber, labeled, see-through, and keeps the fiber free from dust and bugs.  So this is good for now.

Hopefully, I'll be able to find a beautiful armoire for fiber storage in the future.

I have not yet bounced my actual inventory against what I have recorded in Ravelry.  That will have to happen on another day, along with my tool consolidation.

Happy Fiber Arts Friday!