I love my yarn winder!

Do you think that maybe I might have gotten a bit too excited with winding yarn?

This is all from my scrap yarn stash, and that's not even half of my scrap yarn!

I dont even know how many balls of yarn I wound! I kept losing count!

I love this yarn winder. It's really helped me get my stash organized somewhat. I had two ginormous zipper bags (like blankets and comforters come in) and my craft cabinet just totally stuffed with all these loose hand-wound balls of yarn that were starting to become a tangled mess. I took every hand-wound ball of yarn, and used the yarn winder to wind them into neat little cake-shaped skeins. I cleaned out my craft cabinet (my old computer armoire) and have the skeins all stacked neatly, and (sort of) in order according to color.

Getting all this yarn organized actually helped me cut down on storage space. The two ginormous zipper bags of yarn were actually cut down to one bag. I put unused, still in the original packaging skeins in the largest bag. I still had half the bag to fill, so I put some of the yarn cake skeins that I wound with the winder on top of those skeins. The other zipper bag I'm now using to hold my works-in-progress.

I now have space in my room to actually sit on some furniture while I'm crocheting, rather than just sitting on my bed and peering over the top of all my projects and bags of yarn to see my tv.

I still have a ton more of scrap yarn to organize (I have like 4 Rubbermaid totes in the store room that I havent looked at for more than a year). Now at least I have some sense of order. Plus, I like being able to see just how much scrap yarn I have and how much I have of one color. Now I'll be able to tell at a glance if I have enough yarn for a project, or if I need to go to the yarn store.

Last week, before I got the yarn winder, I was already on an organizing frenzy. My dad found an entire box of plastic page protectors in his stuff when he moved his home office from upstairs into the newly finished room downstairs. He gave me the box! (200 page protectors!) so I took my favorite binders of printed out patterns and organized my pattern stash. Since I could put two pages each inside each protector page, I increased the capacity of pages each of my binders could hold. I was able to reorganize and go from 5 binders to 4 by condensing all those patterns.

Next time I go to Office Depot to get printer ink, I'll probably pick up another box of page protectors.

Also, a few weeks ago, I picked up a file folder box that I could put all my crochet magazines into. I need to get a few more of those file boxes (the 50 or 60 something Workbasket magazines that I inherited from my paternal grandmother still need storage space)

It's really cool to finally have most of this stuff organized. I even found a bunch of my missing crochet hooks in all that scrap yarn. I found 13 "I" hooks and about 3 or 4 hooks of other sizes...I guess my favorite crochet hook size is the "I" hook...otherwise I wouldnt have so many of them.

I found three unfinished projects in the chaos. One of them was a poncho that just needed the last couple inches of the edging finished (did that), a pineapple shawl that I ran out of blue yarn for (found enough in the scrap heap to finish that this weekend), and a giant rectangle granny square afghan that I was doing with scrap yarn. (at least I know I have enough scrap yarn to finish that!). I'll probably finish up all those projects next week so that I can figure out what to make with my newly organized stash.