One Hell of a Task.

I've started today to try and sort out my stash.

This is part of an ongoing project to reclaim the house. It is groaning under the strain of an awful lot of stuff. There are boxes and boxes of books left over from when we selling them on eBay. Somehow, despite all our best intentions we've never quite managed to get rid of them all even though it's at least 18 months since we stopped doing all that.

Then there are our own books. I've got a collection of my favourite crime authors and some much favoured and well-battered classics. There's a growing number of craft books - knitting, crochet, spinning, weaving, quilting, felting etc etc.

Pete has a lot of books too. Graphic novels and books about comics mostly, plus a huge collection of comics.

Then there are books we have in common - antiques and collectables, film and TV books, some science fiction, books on dogs and on chicken keeping, cookery and gardening books.

We're making a concerted effort this week to sort the wheat from the chaff and get all the odd and unwanted books into boxes in the garage, from where we hope they will go to charity.

The first aim is to reclaim the spare bedroom, long used as a stockroom and general glory hole. It's also where most of my stash resides. My problem is that while I started off with just one little stash, now I seem to have stash for all the many different crafts I've been trying. Knitting has the largest stash of course, because it holds all the little gems bought over time, some lovely sock wool, some other irresistible bargains acquired gradually, plus lots of odd cones and balls bought at car boot sales. Then there's quite a lot of hand-spun, made by me but not used for any project yet. These are mostly biding their time waiting for inspiration to strike. Spinning requires a different sort of stash - I've not the sort of spinner who buys what they need for a specific project and spins it then buys more. I buy bits and pieces of all sorts of different fibres, different colours, different textures. I just can't resist pretty colours. (I bet you're not at all surprised by that are you?)

Weaving again requires a different sort of stash. Of course there are lots of knitting yarns (and hand-spun) that you can weave with, but quite often there's not enough of a particular yarn for what I want to do, or I need a warp yarn (which needs to be strong) in a particular colour, or I see a project in a magazine I can't resist. There's also something very irresistible about those little project packs of fancy yarns from Texere. I feel I need one in every colour (though I'm trying really hard not to). I'm just hopeless.

This summer I have been accumulating fabrics as well in readiness to make a quilt over the winter. Don't ask me when I think I'm going to have the time to do this.

Anyway, we went off to Ikea this morning and got lots of those stackable plastic crates and I've started to organise the stash(s). This may take sometime.

Oh, and there's just one small problem. I keep finding all this yarn that I'd got and forgotten about. As I'm pulling it out of the wardrobe (where it currently lives) and sorting into the crates - lots of new and wonderful ideas are forming. When am I ever going to find the time to knit them all (and I haven't really started on the fibre and weaving stuff yet!)