2023 Stash Down: Review

gather 'round the spreadsheet

We’ve reached the end of the year (approximately) and it is time to reflect on what this year entailed for all things yarny. I am going to have this be a two part feature because I think it would get a little too in the weeds/long. So if you want more pivot tables, come back at the end of the week! If not, that’s totally fine.

In Review:

I started 2023 with the goal to reduce how much yarn I had on hand and focus on buying less. I thought I could accomplish this by destashing some, buying at certain pre-determined points, and knitting a lot.

Started:

Started with 180 skeins of yarn in January of this year, a hope and a wish.

Plans vs. Reality

I had planned a pretty aggressive (for me) project plan to make: 8 sweaters, 12 socks, 4 other projects

Or 24 total projects

In theory, this would have taken: 48-50 skeins out of my cabinet.

Projects Completed:

What actually ended up happening was I knit a lot less. This year I completed:* 4 sweaters, 1 shawl, 3 hats, 2 pairs of socks, 1 pair of mittens

Or 11 total projects

This resulted in approximately 24.5 skeins of yarn worked up into finished projects.

*I have some projects on going so this is as of the post going live

2022 vs. 2023 Final Counts

How much yarn that came in this year was a sharp decrease from last year. Even with some adjustments to how I decided to count 50g skeins of self-striping yarn (.5 skeins). A caveat, “bought” does not always mean I paid for every single skein that you see in this chart. I’ve been lucky enough to receive a fair bit of yarn as gifts.

Money Side Quest

Let’s just do that money math because I know you are going to do it anyway and we can save everyone the 30 seconds of finding the calculator app on their phone. We aren’t going to subtract which yarns are gifts or which yarns are only 50g skeins of sock yarn therefore are cheaper.

Working with the assumption that the average skein cost $29USD, in 2022 I “spent” $2,305. Compared to this year I “spent” $1,624. Meaning there was a spending reduction of approximately $681.

Anyone else say “holy shit” when they saw that first number? I did.

What I am absolutely not saying is that if your annual yarn budget is that amount or is way more than that then you are doing something wrong or I think something negatively it. This is just about me and where I want to be with my own finances.

Anyway!

Ending totals…

I did remove some yarn out of my cabinet as a destash that either I’ve given away a skein or several and also there is a cube in my closet that I need to post the contents of. I didn’t get around to actually hosting a destash which I think wasn’t a great success on my part.

This year I ended with 188.7*.

oops.

*If this math is not mathing for you, it’s because I’m not going to break down how much I’ve used up for active projects and how much I’ve moved out of the cabinet/out of my house. Just trust me.

Is this a failure?

Yes and no. It is in the sense that I ended up with more than I started with. I also knit half of what I had anticipated. Even if I had managed to knit up 50 skeins of yarn (and got rid of yarn) I would have ended up close to an even amount of in vs. out. Not a reduction.

While generally having a healthy cycle of stuff coming in, getting worked up, and not sitting waiting to be used is the long-term goal. I would rather have that overall number decline right now.

Throughout the year, I felt the wheels turning. The cycle of never-ending little yarn packages showing up at my door ended.

I mostly stayed to my goal of buying a year at four specific points: Rose City Yarn Crawl, Maryland Sheep and Wool, a Solstice Box, and EKF Spain. Self-striping yarn did distract me and I did bring home more than I had thought I would at Rose City. I was also generously gifted yarn this year.

Grace

At the risk of sounding like I’m giving myself an out I want to extend myself some grace for this year. Half of 2023 was extremely challenging and I spent most of the summer catching my breath from getting through that hard time. I didn’t knit a lot. I didn’t do a lot of anything, to be honest. I worked really slowly on projects and tried to keep things as simple as possible.

The ick

The one thing I did feel ick about coming into the end of the year was being judged by my failure to accomplish my goal. I thought about people being rude or mean or people thinking I was a materialistic flake. Among other far more cruel things my brain came up with.

But then I thought, this isn’t my job. This is something connected to my hobby. I post content for free. I mostly have older content behind a paywall to give a layer of privacy and to value my own work in a small way. I am fortunate enough to have a full-time job with extra income for my hobbies and even though I am probably going to be judged that’s probably more on someone else than it is on me.

I tried a new thing. It didn’t work the way I wanted. We keep trying.

So maybe a better framing of this project is that this is going to take multiple years and it will be necessary to make adjustments as I go. I am trying to find out what is a comfortable/encouraging amount of yarn I want to bring in and work on overall having less. This year felt better but still too much.

Let’s see how next year goes. We’ve assessed what worked and what didn’t work, we’ve adjusted our short-term goals, and we begin again.

Lessons Learned/Next Year

I realize that a reduction of purchasing/bringing in by about 24 skeins less than last year doesn’t sound all that spectacular. And still ending up with more yarn is not great. This is what we are hoping for next year:

• Bringing in 40 skeins or less (hey let’s try incremental reduction of spending).

• Consider only doing a “day of” box for Solstice.

• Be more intentional about selling or gifting yarn I don’t see myself using.

I don’t know if I want to shoot for a number of projects goal because I don’t know if tying productivity to building a habit of consuming less was helpful.

Extra

I put together a little mini bonus post to look at some other tables I made since people really enjoyed that when it was in video form. So keep an eye out for that in the next couple of days!

Also, if you’ve been regularly enjoying my posts consider becoming a paid subscriber. I didn’t think it would make a difference but knowing that even a few people have paid for subscriptions has helped me feel motivated to write more. Or don’t! It’s really fine either way and I don’t have a lot of “extra” paid content. That’s something I would like to work on in 2024.

I created a 25% off offer so it would be $30 a year instead of $40 (I think people who have already paid can use it as well). So that works out to about .62 per post since I do about 4 a month.

That’s it! Thank you so much for being here. I really love this space and I wish I started sooner.

till later this week!