There are numerous knitting Icons who encourage a yearly "Airing of the Stash" though I think the actual term comes from Cast On's Brenda Dayne.

This year, it wasn't hard: thanks to the work I did this Summer on My Sewing Room most of my yarn is sitting tidily in it's corner. The tricky part was finding the hidden caches, like the basket on a shelf in a cabinet behind another shelf (thank goodness for castors) or the wonderful totebasket for the living room to hold only my current project that multiplied exponentially and filled up the bookshelves.

I keep my stash in Excel so I can wrangle a funky equation that theorhetically tells me how much yarn I can buy (one skein for every two used) but really tells me I have bought far more then I should have (It was a silly resolution anyway) because I'm a nerd.

I was logging my yarn and I noticed a few differences between last year and this year:

• I bought less yarn
• No wait, I bought fewer different yarns. This means instead of one beautiful skein that I could make a ??? with (And I don't need any more of those) I would buy a sweaters' worth of yarn. So more skeins, but fewer rows in Excel.
• I have finished seven sweaters since August. Four of them were started in the past seven months. While this consumes yarn, it leads me into a false feeling of stash reduction.
• I still have an embarrassing amount of yarn. The only thing protecting my head from exploding at the quantity is the knowledge that it couldn't fill a moving box (and I have heard of people who have boxes (plural!!!) of sock yarn alone.
• It takes a depressingly long time to knit up a 450 yard skein of sock yarn.
• With all my fair isle sweaters (I've made three now) I have 50 partial skeins of Knit Picks Pallette (why does a pattern say it uses 750 yds of a color when it only used 422?)which is probably enough to make three more sweaters or six more vests. However, I will stab those 2.5 mm needles through my nostrils and out my ears before I cast on for another fair isle project.

So, not being in the habit of self voodoolation, I'm taking those fifty skeins into my SnB tomorrow and I will try to pawn them off on anyone who wants them.

Half of 50 is 25. I could buy 25 new skeins...