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You are here: Home / Crafts / Yarn / Organize Your Yarn Stash

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Organize Your Yarn Stash

How do you organize your yarn stash and keep track of which yarns you own or use for a particular project? Do you have a system? Or do you just tie a piece of the relevant yarn around the yarn band and chuck it into a drawer never to be found again?

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

My “yarn organization” used to look like this:

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

A whole bunch of yarn ball bands with lengths of yarn tied around them to help me keep track of what each yarn was.  I could show you my first rudimentary efforts at cataloguing them, but I am too embarrassed, frankly.

Once I started designing in earnest, I needed a better way to organize my yarn stash.  This is what it looks like now:

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

Each yarn is attached to a page, by brand, and labelled with the Shade Number and the Shade Name.  All these luscious strands of yarn (and a few of my pattern ideas) now live in these two files (with many more to follow):

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

The Lion and the Elephant pictured above are from my book, Amamani Puzzle Balls (also available as an Electronic Download).  The pile of squares is from the Block a Week CAL 2014, and the wavy goodness under the Lion is a WIP that I am calling Lazy Waves (the pattern for which can now be found HERE).

Things You Will Need:

  • Lever Arch File
  • Mod Podge
  • Paintbrush
  • Heart Punch
  • Template (for printed sheets)

Optional

  • Laminator and Lamination pouches (like this Purple Cows Hot and Cold Laminator)

I wanted my pretty yarn to have a pretty home, so I started off by covering a Lever Arch file with fabric and Mod Podge.  You can find an excellent tutorial for Fabric Covered Lever Arch Files here.

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

I used Shweshwe, which is a traditional South African fabric.  The fabric is very stiff and it is often called the denim, or tartan, of South Africa.

I used it because I love the designs, but more importantly, because my mom gave me these pieces of Shweshwe and when I miss her (South Africa is so far away!!), I just look at the bookshelf where the files live and I feel a tiny bit better.

Just look at that beautiful fabric!

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

Once my files were covered, I printed out some of these templates.  I stuck a ball band at the top of each page (some brands needed more than one page, because I have so many shades)…

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

…and then laminated the pages.  This is not strictly necessary.  If you print the template out on cardstock, you should be fine.  But I like myself some laminating!

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

I made sure that the care instructions were visible.  For some brands, like the Stylecraft above, I had to cut the ball band into segments.

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

Then I took a Heart Punch (but you can use any punch you fancy), and made a little heart-hole on each of the dots along the side of the template.

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

Oooh…hearts…and of course my mind was running away with possible uses for the cut-out hearts.  And as I write this, I remember that I had actually wanted to take the hearts with to South Africa when we went to visit.  They would have made a perfect addition to my sister’s confetti.  Blast!

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

When that was done, I took my ball bands and noted down the Shade Number and Shade Name of each colour.

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

At first I attached the yarn by just looping it through the hole, like so:

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

Isn’t that just scrumptious? Unfortunately, all those dangly bits of yarn were very annoying…

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

…so I took my crochet hook and turned them into shorter, more manageable chains.

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

I cannot tell you how useful it is to have all my yarns “listed” like this.  Whenever I need to reference a yarn I can just open my “catalogue” and flip through until I find it.

No more running around the house rummaging in all sorts of drawers and bags and coat pockets to find a wayward yarn-band and it’s corresponding piece of yarn.

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

While I was going through the photos for this post, I stumbled upon this one of Kettle the (grumpy) Cat giving me the evil eye.  Yes, I fit the stereotype.  I own a cat!

Organize Your Yarn Stash Yarn Ball Bands

Debbie Pribele has made another version of the Yarn Stash Organizer.  You can find that HERE.

You can find me on Facebook, Bloglovin, Pinterest, Twitter, or Instagram.

Happy Hooking!

Dedri

This blog post contains affiliate links. I only link to products I personally use or would use.  All opinions are my own.

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104 Comments September 9, 2014

Comments

  1. Holly Ann Kasprzak says

    January 7, 2022 at 7:12 pm

    That’s wonderful! What size hole punch did you use? The link doesn’t work and I’m looking to purchase one like you have.

    Reply
    • Jenny Lowman says

      January 8, 2022 at 7:53 am

      I would say Dedri used either a 10 or 15mm heart punch for this project.

  2. Jacqueline says

    May 19, 2021 at 4:18 pm

    Did you laminate the sheets first cause if you did wouldn’t the marker smear?

    Reply
    • Dedri Uys says

      May 24, 2021 at 10:24 am

      I did laminate them first and I used a permanent marker and waited a few seconds for it to dry.

  3. Stephanie Santiago says

    February 3, 2021 at 1:38 am

    Me encanta! Gracias por compartir !

    Reply
  4. Kristi says

    November 13, 2019 at 6:26 pm

    Awesome job and I can’t wait to use this as inspiration. I just started to want to organize my yarns because I recently printed out 175 new patterns for Amigurumi, Appliques and other projects. With the intention to actually make things I want to make sure I have the right materials. Upon searching I found your article and I really am excited now to see what I can create from your post. Thank you so much for the inspiration into making a great organizer.

    Reply
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