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Stash organizing help


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Okay, I'm finally at the end of my Master's program and can get back to knitting and organizing my life. I just realized I have a ton of yarn. Most of it left over from projects or parts of never-completed projects inherited from my mom.

Any thoughts on the best way to start organizing? I hate buying new yarn for projects when I already have a ton of really nice yarn, but I never remember what I have available. Some of it still has labels, but not all (which means weight, type and quantity are up in the air!). I like to add this to Evernote but I'm not sure what the best way will be.

Anyone manage their stash in Evernote have tips to share?

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I do not and I am not a knitter but I do quilt so I have another stash.

I'm going to make an assumption that you will want to scan the actual yarn so you can small pictures of what you have both by color and style since I know yarns can vary in what they look like by more than color.

I would also scan the label of those yarns you do have labels. You can just scan this at the same time as the yarn scan, but you'll want to play around with it to see how it shows up in Evernote so that it makes the most sense to you. Look at the thumbnail and snippet views as well as the view on your mobile device. I'd want to see the yarn part not the label part on my cell phone if I was shopping.

For the yarn scanning you'll need to have a flatbed scanner and I think you'll want to play around with how much yarn you need to put down on the scanner to get a good representation. You may find, for instance, that it works best to do just a two inch single strand, but you may prefer to scan a small block of yarn or even knit a small section to scan.

As you begin to sort through your scans and add them to Evernote, start to add tags to the yarns. I'd certainly do rough color tags maybe just the red, yellow, blue, orange, green, purple, black, grey, and white. You may also wish to list other qualities with tags as well. This I am less sure about but type of material, style of yarn, width, etc. may be things you want to put.

From my experience in doing this with a large database of recipes (around 1000) start with very basic tags and then when you see a need to expand an area later you can search the notes with that tag and break it down. So for instance if you find you have lots of red yarn you may later go back and either add more colors (pink, blood red, etc) to those notes. I would also use the tag hierarchy Evernote provides to make these tags nested so you can look at tags that way as well.

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  • 3 months later...

Last week I thought of a way to organize my craft supply items in Evernote, using the app Red Laser on my iPhone. I scanned in the barcodes of a number of items that are in the same cubbie/shelf/drawer, then you can email that list of items into Evernote. Then you can tag it by location (or cubbie/bin number) and find what you have quickly.

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  • 1 year later...

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