Almost stash-free

I am almost there, the stash is so close to be but a memory and I love it. It will slow down my knitting for a while I think. I have just two yarns left. The pink gift yarn, that I'm going to make into the French Press Slippers and some yarn that is leftover from the last sweater I knitted for my man. That is some very naughty yarn, I'll let you know. It itches when you knit with it. It's fine once it has been washed in the garment, but it is not worth knitting with. I was debating just throwing it out, but I've come to my senses and have decided that I'll try to wash it.

The yarn is on cones and frankly I have no idea how much yarn is still left. So I'll wind it into 100 gr. skeins, wash it and then I'll see if it is nicer to work with and figure out how many meters there are. 

My goal of being stash free was motivated by two aspects:

 1) I felt like I had too much money tied up in yarns and thus I felt like I couldn't buy anything new if I wanted to. For that same reason, I couldn't work on a project that caught my fancy at any time, only ones that could be made out of stash. It was really a very limiting feeling. 

 2) Our flat is TINY, I know I've mentioned this before but with so little room, knitting and yarn and fibre, it all just ends up taking over too much space. Both in the flat itself and in our tiny basement. I wanted my knitting to fit into my knitting basket.

As I'm writing this I have nothing at all on my needles. I have finished the squares for my John 6:12 blanket and not yet cast on for my slippers and I like it. I can't remember the last time I had nothing on the needles and could start a project with brand new yarn without that feeling of guilt. 

I have decided to wash the naughty yarn before I cast on for the slippers. No procrastination here baby. I even made the eyes for the elefante:

They didn't turn out perfect, but they are good enough.

Well, since my goal of simplifying knitting is so close I had to tackle by knitting basket that was more like a pile of junk really. See how overflowing it was:

The items in it was separated into three categories,

Knitting

Embroidery

Spinning 

The spinning stuff went into the basement. Because if I have to get my wheel from down there I might as well get the rest of it.

The knitting was sorted into tools and projects (only the ongoing John 6:12, which I don't count as a WIP when I don't have any yarn for it and the slippers to be).

Half the embroidery yarn went into storage in the basement while the other half, the two kinds of fabric and my frame all were aloud a place in the knitting basket.

Then there were the occasional weird stuff in there like a scarf that once covered the basket etc. And a lot of old patterns that had to be recycled and some stored for later.

When done the result looked like this:

See how it all fits in there and there is plenty of space left over?

This is knitting bliss.