I find sock yarn incredibly stashable. I find it much, much more stashable than other yarns. I suppose it’s because you don’t have to buy a very large quantity of a particular yarn to stash for a pair of socks. Three to four hundred yards will do just fine, so you buy a skein here and a skein there. What with all the indie-dyers out there, there’s a virtual buffet of sock yarn to be had.  You could knit hundreds of pairs of socks and probably never use the same yarn twice.

My sock yarn stash, which is the largest part of my stash, lives in two wire cubes. The top-most cube contains all the unwound hanks, and the cube beneath it contains all the yarn I’ve already wound into center-pull balls. (I got a bit carried away when I first bought my swift and ball-winder, and didn’t know that it’s “bad” to wind your yarn too far in advance of using it.)

I decided to “unpack” those two wire cubes tonight to see what’s really in there…

(View the BIG version of this picture here.)

I started piling the yarn on my coffee table.  Then I realized it didn’t fit.  So it spilled over on to the couch too.  There’s enough yarn there to knit 50 pairs of socks.  Whew!  I guess I better get knitting!

My main goal for Summer of Socks ‘08 is to knit up all the yarn that’s already been wound.  That accounts for 13 pairs.  That’s do-able (… I think?).  I’m going to start looking for patterns to match up with each of those yarns.  Maybe if I get particularly ambitious, I’ll even print out all the patterns and make up ziploc project bags with the individual yarn/pattern combo in each bag.  Then I can just grab-n-go. 

Once all those wound balls of yarn are used up, that should empty out one of the two cubes.  I’m going to attempt to restrain myself to only having one cube full of sock-yarn-stash… not buy more till I knit some up and make room for it.  (Good intentions…)

I just really, really need to make room for my ever-growing roving stash.  So I guess that means I’m really not “de-stashing”.  I’m just “stash-shifting”.  Ah well.