Another steenky hot day today. Too hot to work, but also too hot to knit. Not too hot to surf the internet endlessly, though.

It’s days like this that I read through Knitty articles. Usually I’m too busy, so I skim through and read a few that catch my attention, then leave the rest. Today I discovered one called “It’s not a stash … it’s a collection” in which the author, Kate Antonova, considers her yarns from a collector’s point of view. What I found most interesting was how the categorised the yarns in her stash. It’s probably an indication of how bored I was today that I decided to open up the stash and sort it into similar categories.

A stash is a personal thing, so it’s no surprise that only a few of her categories applied to my stash, and I had to come up with a few of my own.

First there’s the Precious Yarns. These are the yarns that are too good to knit. I have only one:

A beautiful handspun skein of silk that was the first yarn I ever bought knowing it was a thing of beauty in itself, and I need never knit it up.

Kate’s second category was Souvenir Yarns. Oh, yes I know that one well. I came back from the UK with quite a lot of it. Yet when I put it together, I was impressed at how little was still left unused.

I found I had another pile of yarns that related to the Souvenir Yarns category, but which weren’t bought on holidays. I call this category the Because I Was There category. It’s the yarn you buy when you visit a shop or yarnmaker, and feel you must come away with something.

I have no yarns to suit Kate’s Bathing Yarns, but there’s a category that I’ve always had in the back of my mind: Friend Yarns. These are yarns a friend gave me, or made. I know how much pleasure people get when you make something out of a yarn they gave you, or made, so I don’t like to let those yarns languish in the stash forever.

Kate’s Ambiton Yarns didn’t really apply to me, but I substituted with another category of my own. Freaky Fibres are yarns that are made from something whacky. They’re so innovative or wierd, you have to buy some even though you have no idea what you’ll make. I currently only have some banana yarn that qualifies.

For Shame Yarns, I have to admit I do have a small box of acrylic, but it’s only for emergencies. Nothing suggested itself as a Dessert Yarn, or if it did it already sat firmly in another category. But I have one classic One Skein Wonder. This is the yarn you only bought one ball of, because it’s too expensive.

Next Kate talks about Phase Leftovers – yarn left over from a time when you had a particular interest in a technique or style of knitting. I figure it’s easier to just call this part of my yarn stash The Leftovers. There’s plenty of it.

Curious and Curiouser didn’t apply. Either I haven’t been knitting long enough to forget why I bought something, or I’ve given anything worthy of this category to the op shop. So I’ll skip to Best Friends, the yarn you come back to again and again. In my case, that’s Bendy and good old Cleckheaton 8ply.

That still left me with a lot of yarn that clearly required new categories. The most obvious was Bargain Yarns, the ones you buy at sales or from the manufacturer’s factory shop, or at op shops. Some of these buys are good, some not so good. I’ve obviously been very good at buying bargain yarn. This was, by far the biggest category:

Then I invented a category for my handspun called I Made This:

And that left me with just three lonely balls of cotton that just didn’t fit with any of the previous categories, mine or Kate’s. How should I classify them? What was my intention when I bought them?

Then I realise something very, very indicative of my buying habits.

The one defining factor with these three balls of yarn was that I bought them for a specific purpose. Not because they were pretty. Not because they were cheap or expensive. Not because they were made from some whacky fibre.

Perhaps I should call them my Non Spontaneous Purchase Yarns.

(You may have noticed I’ve left out my sock yarns. I wasn’t quite sure whether to split them up or not. Some could have fit into Friend Yarns, but the rest…? Not sure. It seems there’s a whole other very sock-specific drive that applies when buying sock yarn. Maybe they should have a category of their own.)