The State of the Spinning Stash, April 2022 Edition

This is a post I'd intended to write a week ago, but obvious it became impossible when I did not get home Sunday evening as planned. The timing is pretty irrelevant, though, which will become clear in a moment. The point of this post to mainly to take a look at how I've been doing in spinning down my fiber stash, specifically from my stash Southern Cross Fibre club shipments. You may remember that doing so was a goal of mine last year, and you might even remember that I took a photo of all my SCF fiber and was tracking which bags I'd spun during the year. That's what I'm doing again this year.

While I didn't spin all of my SCF stash last year, I did make a pretty good dent -- by my count, at least 18 bags of fiber. Some of that was in the stash when I posted that photo and some came into the stash over the course of the year. And of course that's continued to happen this year. Thought I've been making an effort not to go out and buy more yarn and fiber this year, I've continued my membership in the fiber club because it's a small pleasure I can give myself every month, and I think we can all use a little something to look forward to. So here's where things stand at the moment:

These are arranged, left to right and top to bottom, from oldest and newest. The oldest shipment is in the top left-hand corner and is from December 2015. The newest just came in March and is the February 2022 shipment. One more shipment is currently somewhere between Australia and the United States. These are all monthly club shipments with the exception of the two bags at the far right in the top row, which were prizes for spinalongs from years past.

There's a lot of fiber here -- approximately 2,310 g or 81.5 oz./5+ lbs. But the thing about collecting fiber from one dyer is that their color sense comes through even when they're creating new colorways, and I see a lot of groupings that would work for combo spins or even just combining skeins. Like look at this group in the red/purple/brown family:

Or these in the green/blue/purple range:

Or even these colorways that seem to have a lot of colors in common:

I am really excited about all the possibilities for blending and combining, and I'm eager to get back to my wheel. As I did last year, I've made a list of all the shipments in chronological order, and I'm going to be tracking what I spin throughout the rest of the year. I think I'd like to start with some of the older stash because it's been waiting its turn to get on the wheel for a long time -- in part because (at least in the case of the oldest shipment) I felt like I needed to be a better spinner to be worthy of the fiber. I am a better spinner now, I think, but I've also changed my attitude toward using the "good stuff" since then and believe that if we save things for someday, we'll never actually believe we're good enough for them.

I still have some neutral/undyed fiber to finish spinning, but expect to see some of this fiber on the wheel soon -- and be sure to hold me to account!