I *know* I own this yarn... somewhere

 As I frequently note, mostly with joy and sometimes with just the hint of frustration, I have a lot of yarn. It's been acquired over two decades, with some of the oldest stash remnants of childhood yarn shopping though most of it has come into my life somewhere in the past 15 years. The Philosopher commented the other day that much of my yarn stash is like really good beer: it's not things I can just buy in bulk all the time, it's a collection honed and curated, and most of the skeins come with memories, but it's also something I use up. 

And one of my habits is to rely on the stash to serve as the basis when inspiration strikes. I might need to add a skein or two but what I've already purchased should see me at least partway there. And so it was that I knew a couple of weeks ago that I had four skeins of Louet Gems fingering weight in the stash. 

I had a pattern picked out, I had bought the supplemental yarn (more difficult than might be expected --- Louet Gems is discontinued), everything was set for winding yarn and casting on except the location of the brick red yarn.

Now, while projects get strewn hither and yon around Chez Hedgehog, the yarn stash pretty much lives in two places: it's corner shelving, where I have aspirations of it fitting into the bins I bought it a few years ago and then supplemental stash which lives currently in the breakfast nook. I'm very consistent that yarn not being actively worked on lives there. So, when I overturned most of the stash in a couple of days and couldn't find the brick red yarn -- I got concerned. Had I inadvertently put it in a box that got shuffled around during the pandemic? Had I put it "somewhere safe?" I had this vague memory of setting a bag of yarn on a bookshelf-- none of the bookshelves however contained yarn. 

Over the long weekend I made the decision to toss (salad, not garbage) the entire stash. All bins would be open. All skeins would be examined and judged afresh. There was brick red yarn here somewhere. 

And, there, in a bin I had not opened before because clearly it was just a sweater lot of black yarn, we find this. Someone very brilliant carefully tucked those brick red skeins into the space.  How incredibly smart of them. Past Me clearly wasn't expecting Present Me to be trying to find this yarn in the second week of the fall semester during a global pandemic. 

In the process of all of this, skeins that are less loved were sorted out and set aside for new lives outside of my stash. Project bags were gathered from around the house and put in a single place where I can pull one out and keep working on them. Another large bag was committed to the "next" yarn; yarn I do actually expect to use up before the end of 2020. I hadn't fully been through the stash since July 4, 2019 (the last great Resorting of the Stash) and it was due. 

Once I found the brick red yarn though, I did have to break out the swift and ball winder and spend an hour getting things prepped.  This is going to be a huge project, probably along the lines of 2-3K meters because the yarn is being held doubled. And it's garter stitch with big swaths that will be perfect for meeting knitting.  I'd warn my coworkers to settle in on this one but I that it'll go fast. 

Can't let the brick red yarn sneak off again....