I started this blog in January 2015 to help me knit through my yarn stash, which I called my Stash Challenge. It has been really fun to work toward the goal of using up all my yarn, coming up with creative ideas for small amounts of leftover yarn, and sharing my finished projects here. As an engineer, I love measuring and quantifying things — in case you couldn’t tell from my precise accounting of remaining yarn every month in my Inventory posts. So today I’d like to share some numbers, charts, and photos of my Stash Challenge from 2015. (I realize that we are already almost 1/6 of the way through 2016, but better late than never!)

Let’s get started. In January 2015, I had 5000 g of yarn in my stash, which looked like this:

I decided that during the Stash Challenge I would not be allowed to purchase any new yarn. There was plenty in this pile to keep me busy! Every month, I have kept track of my completed projects and the yarn I’ve used, posting an Inventory post for each month. Behind the scenes, I have a spreadsheet that tracks how much is left of each individual ball of yarn, a section of which is below.

But that’s not all! I also made some charts to visualize the process and give me momentum to keep going. The first one shows what percent of the original 5 kg is remaining.

It looks like there were a couple months during which I didn’t make much progress, one month (September) when I knitted A LOT, and the rest of the time I kept up a fairly consistent pace. For a closer look at how my pace varied, I plotted the percentage used by month.

On average during 2015, I used up 4% of my stash, which amounts to about 200 g per month. Not too shabby! The most I ever knit in one month was 10.1%, or 505 g. I had a lot of free time that month — but I’m also pretty surprised by how much I was able to knit during the rest of the year. I had a lot of other things going on (finishing my Ph.D., starting a new job, some other personal stuff) so I am sure that without the accountability of the Stash Challenge I would not have made this much progress.

After one year, I have used up just over 50% of my stash. There are 2479 g remaining, which equals 49.58% of what I started with. I achieved this by knitting (and crocheting!) 40 projects, many of which were small items like headbands or gloves. Now my stash looks like this:

I think you can tell that it’s a bit smaller, right? I also transformed my knitting shelf from this:

to this:

It’s much more organized now, and I can almost find everything! There is still a fair bit of yarn, but it is less daunting than it was a year ago.

I have found the Stash Challenge to be a great way to strengthen my perseverance and creativity, and I’m looking forward to finishing the Challenge in 2016! And then I can finally buy new yarn…