Since I’ve bought any yarn!!! My wallet, husband, and the movers are very grateful that the diet is going so well. It certainly helped that I’ve been working a ton & we went out of town this past weekend to St. Louis & Omaha. Yes, that was a combined 11 hour trip, 1 way!! We must be nuts or really love our family.
It does make it tough though since I was traveling and my favorite type of tourism is yarn tourism. Luckily, we were pretty busy and unable to visit ANY shops to buy yarn or even look at any yarn or even drive by any yarn or even look-up any yarn shops. I was not a good yarn tourist. Ah well, it is all for the sake of the diet.
In other news, I have been updating my stash so I can at least visit it virtually. What has made this easiest is the app for iPhone called Yarma.
It’s a camera app that links directly to your Ravelry stash or project page. It is amazingly easy to use and it makes adding pictures to WIPs or stash items super simple. For instance, say you just came home with this beauty.
It’s Malabrigo. Worsted. In Mariposa. It’s got some great shades of a minty green, smokey grays, and punches of bright yellow. You love it. You want to stroke it. You want to hold it. You want to admire all the colors. You want to dream about all the things it could become. You even plug it into Ravelry to see what others have done with it. Your queue grows by 3 to 10 new projects that could be this skein.
Maybe Danskknit’s RUST.
And maybe you could pair it with another yarn…that may or may not be in your stash already 🙂
This is all fine and dandy, but what if you don’t cast on right away? What if you get distracted by your current knitting? Or another friend tells you they are pregnant and you MUST cast on something for their darling bundle of joy? WHAT WILL YOU DO IF YOU HEAVEN-FORBID, FORGET ABOUT THIS JEWEL?? (Can I get an audible gasp from the audience?)
Well, Ravelry’s stash tool is awesome. You can document what you have hidden or not around your house in terms of yarn. It even goes as far as to make suggestions for potential projects you look up with yarn suggestions from your stash you’ve logged. Now, if I could just get Ravelry to knit my projects for me….KIDDING!! I do love the actual process of creating 🙂
Back to Yarma and why it rocks. So you’ve found a darling skein to add to your stash or cast-on waiting list and you don’t want it to sink to the bottom of your stash without some sort of documentation. First, you need to take a moment and enter the yarn stats into Ravelry. So you set up your skein in a great solid background with natural light and you pull out your iPhone and snap away.
You can adjust the filter if you want. Maybe one of the cleverly named filters can give you truer colors.
You just click Upload. Then you can scroll through your stash to link this photo to it.
Then visit this gem on your Ravelry page like mine right here.
You can even use the Yarma app to take pictures of projects that are either in progress or finished and link them to your project on the website. Like I did for this awesome Earflap Hat.
You just click the upload button and choose the project. Super simple. Oh, and the most awesome part? IT’S FREE!!!
Do you catalog your stash in some way? Just curious…
v’s & bumps,
Jenna
hardknitlife 
I use Ravelry, too, to keep track of my stash. I like the fact you get suggestions when looking at patterns.
Good to hear there are fellow Ravelers who use it to track their stash. The suggestions make it tough to resist casting on!!
First off, congratulations on ten days of yarn dieting! It sounds like you’ve been able to use the time to get to know your existing stash a little better – which is a totally guilt-free form of yarn indulgence!
I don’t always remember to catalog all my newly-acquired stash on Rav, especially when it’s by an indie dyer or if I buy it while I’m away from my computer for an extended period of time. But I love being able to look up suitable patterns for the yarn I have! My list of future projects has just grown and grown exponentially.
Guilt-free is right!! It has helped to stay away from the store 🙂
I hear you about the future projects growing. I feel like every time I add a skein I add at least 2 or 3 patterns that I could make with the new purchase.
Grats on making it 10 days on your yarn diet!
I’ve heard of Yarma but haven’t had in-depth little walkthrough like yours before–thanks for clearing it up for me. It looks so straightforward and simple to use and it makes stash recording fun. :]
Since I began knitting around the same time I found out about Ravelry, I didn’t have any other method to catalog the yarn stash and the one on Rav seemed perfect for me (and has been! that ‘ideas in your stash’ feature is AWESOME!) It’s been such an enjoyable rhythm to photograph and record yarn acquisitions that I have my whole stash online. 😀
Thanks! I’ve enjoyed having Yarma. I know the iPhone camera is not the best, but it does a good job to at least document what you’ve got. I love that you’ve got your whole stash up online. It does make it easy to keep track of all you’ve got!!
I like the idea of that app – I do try to get it all onto ravelry but sometimes I forget, or I take the picture then someone is using the computer and I can’t upload the photos so this would be a great little idea. I will look into this!!
Super easy to use and a quick upload. It’s not the best quality photos but it is easy to get things uploaded and documented 🙂
That’s an awesome app. Congratulations on your yarn diet! I plan to get my stash all entered on Rav sometime this week too.
It just takes an afternoon where you can certainly sit down and get it all entered. It is pretty soothing to see it all in one place and I felt pretty accomplished when I can look through my stash online and know its all my physical yarn 🙂
It helps with stash busting too when you can see what you have while looking online at patterns.
i have most of my stash in ravelry…..but no photos!!!! this looks awesome!!! thanks for mentioning it.
It’s super easy to use and quickly gets a photo with your stash. It’s not the best quality photo but it’s a good way to keep up with what you’ve got!
I use ravelry to keep track of my stash. I’ve been Cold Sheep-ing since October last year so coming up to my 9 month milestone 🙂 Well done on reaching 10 days, I think the first few weeks are definitely the hardest
Thanks for the encouragement! I’m going to really try to stick to Cold Sheep-ing until I can get through my current WIPs and knit through a good chunk of my stash. It’s certainly a challenge!!
I liked the idea of yarma. I wish it would create stash pages as an option, which you could edit later. But I would like to get all my stash up. It might be a little embarrassing. Considering how slow I knit and that I’ve only knit since early this year… Then I think I’m at “sable”!