How to manage a wild-grown yarn stash.

As a long-term knitter, I have accumulated a lot of yarn over the years. It seems to accumulate faster than I'm able to use it, which probably has something to do with my love of different textures, colours and blends. So how do I keep this yarn stash from growing beyond all boundaries, occupying my closet and popping out from under my bed?


Appearently, this is not a problem unheard of, several blog entries and even books have been written on the subject. So, in order to motivate myself to continue knitting and continue blogging, I've created my own knit-o-meter! This knit-o-meter shows the number of grams of yarn remainig in my yarn stash, as well as how many grams of yarn I've already used.

In addition, I've created some more detailed knit-o-meters, showing what types of yarn I use most frequently. All knit-o-meters are displayed on the knit-o-meter page.

Here's how I created my knit-o-meters
I created a new spreadsheet in Google docs, and made a table summarising the types of yarn and how many grams the yarn stash contains of each. Then I inserted a column chart in the spread sheet, based on this table. When the chart is finished, one of the available options is "Publish chart". Choosing this option provides you with a small html script, which you can copy and paste into a html gadget in your blog. This will display your chart as a picture in your blog. Whenever you update your table in the spreadsheet and save it, the chart will be automatically updated, as well as the picture of the chart in your blog!