If you have more stash than you're ever going to knit with (probably including some stuff you'd never want to knit with -- why, exactly, did I go through a lime green yarn buying frenzy a couple of years ago?) it can be a really good thing to get rid of some of it. Once you've sorted and evaluated what you want to keep and what you'd like to get rid of, you have a lot of options for how to destash your yarn and other knitting supplies.

You might think eBay, but did you know you can also sell yarn on Ravelry? Or you might want to donate the lot to Goodwill, but maybe you could find a local knitting charity or a school knitting club that could put it to use right away. Or you could give it to your friends in the form of a "yarn swap" that you only provide materials for and don't actually take anything in return.

Some of these ideas will take more time than just selling it all for a buck a skein at your next garage sale, but I'll bet you'll get a much better feeling knowing that your yarn is going into good hands that really want and need it.

If you've destashed before, how did you get rid of your yarn? I'd love to hear your ideas.

If all this thinking about your yarn stash has gotten you down in the dumps about how much yarn you really own and how you feel like you may never be able to knit it all, I have some ideas for getting rid of stash guilt.

A striped afghan is a great way to get through a lot of yarn fast. © Sarah E. White.

The first thing, of course, would be to stop buying any new yarn and to get something on the needles pronto. If it can be something that uses up a lot of oddballs, so much the better. Maybe a stash afghan, a scarf worked in multiple colors on huge needles or a shawl version of the Horizontal Scarf.

In the future you can try practicing the one in, one out rule. This is a way to keep yourself from owning too much of anything. Whenever you get a hankering for a new skein of sock yarn, remind yourself that you can have it, as long as you go home and get rid of a ball you already have (you can donate it, sell it, give it to a stashless friend, whatever). This will cause you to evaluate both your stash and your purchases in a new way.

What do you do when you start feeling the weight of all your stash? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

You probably shouldn't follow any advice I have to give on organizing yarn. I'm not very good at it. I'll think that I have a pretty good system going, and then all of a sudden I'll find a box of random single skeins I'd forgotten I had and nowhere to put it.

I have yarn in plastic boxes (and some cardboard boxes) in the upstairs linen closet, more in my office closet. There's some yarn in tote bags in my office closet, and some in boxes that used to hold magazines on my desk.

There also, admittedly, is yarn in my attic I haven't unpacked since we moved just over a year ago. See why I need this week of talking about stash and cleaning it up?

If I had the time, which I do not this week, I'd try to get all the yarn in one place (probably the dining room) and make an effort to really sort through it, including setting aside a pile of yarn I don't think I'll ever knit with (more on what to do with that later in the week).

I like most of my yarn to be organized by color, because that makes it easy when I know I want to knit something, say, brown and red or I need a little bit of yellow for an accent. But yarn I have in larger quantities I like to have stored separately, both so I can use smaller bins and so I can easily see how much I have of a particular yarn. So I'm not quite sure where that leaves me.

And if I had even more time I would log all those skeins on Ravelry so I would always know what I had, how much and where it was. But let's not get crazy. Right now I'd just take fewer skeins on the floor in my office!

Have any great tips for getting your stash in order and keeping it that way? Please share! You know I need to hear them!

This week I'm thinking a lot about spring cleaning, particularly when it comes to my wreck of an office, which is mostly filled with knitting books, yarn and other craft supplies. I know that I have way too much stuff to store, and also way more stuff than I will probably ever use, and I think I'm about ready to try to part with some of it -- more so than I have in the past.

If you're in need of a little cleanup of your crafty space and stuff, I'll be sharing lots of tips this week. But first off I want to know how you feel about your yarn stash.

We knitters are so funny in that we hoarde our materials as if merino sheep were about to go extinct. It's so common to have too much yarn that we even have an acronym for it: SABLE, meaning stash acquisition beyond life expectancy. It's usually said in a joking, "whoever dies with the most yarn wins" kind of way, but the truth is it's probably a little unhealthy.

I don't think I have so much yarn I couldn't use it all if I tried, but I do have a lot. And it's kind of overwhelming. And even though I've only bought a few skeins this year, it seems like more is always coming in the door (thanks to yarn reviews and the book I'm working on).

So tell me, how do you feel about your stash? You can click multiple replies on the poll, but please leave more details in the comments!