SABLE?

Spoiler: I haven't. Not yet.

Recently, I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of my ravelry projects page, and saw this:

Not bad.

But then I wanted to see how much yarn I still have in my stash, and whether I had actually achieved SABLE yet or not. So I exported that excel file using that handy ravelry function, totalled up the yardages left, and saw this:

I can totally use all of the yarn I purchase! Look at how much yarn I've got! I must be super productive!

This gap between what I have actually produced and what I have left with which to produce new things is a bit overwhelming. It's more of an abyss, truth be told.

Granted, some of my projects have no yardage listed because I used cone yarns and I'm too lazy to measure out how many yards they are per gram. Also, none of my weaving projects save one have yardages listed, and I think those probably do eat up quite a bit of yarn. (The same argument goes both ways, though: none of my cone yarns have yardages listed in my stash. So actually there's more yarn than the numbers suggest, both in my stash and in completed projects.) Anyway, I decided to break things down.

I've been a member since 2010, so that's 5 years. I've been knitting more in these past couple of years than in the beginning, so let's actually count from 2013 onwards. That'll be more representative of how much yardage I consume yearly, on average:

2013: 6422 yds
2014: 9832 yds
2015 (so far): 10 800 yds

Hey hey! Do you see a pattern? I seem to be getting pretty good about using more and more yarn, so that's good news. More good news: it's only June, end of June. I have a couple of projects still on the go (another test knit for Nadia - go check out her designs!) and more that have been queued and are in the foreseeable future that I've linked to stash yarn.

Now, the bad news. Unfortunately, I can't seem to sort all of my stash according to date added on ravelry and still see exactly how much I got each year, but here's an approximation (cone yarns not included, of course):

Rate of acquisition per year.

Prior to 2013, it was mostly cone yarns. Which explains that super low yardage. Also, I was only just getting into knitting. Then came 2013 and my rate of acquisition shot up. More specifically, I purchased approximately 51 times the yardage of 2013 and before. 2014 was my worst yet, but growth-wise, I was only 1.5 times the 2013 acquisitions. So not too bad, right? (Right?) And this year has been showing great improvements: so far, my acquired yardage for the year has been only a quarter (1/4) of what I purchased last year. If I continue on like this for the remaining half of the year, that means I'll have decreased my habits by half! And I'm already actively trying to not purchase more new yarn, so the rest of this year will probably see even fewer additions to the stash.

Let's sum up all that I've said, then:

1. On average (extrapolating from my usage these past 6 months into the future 6 months), I use about 12 618 yards/year. That's a very safe average, considering I've already used 10 800 yards.
2. I have in my stash 97 934.4 yards.
3. If I do not add to my stash (... I'm not calculating the likelihood of that), it will take me 7.76 years, so approximately 8 full years, to use up all of my stash.
4. Life expectancy is 84, from a quick search on google. I am not 76.
5. In conclusion: I have not yet achieved SABLE. (In order for me to be at that level, I would need to have more than 782 316 yards of yarn. I'm not too sure whether I should be happy to relay this or not, but my stash currently makes up 12~13% of that number.).

Regardless, I think I really do need to do more stashbusting.