YarnScope
Issue № 001Spring / 2026Klaipėda · A stash tracker for serious crafters
03The Tool · Stash

A yarn stash organizer that finally remembers itself.

Three perfectly good skeins, in the exact rust you'd just spent forty euros on at Loop. It happens to everyone. The stash grows faster than memory. A spreadsheet works for a season; a notebook for two. After that, you need a tool that fits the stash.

The honest problem

The stash starts in a basket by the sofa. Then a second basket, behind the sofa. Then a shelf, then a closet. By the time you have three baskets, two shelves, and a closet, the mental map breaks. You buy duplicates. You forget the dye lot on the half-finished jumper. The cashmere singles get strangled by the worsted bulk on the wrong shelf.

The honest problem is that human memory was not designed for skein management.

What organized actually looks like

Every skein in YarnScope is a card. A card carries:

  • Brand and yarn line (Drops Karisma · Malabrigo Rios · Madelinetosh Tosh DK)
  • Fibre composition (100% wool · 75% wool / 25% nylon · 100% pima cotton)
  • Weight category (lace · fingering · sport · DK · worsted · aran · bulky · super bulky)
  • Yardage and metres remaining, updated as you reserve to projects
  • Dye lot (the field that earns its keep on a 12-skein blanket)
  • Colour name and code, plus a hex swatch you can pull up at a yarn shop
  • Location — free text, your shelf shorthand, your private vocabulary
  • Photos — one or many, attached at OCR scan time or added later
  • Notes — where you bought it, what you meant it for, what you decided

Search, filter, sort

The home screen is your stash, not a marketing page. You can filter by weight (show me all the DK), by fibre (show me cotton-blends), by colour family (show me everything in the rust range), or by project assignment (show me what's reserved to the cardigan). You can sort by date added, yardage, weight, or brand. You can search by typed text across every field at once.

On the iPad or web view, the same data renders as a swatch grid — 24 to 48 swatches per screen, depending on density. The colour cards in the magazine are exactly this view, captured live.

Sharing — or not

By default, your stash is private. Nothing is shared with anyone, including us, unless you explicitly export. You can export the whole stash as CSV at any time, or export a single project's reserved skeins as a tidy PDF (useful at a yarn shop, to confirm dye lots before buying more).

A built-in social feed is not on the roadmap. Ravelry already has the best one.

Pricing — short version

Free up to 50 yarns. Pro $3.99 / month for unlimited stash, OCR ball-band scanning, pattern-to-yarn matching, and project tracking. No credit card on the free plan. Cancel any time; over-limit yarns become read-only on cancellation, never deleted.

Questions about the stash

How big a stash is YarnScope built for?
Comfortably for 200 to 3,000 skeins. The free plan stops at 50, which is the right size for a beginner; Pro is unlimited and that's where the search/filter UI earns its keep.
Can I record which basket a skein lives in?
Yes — every yarn has a free-text location field. Some users write 'third shelf, basket 4'; others write 'Eilė pa langu, audėjas'. The field is private to you, fully searchable.
Does it work as a spreadsheet replacement?
If your spreadsheet has more than 50 rows, yes. You get search, filter, sort, photos, and OCR for ball bands. You can still export to CSV at any time.
How is YarnScope different from a notebook?
A notebook is searchable only by you, on the day you remember which page you wrote on. YarnScope is searchable by anyone holding your phone — useful at yarn festivals.
Can I track yardage I have already used?
Yes. When you reserve skeins to a project, the remaining yardage updates automatically. When you frog the project, the reservation releases. Nothing is deleted without your tap.