Tuesday Tip: Yarn Storage

I decided that maybe I should change my name for my tips this week, since this tip isn't exactly plastic canvas related.  So this week it's a Tuesday Tip! 

So as a plastic canvas designer, I decided that I should have a lot of yarn.  I mean a LOT of yarn.  Remember the shopping trip when I came home with this?

 And that was just a small section of my collection.  I have all but four of the solid Red Heart Super Savers colors, plus a ton of stuff from the With Love series and some other random stuff.  I just buy yarn when I like it, lol! 

So how does a crafter sort all this yarn?  Especially if you don't have a lot of room?  I have an art studio that's 8x12.  Not exactly huge, and most of it is filled with a drafting table, large wall mounted ironing board/crafting table, and book shelves.  Here it is in all it's incredibly messy glory.

Somehow it doesn't look that messy in real life, lol.

So as you can see, I just don't have a lot of room for my yarn, and I especially don't have room to keep it well organized.  What's a crafter to do?

I don't have a lot of room in my studio, but I do have some large closets in our den/computer room.  It's a room over the garage, so the roof goes down across the room, and there's a long closet all along one side of the room where the roof is angling down.  It's convenient for storing stuff we don't use very often.  And it also happens to be a great place to store milk crates full of yarn!

Since I don't have to get in there very often, I just piled the crates right inside the doors.  Each crate holds one color family; there's a brown crate, a pink crate, blue, bright green, soft green, purple, black and white, teal, and yellow and orange.

I started out with three crates, and then I asked around to get two more.  I bought two more crates at Home Depot, but cripes they're expensive.  They were about $10 a piece.  I still needed a few more crates though, so I decided for the time being, I'll make due with cheap Rubbermaid crates.  They were 3 for $10!  And they're actually pretty high quality.  Not quite as high quality as the milk crates though.

I wouldn't use this storage system outside of the closet.  My house is very dusty for some reason (I blame cats), and I bet that if these were out in the open, they'd be covered with dust and hair in no time.  Someday I hope to have a huge cupboard with drawers to hold all of my yarn, but for now it's a good work around. 

If you're a yarn freak like me, how do you store it?  I'd love to see everyone's ideas!