The milk pan, the lasagne dish, the salad spinner, the scales and the irritatingly small espresso cups have all been taken. I don’t know who took them, or what smells will rise in the kitchens they’ve moved to, or what food will be prepared in them. But I do know that they will be great – or at least greater than what has gone before. For the shameful truth is that the unwanted kitchen paraphernalia which I put on my doorstep on Sunday morning has done nothing other than gather dust since it accumulated in a box from returning student kids and kitchen clearouts several years ago. But now in the space of just a few hours, 2 great things have happened: The desk which was previously colonised by dusty saucepans, can function as a desk again, and the kitchen stuff can revert to its original purpose and be useful to people who need it.

Now wouldn’t it be great if you could do the same thing with your unwanted wool? No, not leave it on the doorstep, silly! I mean get all the wool out from your underbed boxes, the cupboard under the stairs, the projects you’re pretending you might one day finish but can’t even remember what they started as, all the wool that you’re not knitting with (or ever likely to), and find a way to get it into the hands of people who would love to knit with it.

That’s what I thought too! In fact it’s what I thought when I very first thought of opening the shop back in 2014. And it’s how we came up with the idea of the Stash Depot – a place where unwanted wool could change hands and in the process, miraculously transform into wanted wool.

Here’s how it works..

• Knitters bring or send their unwanted balls of wool (moth-free, unused, complete with ball bands) to the shop, and receive a Stash Dealer number.
• We label each ball of wool with its dealer number and put it into our Stash Depot Drawer.
• All the yarn in the Stash Depot Drawer is sold for £2 per ball. Acrylic, cashmere, wool, alpaca, lurex, hand dyed, whatever it is, it’s all £2 a ball.
• Whenever a ball of Stash Depot yarn is sold, £1 goes to the shop and £1 is credited to the Stash Dealer who brought it in. They can use their credit to buy more wool that they really do want, or alternatively donate it to our Yarn Forward project .
• Meanwhile bargain hunters leave the shop with super-affordable yarn and all the new knitting possibilities that opens up.

You can take your pick of which is your favourite win from the Stash Depot:

The profound feeling of well being that you get from clearing out a cluttered space?
The joy of stocking up with yarn for a knitting project that previously seemed out of reach?
The balance that’s restored when things get moved to their rightful place in terms of where they’re most useful?
The pleasing tickle you feel when you discover you’ve got £20 to spend in the wool shop that you didn’t realise you had?

It just works for everyone! The knitters who contribute yarn and the knitters who pick it out of the drawer: They’re all helping to carry on cycling the yarn around, getting it from where it was to where it needs to be so that it can finally turn into hats, mitts, sweaters, pompoms and and other things to keep everyone warm.

If you’d like to contribute yarn to the Stash Depot, just send an email to stashdepot@wildandwoollyshop.co.uk with a brief description of how much and what sort of yarn you’d like to drop off. If you’d like to shop the Stash Depot, you’ll find it in a big drawer opposite our bookshelves where you come into the shop..

Happy New Year everyone!