A Yarn, Fabric and Bead Stash You Can Trust: How the Craft Supply Ledger Works

A yarn stash inventory is worth keeping for as long as it can answer two questions before a trip to the craft store: what do I already have, and which color and lot do I need to match. The Craft Supply Ledger is built around those two questions. It is a Google Sheet with a phone form: each time a skein comes home, a yard of fabric goes into a bag or a drawer of beads is counted, the entry travels form to sheet and the counts update from it. Logged in-the-moment, at the yarn shelf or the cutting table, the sheet holds a count worth trusting.

The form that writes to the list

The form is called Log Craft, and a link to it sits on the Dashboard under the heading "In-the-moment entry." It asks for six things. Date, which falls back to today when it is left blank. The Craft item, chosen from a dropdown of every item on the list, A to Z. What happened: Added, Used or Counted. Amount, a number in the item's own unit. Project, an optional short answer for the project the supply went into. And a Note.

Everything the form collects lands as one row on the Craft Log tab, so the whole history of the stash sits in one place, in order, with the Project in a column of its own between Amount and Note. The log holds up to 5,000 entries, and a stash that reaches the limit is told on the Dashboard from 90 percent full, rather than having entries quietly dropped.

Three words for three kinds of moment

Added raises the number: a supply joined the stash, bought, gifted or swapped. Used lowers it: three skeins went into a hat, a yard of fabric into a bag, a tube of beads into a bracelet. Counted records what is really in the bin.

Counted is what keeps the list honest. A skein can leave the shelf without an entry. Counting the shelf and logging the result sets On Hand to what is physically there, and the Last Counted column shows the date.

The Items tab is the list

Every item has one row on the Items tab, with room for 250 of them. The owner's columns are Item, Category, Location, Unit, Low at, Color, Dye lot and Notes. The sheet fills in the rest: Added, Used, On Hand, Used in the last 60 days, Status and Last Counted.

Each color gets its own row, so Worsted wool 8010 in Peacock and in Rust are two items, and the Color and Dye lot columns say what the label says. Yarn, fabric and thread from different dye lots can differ in shade, and a lot written down once is still there at the next trip to the store. Beads and notions rarely carry one, and that column can stay empty. An item is added on the Items tab, not on the form, which keeps the form to one dropdown. As a name goes into the Item column, it appears in the form's Craft item choices. Each item carries one unit, in the owner's own word: skeins, balls, yards, spools, tubes or packs. The sheet never converts between units, so a number always means what the unit beside it says.

How the On Hand number is worked out

On Hand is the most recent Counted amount, plus everything Added since that count, minus everything Used since it. An item that has never been counted uses the whole log. It is a live formula over the log, so correcting a log row corrects the number.

Low at, and the Shopping List

Each item has a Low at number: the amount at which it is time to buy more. Status reads Out at zero, Low at or below the Low at number, and In stock otherwise. Every Low or Out item feeds the Shopping List on the Dashboard, grouped by category and then by name, with its Color, its Dye lot, its On Hand, its Low at number and its unit beside it. It is the list to read before you shop: which color to look for, and which lot to match.

Below the Shopping List sits Used most: the items that went into projects in the last 60 days, most first, with what is on hand and the Status beside each. A favorite that is running low shows up on both lists. With nothing used, it reads "Nothing used in the last 60 days." The row of counts across the top shows the whole stash at once: items on the list, Low and Out.

A Project on every Used entry

Every Used entry can carry a Project. It lands in its own column on the Craft Log, so the log can be filtered by project to see everything a project took, in the order it was used. A supply that did not go into a project leaves the answer blank.

Locations and categories, in the owner's words

The Customize Forms tab holds two short lists: Locations and Categories. They start with Yarn shelf, Fabric shelf, Thread drawer, Bead drawers, Notions box and Project bags, and Yarn, Fabric, Thread & floss, Beads, Findings, Notions and Batting & fill. They fill the dropdowns on the Items tab, and any of them can be renamed, added to or removed, so the sheet describes the owner's own craft room rather than a template's.

Starting with a sample stash, then making it your own

The Craft Supply Ledger arrives filled with a sample stash: 50 items of yarn, fabric, thread, beads, findings, notions and batting across six locations and seven categories, with about three months of log entries and 13 projects named on the Used entries, so every status and both lists on the Dashboard show something real. Clear Sample Data, on the custom Ledger & Light menu, empties the log and the items, keeps the locations and categories, and leaves the Items tab ready for the owner's own list. Entering that list is real work, done once. After that, each entry is a short form on a phone, and the sheet does the totalling and the sorting.

The menu also carries "Show my Log Craft form link," so the form's address is always on the menu when it needs to be bookmarked on a phone.

Owned, not rented

The Craft Supply Ledger is a Google Sheet bought once and kept, living in the owner's own Google Drive with no subscription to renew. Because the log is a list of rows, a stash that grows simply adds rows to the same sheet, and the history stays in one file.

This article describes how the Craft Supply Ledger works. It keeps the owner's own counts, colors, dye lots and project names.

Craft Supply Ledger on Etsy

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