There has been a lot of discussion and questions about the actual process of taking part in Stash Dash and whether it is cumbersome to keep track of exactly how much you have knitted. As ever in so many things knitting related Ravelry comes to the rescue.

By entering the amount of yarn you have used for a project Ravelry will automatically calculate the exact amount of yarn used (in meters and in yards). For example, for a shawl where you have used 1.5 skeins of a sock weight yarn - you can just enter 1.5 skeins (or you can do it by weight - 150g) and Ravelry will work out the rest.

To make life even simpler you can set up Ravelry to keep a running total of your total. Just assign each completed project a tag (eg StashDash2017) and then you can set up a filter to just show you all of those projects - and at the bottom it proudly displays your running total. With zero effort on your part.

If you've never done this before go to your notebook page and click on the ‘organise’ tab.

Then click on the button to ‘create a new set’. You just need to make sure that you enter your stash dash tag exactly as you've used it on your project.

Then when you go back to your main notebook page you will see a new tab across the top for StashDash2017. You can then click on this to see all of your Stash Dash projects neatly in one place.

In these screen shots I have shown you the one I set up for last year - I do hope it helps. After all Stash Dash is meant to be about maximising your knitting time so it makes sense to let Ravelry take care of the maths.