Thursday, November 10, 2005

My Stash

Hello, my name is Katie and I am a fiberholic. (Hello, Katie.) I have come to the realization that fiber craft and fiber acquisition are two completely unrelated hobbies, and that I can support one or the other, but not both.

What's in my stash? A lot of junk, honestly. I have about a dozen skeins of acrylic inherited from my mother, now passed on to my husband who believes that if you learn on crappy tools, you become a better craftsman. (I disagree, but hey, it got the acrylic off my tally sheet, so I don't disagree too loudly.) I have the odds and ends from completed projects, waiting for me to find that website on moth-hole repair. I have some tangled masses that used to be sweaters but were reclaimed before I had the use of a ball winder or the brains to realize that it made more sense to frog the sweaters as I needed them, not all at once. Which means I also have a stack of sweaters that count as stash, but at least are stored nicely. I have a few skeins of this and that, pretty fuzzy stuff that I bought before I insisted on project-oriented purchases. (And before "Knitting Without Tears" ruined me for anything that isn't wool.) And then I have the skeins of nice stuff which should be projects, but were abandoned for one reason or another, usually involving a short attention span. Oh, and don't forget the enormous piles of "bargains", including the kilo of recycled silk accidentally bought off eBay. Nice stuff, but when am I going to get to use it?

So, I have stash that clutters and complicates my life. (Where should I put it? Where did I put it? How can I protect it?) And I have knitting, which clears my mind and inspires positive thoughts and actions. I know what I need to do, and yet those soft balls of fluff ceaselessly sing their siren call, bypassing my will and heading directly for my inner greed and basest desires.

To remedy this, a new worldview: I Own All The Yarn. I just keep it at the yarn shop, because my house isn't that big. And when I really, really NEED (as opposed to really, really WANT) some yarn, then I can go to the yarn shop (local or otherwise, for I have many locations in which to store my stash) and pay the nice people there to get it out of storage for me. There is no reason to take it away from its friends and family prematurely; the yarn can enjoy its time at the shop and I will trust it to be there when I need it. Will it work? Only time can tell.


(This entry was written for and submitted to The Carnival Of Knitting.)

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