I am back to blogging after a rather long break. I know what you are thinking. I could have just started an all new blog and pretended I was a fresh blogger. But I am too lazy for that and I am also rather fond of the content on this blog. I might even get my scanner connected and revive the seventies pattern series. I still have a few of those that beg for comments.
But right now, I am in a thoughtful place. Wooldiaries, of our South African Ravelry group has prompted us to haul out our stash, to flash it and to say what we intend doing about it. As a person who has "too much stash" ( in quotes because there is no such thing) I am a bit embarrassed about it all. The more I entered the stash into my stashery, and the more photos I took and posted, the more I started wondering if I do have a serious problem. The whole flash your stash thing feels a bit like sitting at a dinner party and every one is asked to tell about her most embarrassing moment. FFS! Why, if it was your most embarrassing moment, would you want to be embarrassed all over again by recounting the moment? I never understood it.
The last few days, I have been pondering about the whole stash thing and have come to terms with it. Here are the main points that come to mind.
I love knitting and to knit you need yarn. Like a painter needs a canvas and paint, a knitter needs needles and yarn. No one has ever said to a painter, you can't buy more red paint until you have used up all the blue that you have stashed. The artist would never be able to be creative if he was not allowed free range to pick and choose colours or to store up pieces of inspiration in what ever form he does, so that when he wants to create, he can get creative. It is the same for knitters. We may not be elevated to the status of artists, but this is a creative outlet to me. So I have stash, and knitting books, and my late M-I-Ls collection which spans her 50 plus years of knitting. I also have tools. Needles, two sets of interchangeables. Only a knitter knows how expensive our tools are. Ordinary people would be shocked at what some plastic cables and metal, bamboo or wooden tips cost. Ordinary people don't even know what a modern day knitting needle looks like!
Ok, creativity aside, do I deserve to have all this stash? Am I worthy? Am I aiming to be to yarn, what Imelda Marcos was to shoes? I don't know. She probably had warm feelingsabout her shoes like I do about my yarn. But that aside, we live in a material world where people collect all manner of expensive things, and then they flash them before the eyes of the poor and hungry. When you drive your luxury car past a beggar on the street, do you wish you had taken a taxi and not been so conspicuously consumptive? No, you probably say, this car created jobs and some people are lucky that I bought it because it meant that some families had food on the table because I love being a collector of things. Maybe yarn is the same. What I do know is that what I spend on yarn in comparison to what other women in similar circumstances to me spend on facials, manicures, and massages, not to mention hairdos, special treatments and pedicures, I can honestly say, what I spent on yarn this year would not keep my nails in good nick for the whole year. I am not condemning your beauty routine, just saying that we all waste our money in different ways.
I knit and give most of what I knit away. I don't mean charity knitting, but friends and family who love my shawls and socks and mitts are the recipients of my knitting and welcome to it. Sometimes when I spend a rand or two on yarn, I realise that I could never have found as lovely a gift for a friend as the what the yarn becomes. My humble opinion, so there!
So, what am I thinking as far as stash goes in 2015? I want to thank Wooldiaries for the challenge. It forced me to take out all my yarn and enter it into my stash on Ravelry. That is a gift in itself. Because I can glimpse at it and remind myself of what I have when I am planning a new project. I also know what the heck the yarn is called, the weight of it and how much I have. I am notorious for losing ball bands.
My 2015 resolutions about yarn:
Keep knitting, whether from stash or cash.
Try to have less yarn at the end of the year. I might need to downsize one day and it would be sad to say goodbye to some of the yarn I have yet to knit.
But never deny myself a flutter if the yarn tugs at my heartstrings.
Big resolution - whatever new yarn comes in to the house, enter the stash into my Ravelry page.
