needles & vectors

(This post starts out as a boring summary of my cleaning non-adventure yesterday but morphs into a statement about my yarn stash and its suffocating nature.)

Well, I didn’t finish nearly as much as I’d hoped to yesterday. I had fully intended to lock myself in the office with the TV on some sort of crappy television show, and stay in there until the place was spotless. Okay, not actually lock myself in because the cats would never allow me to keep them from an entire room and I would need access to things such as extra trash bags or a cold soda. But you get the point.

I was all excited, until I opened the front door and saw the dishes. Let’s just say we hadn’t done the dishes from the night before and they weren’t alone. Not wanting Matt to come home to a disaster area in the kitchen and a office in the process of becoming organized, I decided the office could wait. He arrived home when all but the plates were cleaned and I immediately put him to work dryer tupperware and pots. He continued to clean up the kitchen and made dinner while I (at last) relocated to the office.

I managed to clean off my desk, remove most of the junk under my desk, and clean one of the closets (two closets in an office, odd, that is) before dinner was ready. A dinner of my favorite things ever: sauteed chicken (from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1) and creamed corn (from the Lee Brothers main – only? – cookbook). After dinner I simply couldn’t be bothered to return to the office though I did sit down and get all of my yarn stash in one place and (somewhat) organized. I tossed all of those stupid sock yarn scraps I was collecting that I was never going to do anything with and all the scraps of crappy yarn I was also stupidly holding onto. It was really freeing.

Yes, after dinner, I had more than enough time to organize my entire stash before going to be at a reasonable hour. My stash consists of – hold onto your hats – one single Ikea plastic storage bin. The only yarn not in that bin is the yarn in my WIPs. If a sweater project is 10 balls total and I’m knitting on the 2nd ball – eight are still in that bin. Finished projects, buttons, and notions aren’t in the bin though all my needles are (all 25 of them).

It’s funny, I always think I have tons and tons of yarn sitting down in the basement yet one little bin. Only 12,000 yards of yarn which is about 15 gallons (volumetrically speaking). But I can’t help but look at all you can make with that much yarn: 2 scarves, 3 cowls, 6 shawls, 2 baby sweaters, 5 pairs of socks, 2 adult sweaters, and some scraps. I don’t even want to think about how much money is in that bin.

Why, oh why, do I have so much stash? Sure, most of the sock yarn was gifts and the two sweaters worth were purchased “early” because the intended recipient could be taken to the yarn store to select the yarn right then. But, the rest – why did I feel this intense need to buy it before I was going to use it? I could have grabbed just one thing of Lonco instead of two and who cares if the Miss Babs would have sold out before I would have “needed” it?

But I guess what Rosemary says is true: I’m not just a knitter, but a yarn collector. Every now and then, it leaves its box not only so I don’t forget what I have but also to be looked at and squished in my hot little hands. It’ll get knit up someday – nothing I have in stash is so sacred or valuable to remain unknit – and, until then, it makes me happy knowing it’s there. And that’s good enough for me.

(It seems like “and that’s good enough” or “and that should be good enough” is becoming a catch phrase for me. I get fixated on words or phrases often so bare with me until I move on to some other phrase to repeat over and over again.)