Now, I’m about to write something that will alienate about 105% of the fibre community. Please don’t hate me. I’m fairly nice, really. You might even like me if we met at a party.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t understand the concept of stash.
No, that wasn’t a typo. I meant it. I. Don’t. Understand. Stash.
Yes, yarn is beautiful. Yarn is lovely. Yarn is squishable. Yarn is comforting. Yarn inspires possibilities. And yes, if someone popped round tomorrow to fill my house with gorgeous indie-produced merino in many rich and luscious colours, I probably wouldn’t grumble very much. In fact, I’d look a bit like this:-
But buying yarn when you only have the vaguest idea what you’ll do with it and when, I just don’t understand. (I’m not criticising anyone who does this – I just want to understand so that I can join in the yarn-accumulating fun. Have you SEEN some of the stashes on Ravelry?) Fair enough if you love to knit socks, you can buy up all the sock yarn at Yarndale and be pretty confident that it’ll get used eventually, assuming that you live to the ripe old age of 304. But otherwise, how do you know what to buy? And how many skeins?
At the moment, I’m knitting a jumper, doll-like models of my family, a cushion cover, a chicken, and I’m crocheting a rug, a giant stained glass window afghan, a model of my house, and crochet-bombing the plant pots on the kitchen window sill. You can imagine the sheer variety of fibre types/weights/colours/quantities involved here. That’s the thing: there are so many variables in yarn. Even if I had a stash, a huge stash, what are the chances of finding yarn for my next project amongst it? I just know that if I bought eight balls of something, I’d end up wanting to use it as part of a many-coloured fair isle project, so I’d only need a little bit. And if I bought one ball, I’d be struck the next day by an urgent need to knit a dress.
Truly, I am perplexed. And I do love yarn. Clearly I am missing something. Please can somebody explain?
Oh my goodness, woman, you are right about never having the right amount, no matter how huge the stash. It never fails, when I want to do something other than a baby blanket, there isn’t enough of any one color/brand/weight. In defense of my ridiculously huge stash, I bought most of it before I learned to knit, so it’s all cheap acrylic and silly bits of novelty yarns that are pretty useless for day to day stuff. Now that I knit, which takes substantially more time and effort for me, I want to use the best yarn I can afford, so I’ve been stashing alpaca, silk, merino, and other luscious fibery goodness. Our street is having a three block long garage sale the first of August, so the vast majority of the old stash is getting bagged up in bunches and sold off, with the proceeds going towards yarn souvenirs from my upcoming vacation in Santa Fe. The nice thing about luxury yarn is it takes up MUCH less space than the nuclear holocaust surviving cheap stuff. I’m sure I’ll always have a stash of some kind, though…petting yarn makes me happy, so I like to keep it around. It also doesn’t talk back or make a mess, and even if angora does shed, it is nowhere near as much as my dogs do!
I think you’re right about the luxury yarn. Surely such beautiful gorgeousness can never really be wrong…