Yarn Harlot (7 page)

“What’s the average lifespan of an urban gray squirrel?”

T
here have been some complaints from my family, or as I like to call them, TAKE (Team Against Knitting Enjoyment), that my yarn has been turning up in all possible nooks and crannies and attacking people with double-pointed needles bared. The last straw may have been when my husband, trying to put on a sweater he hadn’t worn for a while, encountered a sock-in-progress stuffed down its sleeve. Don’t look at me like that. The sock was originally perched atop a pile of other stuff in the sweater closet, but owing to a shortage of space it fell to the floor each time I opened the closet. Very annoying. Stuffing it down the sleeve of the sweater hanging there capitalized on unused space and made the closet tidier. You need to think outside of the box when you have yarn-control issues.

In my continuing attempt to live in harmony with these nonknitters I have decided to try and bring things under control a little bit. I’m going to clean out my knitting bags, my closets, my baskets, my freezer, and my bins in an attempt to consolidate
my yarn collection. Note that I have given up attempting to reduce the stash—past forays into yarn nonproliferation strategies have proved to be folly. Mysteriously such efforts only increase the stash. True stash reduction being a nonstarter, I have undertaken a condensation approach.

While corralling stash, I found some long-abandoned projects and I began tossing them in a pile. As the pile grew, an idea began to form. (My ideas should come with a warning. Some of the worst disasters of my life have been preceded by the thought, “Hey! You know what I should do?”) My idea, before the whole thing got ugly, was that I should immediately vow to finish all these projects. I’d have a huge head start on Christmas, and it would feel good to have so many finished things. So far, most of these works-in-progress were more than half done; in fact, a lot of them were mostly done. I surveyed the pile. There weren’t even that many of them.

That was it. I decided to make a commitment: I,
Stephanie, do hereby make a deadly serious promise to myself that I will not cast on any new project until I have dealt with (in whatever way I deem reasonable) all of my unfinished projects.
I was cracking the whip, I was getting it together. I was going to finish these projects and then I would be the kind of knitter who has one project at a time (maybe two, if circumstances demand it) and works on that one item until it’s done. I’d always wanted to be that kind of knitter. Things seem to get done so quickly when you only have one project. (It is worth noting that I did not pause and reflect about why I have never been this kind of knitter … but self-examination is not for those in the grips of a new plan.)

I decided to go around the house and gather up all my projects.
I found two sweaters on the top shelf of the linen closet along with a scarf and mittens. The freezer yielded two shawls, a baby sweater, and socks (three pairs), and the empty space in the piano (Don’t judge me—remember about thinking outside the box?) held a hat and scarf. One final check of my bedroom closet turned up an almost finished cardigan. I found two mysterious rows of ribbing on needles under the hair dryer in the bathroom. (I don’t even know what those were going to be.)

I put all of these jilted projects on my bed. By now, it was quite a big pile … but never mind. I’d made a promise to myself and this time I was following through. Still scrounging around the house I found a wrap that only needed ends woven in and a baby sweater for a kid who was now in the third grade.

I kept looking for more forsaken projects, but it began to dawn on me that perhaps it wasn’t in my own best interests to look
too
hard. The pile on my bed had reached epic proportions and was distracting me; I was beginning to find it daunting. I checked a couple more hiding spots and decided that I’d certainly found them all.

The pile on the bed now resembled what would be left behind if every member of an enormous and eclectic knitting guild was forced to evacuate the club’s meeting place, taking nothing along. I began to take stock of the mountain.

I started adding up the unfinished projects. When I counted more than ten, I gave myself a stern talking to. How did I lose control like this? This tidying up would be good for me; it would be a self-imposed revolution. When the ruling class loses control and gets decadent, a revolution is just the ticket to restore balance.
I simply never imagined that I would be the first against the wall when the revolution came.

When I got up to twenty knitting orphans, I started wondering what on earth motivated me to abandon these projects in the first place. Why did I do this to myself? There’s that cotton intarsia sweater … I loved that sweater. Why did I put it down? Oh yeah, while I love wearing cotton intarsia sweaters, knitting them makes me feel like I’m getting meningitis.

I kept looking through the woolly deposit of projects. Now I’d counted more than thirty. Why didn’t I finish this hat? I lost the pattern, that’s why. Any reasonable woman would have given up and ripped it back, but did I? No, I saved it, because I believed that even though it had been years since I lost the pattern, it might yet turn up.

Still counting … thirty-five. These socks? I put them down because I was going to the movies and couldn’t pick up stitches in the dark. I cast on another pair instead, completely forgetting these.

After careful assessment, I realized that the pile could be roughly divided into several subpiles.

Pile one: Good projects gone astray. Projects I adored that lost their place in the lineup because of my criminally short attention span. These projects deserved better. These projects were worthy.

Pile two: Projects of questionable worthiness. These were the ones where something clearly went wrong. They were missing patterns or yarn; they were knitted at the wrong gauge; they turned out to be as much fun as making your own toothbrushes out of the rough hair of a Persian camel. These, well. These I didn’t know
what to do about. A wise knitter would have reclaimed the yarn and tried again. I’m not a wise knitter, so I didn’t have a plan yet.

Pile three: “I must have been drunk when I cast this on.” This was stuff other people gave me, stuff that I bought because I fell for a 50-percent-off sale. Some acrylic that I started before I knew I liked wool better. Stuff with bobbles. Why did I start anything with bobbles? Bobbles were the work of some evil three-dimensional demon sent to vex me. I always thought I was going to conquer the bobble and I never did. Maybe if I wore a necklace of garlic while I was knitting bobbles … I hadn’t quite figured out what to do with these either. Clearly, stuffing them into well-hidden locations around the house wasn’t helping, although it probably did lower our heating bill.

By now, the pile was scaring the crap out of me. I was feeling as if I had personality traits that I didn’t think of myself as possessing. This was the work-in-progress pile of a fickle, fickle woman. A heartless, spontaneous, wanton knitter who didn’t mind trashing a project on a whim. A woman who cared nothing for staying power, getting things done, or following through. It was also the pile of a woman who apparently didn’t think that there was anything wrong with buying as many knitting needles as it took to fill this urge, no matter how much this made her look like she had a porcupine fetish. Also (as I looked over the variety of things I had rejected or abandoned) I was either a person who really loved diversity or had a split personality. Wool, cotton, silk, lace, cables—I had forsaken them all at some point. I was clearly an equal-opportunity nonfinisher.

This was disappointing. All these were projects that at some
moment in my past, I adored. For each and every one of them there was that magic moment when I loved it (or the idea of it) so much that I trashed everything else I was knitting. My knitterly heart may be fickle, but it’s open. All of these yarns and projects were, at one time, my very favorite. They deserved more respect than this. Even the crappy acrylic could be better loved by another knitter than serving as box stuffing. The hat could be ripped back, reclaiming the yarn that I loved.

Okay, I told myself, I’m taking control. Today I tossed out a yarn catalog without even looking (much). I’m going to duct-tape shut my stash boxes and maybe put them in the attic with a drop cloth over them with some sort of electric field going on to try and make it harder to start new things. I am going to change my ways. I will begin with pile one today, and I will not cast on anything new until I’ve dealt with half of the total works in progress. I am freeing up space and opening the door to knitting hope again. I am not going to let the yarn down again. I will try to do better.

I had no idea I had so many size-four needles.

T
here is nothing in my stash. Despite my having … well … let’s just leave it at a
lot
of yarn, nonetheless there is nothing to knit in my stash.

I’m a logical woman. I understand that I live on a planet with basic scientific laws about mass, space, and volume. I believe that these laws are true. If my stash really takes up this much space and yet contains nothing, there must be a black hole in my own home. Perhaps I should let NASA know about this.

I begin the delicate art of stash examination. I take my stash out of its boxes, its bins, its bags, its cupboards, its drawers, and its hidey-holes. When I have it all out, I come to two conclusions. As expected, I have a lot of yarn. As I suspected, there is nothing to knit in the stash.

I stand back, surveying the stash, and say aloud, “I have nothing to knit.” This simple sentence gets my husband’s immediate attention. “Sorry.
What
did you say?” The look on his face is beyond description. “You think you have no yarn?” He is
clearly incredulous. I can see his point. A woman standing hip-deep in yarn who says she has nothing to knit might need some kind of professional help.

Here’s how I explain it to him. Stash isn’t just stash; it has distinct components that affect its knitability. My stash consists of the following:

1. Core stash. This is yarn that to be completely honest, I am likely never going to knit. It is discontinued yarn that is too rare to knit. It is yarn that is too expensive and is too special to knit, or it is yarn that is so beautiful that I am not worthy of it. In my Core Stash is some of the Patons Ballybrae that they don’t make anymore in a color so perfect for me that when we met I knew it was kismet. There is Irish Aran wool, the real stuff, soft, thick, and perfectly cream. There is the lace-weight Shetland that is far better as an imaginary shawl; my real knitting could never match the shawls that I knit with my imagination every time I hold it. Core stash is the foundation of every good stash. It is inspiration. It is beautiful. It is the reason that I knit, but it is not for knitting.
   

2. Souvenir stash. If I look deep within my knitterly soul, I don’t believe that I’m going to knit this either. The soft blue handspun that I found in a tiny shop in rural Newfoundland, the wool that I got in Hawaii (especially valuable because it may have been the
   only
   wool in Hawaii), the tweedy yarn my friend brought me from Scotland, the cotton from Italy. This is remembrance yarn. This yarn is
   postcards of my life. Here are the leftovers from my first stranded sweater, the twelve colors from an intarsia sweater that was nothing short of a personal victory. With this yarn I can document every trip, baby, and yarn shop of my life. Who would knit that?
   

3. Sale stash. This is yarn I bought because I have a limited ability to walk away from a 50-percent-off sign, no matter how ugly, odd, or inexplicable the yarn. I’m never going to knit it. If I’m lucky I’ll grow enough as a person to be able to donate it somewhere.
   

4. Transient stash. This is the only yarn that stands a chance of being knit. The transient stash is forever shrinking, not only because I knit it, but because it is very easily converted to other forms of stash. Firstly, transient stash can automatically convert to souvenir stash if it remains in the queue for too long. Buy some wool, stick it in the stash, don’t get to it for five or six years, and then—Bam! I’m standing there with the wool in my hands saying “I remember when I bought this …” That yarn is thereafter not for knitting. Leave a lovely sock yarn in there for a decade or so, and it turns into core stash. Decide that I love it too much to decide? Done.
   

I feel sort of guilty about the stash sometimes. I feel especially bad when I’m in yarn shops buying more because I don’t seem to have anything, even though I’ve got almost as much yarn as the shop itself. The thing is, I explain to my husband, it’s
not so bad. There are worse things to collect, like cats or bicycles or those creepy dummies that ventriloquists use. I pause for effect, allowing him to imagine a house covered in blank staring wooden comrades.

Really, when you think about it, yarn stash isn’t that bad.

But I still have nothing to knit.

L
et’s cut to the chase, shall we? I hoard yarn. It goes well beyond buying yarn on sale or putting away some particularly yummy yarn for the future. It even goes beyond the very common knitterly urge to collect far more yarn than I can ever knit in my lifetime.

Some knitters have the equivalent of a personalized yarn store in their house, and that’s how they use it. When they consider a project, they “shop the stash.” Others have a stash for inspiration; they cruise the stash combining colors, exploring textures, feeding the creative muse. Their stash is their palette.

I am not like these others. I must confess it.

The first hint of a problem emerged when I was teaching my kids to knit. My daughter asked me for a ball of yarn to make a hat. I love my daughter desperately and I have a generous stash, but when she refused the ball of truly ugly green acrylic that I offered her, I opted to take her to the yarn store and buy her some yarn instead of forking over a ball of my own. I went so far
as to lie to her—er, I mean mislead her—about some yarn that she liked in the stash. I told her it was scratchy. (It was actually an Italian merino crepe. There is butter out there that is scratchier than this yarn.) I told myself that I wasn’t being selfish; I just didn’t want my good yarn ruined by a child who as yet lacked the knitting ability to make an object worthy of the yarn. I justified my decision still further by telling myself that even if she did manage to knit a nice hat, she would probably just lose it anyway. She’s thirteen. She can’t be trusted with stash yarn.