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Authors: Stephanie Pearl–McPhee
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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.
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 ispostcards 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?
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.
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’snot 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.
Mine, Mine, All Mine
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 faras 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
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 ispostcards 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?
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.
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’snot 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.
Mine, Mine, All Mine
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 faras 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
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