I'm prepping a yarn sale - make a note! tell your friends! - for probably next week and so I have been tracking things down all over my house, looking up prices, winding yarn balls, taking pictures, finding stray swatches, writing yarn stories and generally tossing the stash sky high for the last couple of weeks.
What is blowing my mind is how much of my relationship with knitting is pure emotion. (Most of the rest is color.)
I thought I knit because it was fun, because I like sweaters, because it brought me great people, because it's tactile and so am I. Lies. All lies.* I just love yarn and people look at you funny if you collect it like Hummel figurines. Which I totally do.
Look at these. I want them all. New York Twilight #10 I want 12 skeins of to knit into a magic sweater, but the rest, I want in some kind of moth proof gallery space, in rosewood and ebony turned bowls, under harmless light to just ...visit. Maybe swatch. The world is better because these yarns are in it, you will never convince me otherwise. Yarn is good.
It isn't fitting in the yarn closet very well anymore, and that's my personal line between pleasing collection and not really knitting very much because I cannot connect with what I have. Or see it very well.
As I have gone through the stash, essentially curating it, I've revisited the days I bought these skeins, the company I was in, how that company affected the purchase, my ideas about myself and what I was seeing when I thought about it as clothing to wear on my body, which is such a profound expression of self even before you get to the part where you spend a 1000 hours MAKING.
A lot of what I'll be putting up here soon is from early in the blog, early in knitting - there was SO MUCH NEW - not just material but emotional, new important friends and new important personal milestones. Was I projecting a desire - who I WISH I were? Was I borrowing a friend's eyes and idea of me? Or is my change in taste really a mirror of another aspect of the ways I've changed over the last half decade?
There is NOTHING I cannot see as a tool for self knowledge. It's my best quality AND my most irritating.
* Not lies at all. Trues. But for the purposes of this blog post...LIES.




































































