Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Purge

You can feel the season start to change. It's cooler. The leaves on the trees are looking dull, and many that were scorched by summer's heat and drought are already on the ground. There's an urge to prepare, to clean, to focus one's energy for the next shift.

This weekend, my cleaning energies fell on my yarn room. There were books strewn about, left behind as inspiration failed, that needed to be sorted and tidied. Many needles were caught mid-way in a project, abandoned as troubles slowed me down. These I liberated, leaving the project at loose ends, and sized them up to be slotted into their proper place. But the yarn.. ah, what to do about the yarn.

Earlier I had purchased a book, Knitting Plus, in hopes of learning how better to make myself sweaters that fit. I've learned a lot from it already and I'm eager to try out the patterns. Many are very simple, making good templates, and I think I could learn a lot from working them. Others have wonderful cables or pretty lace details that appeal to me.

In looking through my yarn stash though, I realized that I don't have the yarns to make these sweaters. My stash has overflowed its containment, and yet so much of it I don't want to knit with. So I purged.  I pulled it all out, bagged it up and called a friend. She's a mom, in school and on a budget. We were recently talking and she said she couldn't go to the KW Knitter's Fair this year. So I invited her over to shop my stash. The price was right (free) so she took it all.

Gosh it felt good to purge it! I feel so much lighter and now I can buy the yarn I need to make the sweater I want with no guilt about what's already at home.

And you should see how much tidier my yarn room looks.

ETA: Re-reading this, I realize it sounds as if I gave everything away. Well I didn't. Just the yarns that were holding me back. Several sweater's worth of yarns that I bought on sale that I can't find a pattern for. Much yarn is still left in the stash, mostly sock yarn, but there's some laceweight and sport weight and beloved odd balls and of course the Rowan for which I am now searching for a pattern.

6 comments:

  1. Three cheers for you for taking action. I think I need three swift kicks in the rear end to get in gear and do the same thing. My craft room is a disaster, and there is a lot of yarn I need to release back into the wild. My coping mechanism so far has been to keep the craft room door tightly shut.

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  2. Haha...now you have to buy more yarn!!
    Isn't Autumn wonderful :-)

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  3. What a lovely, kind, generous thing to do. Knitters are great people.

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  4. Mary Jane4:12 pm

    I have been trying the purge my stash. I have been knitting and giving away yarn but somehow I still had to buy two more rubbermaid bins. Sigh. I even brought a suitcase full to San Antonio to give away to my cousin. Didn't make a dent. Sigh.

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  5. Oh so brave! I really should do the same thing. So much yarn, but not enough of a lot of it to make anything other than hats and mittens. And just how many hats and mittens does a gal need?

    I think FCK needs another flea market sale!

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