Hooked for Life

by Mary Beth Temple

  Crocheter vs. Stash

  The dream: Okay, I am going to clean out the stash today. I am going to organize, sort, make notes so I don’t buy the same thing twice, and dig out all of the things I won’t get to in this lifetime and get rid of them. I am going to finish all the works-in-progress, or at least put the patterns and parts together in an organized fashion if it turns out there are rather a few more of them than I remember. I will condense, I will combine, I will find room in the stash closet where none existed before and this time, this time, I will not fill up the newly created space with random yarn purchases (which are not my fault because as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum and you can’t fight physics). I will once and for all put all of my unassigned hooks in one needle case so that I will have at my fingertips the one that I want when I need it, which will save me tons of money because I won’t have to run to the store for hooks every time I start a new project, and therefore will spend less time succumbing to temptation in the form of wool. And I will do it all today. Amen.

  The reality: I decide the first order of business will be to get all the stash in one place. It’s all in the stash closet, right? Oh, except for the underbed storage containers in the guest room. And the pile of wool in the cedar chest. Um, there might be a bag (or six) in the living room—stuff I thought I would start on right away so it wasn’t worth stuffing it into the closet. And the bag in the car that I am trying to pretend I didn’t buy… and if it’s not in the house, it’s not in the stash, right? Oh, and the leftovers from design jobs that I don’t think I can part with yet—at least not until the patterns are published because who knows what might happen during the photo shoots. If I had to remake something, I would need the same dye lot. Since that yarn is stored with the work yarn, it doesn’t really count as stash yarn. However, I should probably put all the yarn together because now every single thing will be organized, so I decide I need that, too. This part might take a little longer than I thought. And maybe I need more space… like perhaps a spare house. Okay, moving on.

  I am going to empty out all the containers and sort everything by weight—sock yarns with sock yarns up to bulky with bulky. Darn, I have a whoooooooole lot of sock yarn. Well, does the light worsted go with DK or with worsted weight? Is that organic cotton a bulky or a worsted? What the heck weight is baby yarn, anyway? Where did all this stuff come from? Maybe I should sort by color. I need to lie down, but there isn’t any room because there is a two-foot-deep layer of yarn on the bed. I think I will have a snack instead.

  Postsnack, I decide that before I sort anything, I should get rid of all the skeins and partials that I don’t want. If I give some things to the local senior center, they will be very grateful and I will have less bulk to organize. This is a fine idea. So I will now look at every skein of yarn and make a decision as to whether it’s something I really think I will use. While I am at it, I will examine all the WIPS. If I decide not to bother with something, I will rip it out instead of keeping it in its partial state, and if it’s ripped out it’s yarn, not a WIP so should be counted with the yarn. Maybe I should bring out the ball winder so I can rip out more efficiently… hmmmm…

  Four and a half hours later, I still haven’t laid hands and eyeballs on every skein and WIP, and it’s getting to be pretty near the time that I need to be finished so I can go pick up the kiddo from school and take her to dance class. Maybe I should start putting stuff away—the pile has to be lower now, right, after all my rigorous pondering? I look over to the garbage bag where I put the yarn to be donated. It isn’t very full—in fact, it only has five sad partial skeins and some baby yarn (because this way I don’t have to decide what weight that is). I should maybe think a little harder about giving more away, but decide I don’t have any more pondering time available to me right now. I put the garbage bag in the back of the car. And stop for a late lunch. And some crocheting—if I get going on some of these WIPs, I would surely make progress in the decluttering department.

  Having thoroughly lost track of time, I now run to pick up my daughter, walk the dog, and run to dance class. Then we have to eat, then I have to nag about homework, and then I hear I am supposed to have made two trays of brownies for school tomorrow. So I make some brownies. And the kiddo goes to bed.

  Now it’s 10:00 P.M. I am fried and have, conservatively speaking, ten thousand bits of yarn lying around. Sorting be darned, I am going to just shove all this stuff back in the boxes and into the closet and will get it really, really organized tomorrow. Although oddly, the amount of yarn that came out of the boxes doesn’t seem to want to go back into the boxes. I believe that exposure to light and air has made the stash expand.

  Just past midnight, I decide that if I have to go through it all again tomorrow anyway, it might be just as easy to dump the remaining skeins onto the floor. In fact, I could sleep under some of them and turn the heat down a bit—yarn makes great insulation—and that would be really energy conscious. So this is what I do. The only problem is the panic attack I have at 3:00 A.M. when I get up to use the bathroom, step on a skein of mohair and scream, thinking I have just crushed the dog. I wake up just enough to realize that since the mohair didn’t bark it wasn’t the dog, and if it was anything else living I really don’t want to know about it right now, so I move on and go back to bed.

  In the morning the alarm goes off, and in the stark light of day I see my room—it looks as if a small bomb exploded in the middle of a yarn store managed by someone with eclectic tastes. My daughter wanders in, rubbing her eyes, and demands to know why she has to clean her room if mine gets to look like this. And why is it so cold? I put my head under the pillow, count to ten, and then get moving to face the day.

  After I deliver my daughter, ever the critic, to school, I decide I have to deal with the stash explosion, and sooner rather than later. Sorting be darned, I squish and squeeze until every last skein of it that came out of the closet fits back in the closet. Instead of the delight of a job well done, I have sort of a sickly feeling that I just wasted two full days getting nothing done that should have been spent writing or designing or doing some other income-producing work.

  I vow never to clean out the stash again. Some things just shouldn’t be messed with.

  Too Much Yarn

  Just the other day I uttered a phrase that stopped traffic in my household, a phrase I never in a million years thought I would utter. I was sorting through yet another box of yarn that appeared as if by magic, trying to lower the square footage of wool that is all over my living room, and in frustration I yelled out, “I have too much yarn!” You could hear crickets chirping in the aftermath—my daughter looked at me as if I had three heads; even the dog cocked her head and started to slink slowly away from the crazy woman. Did I really say I had too much yarn? Was I sick with a fever?

  I think most crocheters have a personal set point at which the stash becomes “too much yarn.” For some crocheters, a dozen or so skeins are too much. Others cut back on purchases when they run out of room in a predetermined space—a storage bin, spare closet, the guest room. I have been crocheting for more years than several of you reading this have been alive, yet I had never before hit my own “too much yarn” point. And there is yarn everywhere. I am not the most organized person in the world on my best day, and I have a pretty high tolerance for yarn stacked in common living spaces, yet I have finally cracked. There is too much yarn in my house.

  I have always been acquisitive as far as yarn goes. I remember walking to the local five-and-ten store when I was in grade school, pondering all the colors available in one-ounce skeins, and taking my time choosing which one or two to spend my meager funds on. When a local discount store went out of business, I went back day after day as the close-out discount got larger and scooped up skeins (the big ones! Four whole ounces!) for loose change. I made granny square after granny square with a different color combination in each one. In high school, I bought large bags of tangled skeins of acrylic for next to nothing from a
yarn shop in the mall and spent hours and hours detangling them and winding them into balls. Then? More granny squares!

  College brought a move to the big city (NYC, if you are keeping score) and exposure to my first real local yarn store (LYS). It specialized in the products of a certain European manufacturer and I thought I had died and gone to yarn heaven. The colors, the textures, the natural fibers—yum to all of it. When school became too stressful, I spent time there petting skeins and paging through pattern books. I do not want to talk about what percentage of my student loan checks went to yarn and needles, but I did make all my Christmas gifts during those years so I rationalized that it all worked out in the end, budget-wise. I alternated the pricier trips to the LYS with some bargain hunting at the discount store down Sixth Avenue—*one project in Phildar, one in Lion Brand, repeat from * around.

  After school I hit the road and my yarn came with me. I traveled, first the United States and then the world, caring for the costumes of various and sundry dance companies. I shopped in yarn stores all over, which was great so far as variety goes, not so hot if I underestimated the yardage for a project and had to try to match a dye lot. I recall phoning a store in New Jersey when I was in Colorado and having the yarn I needed shipped to Arizona. When I filled out the paperwork to get my road trunks through customs when we traveled abroad, I was always careful to list a “canvas bag with yarn and crochet hooks,” which was specific enough verbiage to get us through the red tape but vague enough that it covered whatever project I was working on at the time. I remember many of my travels through the projects made from the yarn I brought home. I still have vivid memories of the little shop where I found some green and tan DK weight off the beaten path on the North Island of New Zealand—every time I see the sweater, I remember that trip.

  None of this led to a huge stash, however. I bought yarn all the time, but I made it up pretty soon thereafter. I remember knitting the sleeves of that green and tan sweater in San Diego, which was my next stop after Wellington. I bought yarn, I crocheted it up, I left a trail of finished objects behind me as gifts, or it moved into my suitcase in the form of clothing rather than crafts projects.

  So I guess my serious stash habits began with the purchase of my first house. I saw some yarn or some patterns on sale, and I bought them. If I wasn’t going to work on something right away, I would box it up and put it in the attic. I had a pretty good handle on what projects were lined up in what box and even kept the patterns and the yarn together so I wasn’t buying yarn with no purpose in mind. We moved, and the stash moved with us. It was still pretty well contained, although it had to move from the attic to the guest room closet in the interest of keeping the fiber in the proper environment, heat- and humidity-wise.

  And in the new environment, it started to spread. It outgrew the closet expanded into an underbed storage box or two (or four) and into the cedar chest. And of course the projects I was going to work on “soon” migrated into the living room—there was no point in packing that stuff away if I was going to need it in the very near future. And there wasn’t any room anywhere else, anyway. As I discovered new and different fibers, I bought more yarn. When I found a great sale, I bought more yarn. Then I discovered sheep and wool festivals and I bought a lot more yarn. I started spinning and bought roving, which turned into… You guessed it. More yarn. Still, I didn’t think I had too much. And then I changed careers.

  A few years back I started designing crochet patterns professionally. If you ever talk to crochet designers and ask about entering the field, we will all tell you the same thing—it pays crap and you could make more money per hour working at a fast-food joint. “Don’t do it,” we cry, “you will be sucked in and never get out!” So then why do we do it? The glory of seeing our name in print? The burning desire to share our artistic vision with the world at large? Nah, it’s the little voice in the back of our head that tells us that if we work as a designer we get free yarn. And who can resist free yarn? I can’t. And therein lies the rub.

  It started out with a very few companies offering me a little bit of yarn to swatch. Yarn companies like it when designers use their yarns, as it increases demand for their products. But they can’t just hand out a bunch of yarn to everyone who asks, so my freebies were pretty much bits and bobs of new things and leftovers from design jobs I had actually sold. As my name got out in the industry, my work started to be seen in books and magazines, and I attended more and more trade shows, more companies were willing to give me a skein or two here and there. I loved them, petted them, swatched them (or didn’t, right away—we were rapidly approaching the way-more-yarn-than-time conundrum), and put them with the other yarns in my stash.

  Soon, yarn started arriving in big boxes—not just yarn for swatching, but for the various designs I had sold. You always ask for the amount of yarn you think you need, then a little bit more just in case you need it. No one wants to have to do that interstate (or depending on where the warehouse is, international) dye-lot chase. Often the shipper will throw in a little extra, too—they get the worst end of the dye-lot chase if it happens, so they really want to make sure you have enough yarn. Because of this, you have leftovers too nice to throw away, but you are probably sick of the color by the time the project is over with, so it goes in the stash closet to mellow for a while until you think of a use for it. As I went from working on one or two designs at a time to six or seven or twelve designs at a time, the yarn deliveries increased. But I was still fine—I had a nice stash and it was getting nicer all the time. So what if sleepover guests couldn’t hang any clothes in the closet? Isn’t that what their suitcase was for?

  And then it happened. I agreed to design a book of afghans. I thought choosing the colors and estimating the yardage was the hard part… and then the boxes began to arrive. Over three hundred skeins of yarn in a three-week period—and that was on top of my regular, everyday stash that was several hundred skeins all on its own. Yarn was everywhere. Even when I sent some of it out to friends to make the models for me, the pieces and leftovers came back. I went from stalking the UPS driver to praying he wasn’t stopping at my house whenever I saw the big brown truck come up the block. A neighbor went on a catalog shopping spree and I nearly had a heart attack for a week when her deliveries came by!

  What do you do with too much yarn? My daughter would happily take it, but she is even less organized than I am if you can imagine such a thing, and that doesn’t really get it out of my house. It simply moves the clutter from one room to another. So I engaged on a campaign to lower the yarn density of my house.

  Plan one: Pawn it off on a friend who does not have quite my stash problem. I set up a day and invited my buddy to go “shopping in the dining room.” She was delighted with all the goodies, and I believe caught a wicked case of startitis, which I feel sort of bad about, but not bad enough that I wouldn’t do it again.

  Plan two: Find someone who would be happy to take the odd balls and partial skeins. I implemented this plan by adopting a local senior citizens crochet and knit group that makes blankets for shelters of both the human and animal variety. They can incorporate single skeins into works of art and my donations mean they can produce more while spending less of their own money. And there have been no records of cats complaining about the color choices in their blankets.

  Plan three: Get real about what will and will not conceivably be wanted in the future and increase the amount of yarn that goes to plan one and plan two. It doesn’t matter how much I give away, more always arrives, so keeping the pipeline flowing might avoid another meltdown on my part.

  Plan four. Buy high-rise beds for all of the residents of the house, including the dog. It might be harder to get in and out of bed at night for all concerned, but imagine how much larger I could make the underbed storage crates. Meaning more stash for me! Hey, I want to declutter a bit, not go cold turkey and stashless. That’s just crazy talk.

  The Secret Life of a Crochet Designer

  It all start
s in the ether—somebody, somewhere has a glimmer of an idea. It may be inspired by a yarn or a stitch, by the stars and the moon, a breakfast cereal, or anything else. But somebody somewhere has an idea for a crochet design.

  1. To sell a crochet design to a publisher of some sort, you need a swatch, a sketch, and probably a schematic. You swatch, you sketch, you rip out, you erase. Lather, rinse, and repeat as necessary until you get all of those three things to look like you want them to—a crocheted fabric you are happy with, a sketch of what the final garment will look like, and a schematic of what the pieces are and their general shape. You whomp all this stuff together with a designer bio (that says how wonderful you are) and a paragraph or two about your genius design and why it needs to be shared with the world, and you decide to send it off to an editor.

  2. You download the designer guidelines, look at the calendar, and realize that you have swatched something that would keep an Eskimo warm … and the editor of your dream publication is currently reviewing summer. Darn. You can submit it anyway and hope it doesn’t get lost, put it in your file cabinet until the appropriate time (and hope it doesn’t get lost), or decide to publish it yourself. In the meantime you had better swatch something summery, don’t you think? If you decide to self-publish, skip to number 8.

  3. It’s time and you mail off or e-mail your submission packet. You know it will take six to eight weeks at best to hear back from someone, but this does not stop you from obsessively checking your e-mail, starting about twenty minutes after you think the packet has been received. Surely your piece is just so darn wonderful that the editor will have to accept it within seconds of its crossing his or her desk, lest your genius get away. This does not happen.