Yarn Harlot

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  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’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.

  Mine, Mine, All Mine

  Let’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.

  I did wonder if maybe I had a problem parting with stash when she accused me of only offering her the “crap yarn,” but I ignored the twinge of insight. I’m sure that everything about my knitting habit is perfectly emotionally healthy.

  My husband Joe asked for a sweater. I happily got my coat and credit card and started quizzing him on what kind of yarn he would like. I love him deeply, and I will gleefully part with time and money to make him happy. I babbled on about what kind of design it should be, how handsome he looks in cables, all the while getting ready to fling myself out the door into the snow, make my way across town in the cold, on the bus, to buy him some yarn. He told me I didn’t have to go to the yarn store. I looked at him as if he had three eyes. How on earth can I knit him a sweater without buying yarn? Silly man! Confusion gave way to shock as he told me that he had been looking in the stash. (Did you hear that? Looking in my stash. Is nothing sacred?) He said that had seen a really nice yarn, and that there were twenty skeins of it, and that he wanted his sweater knit from that. I surprised even myself when I told him that it was absolutely out of the question. No way. I am not using that yarn for a sweater. I’m saving it. I don’t want it to be gone. I want to be able to look at it when I open the stash; I want it in its skeins with the labels still on it. Mine, mine, all mine. He insisted. That was definitely the yarn he wanted. It was when I decided to go online to see if I could buy more of that same yarn that I realized that I might, just possibly, have stash issues.

  My stash is remarkably static. Things go in, but they rarely come out. Now, not everything I buy goes into the stash, or at least not into core stash. I have an “outer ring” of stash. I buy it and it gets knit up pretty quickly and never makes it into the stash closet. True stash yarn goes into core stash and it never comes out. If I need yarn from core stash, I go buy something like it. Core stash is not there for using. It is there for “being.” It is not yarn; it is a monument to knitting. It is my homage to wool. It is there to be admired, revered, and uncorrupted, and if Joe thinks he can mess with that, he’s out of his mind.

  Joe need never know. His yarn sense is not as finely honed as mine. I am certain that I can find yarn close enough to what he wants; as for my precious yarn, it can go deeper into core stash, where Joe will never find it. I will just make a little trip to the yarn store tomorrow, while he is at work. I’ll pay cash so there’s no paper trail. My darling can have his sweater, and I get to keep my yarn. Is this clever, or what?

  Stash issues? I don’t got no stinking stash issues. Nope, not me.

  If You Have a Lot of Yarn…

  The knitting newsletter comes to my mailbox four times a year, always full of patterns, suggestions, and stories about knitting. This spring, it had an article about storing and organizing your stash. The article had some really good suggestions, like arranging your yarn by weight and color and storing skeins of yarn artfully clipped to hanging chains where people can see and enjoy them.

  These suggestions were great. When I had followed all of them, I had managed about 10 percent of my stash and had to stop. There are only so many chains of yarn you can hang in your home before you start blocking exits. Clearly, the author of the article and I are leading very, very different lives.

  Perhaps part of the problem is that I’m a spinner as well as a knitter, so there is an ever-increasing mass of fiber that will become yarn and yarn that recently was fiber. Becoming a spinner has also cut into my knitting time while increasing the yarn stash, which increases the yarn supply at an alarming rate. It does not help that I live in a shoe box of a house, or that I’m sharing this house with four other people who seem to feel that they have a right to have some stuff stored too.

  Perhaps it is that I buy yarn in a way that makes it clear that on some level I must fear that there will be no yarn for sale tomorrow, or that due to an evolutionary glitch attached to global warming, sheep will suddenly stop bearing fleece any minute now and my stash is the only thing that stands between me and the nightmare of knitting nothing but acrylic eyelash yarn for the rest of my life.

  We will likely never know what the exact factors are that change a perfectly normal yarn stash—which can be handled by methods suggested by a thoughtful article in a newsletter—into something that has turned into a lifetime commitment. My stash does not need mere management. It needs to be beaten into submission.

  Those who are competing at the extreme sport level of stash storage in small homes, and have obsessively managed to procure more yarn than could ever be knitted in ten lifetimes, need more help than a well-meaning newsletter can give. Not only do we need excessive amounts of storage space; it must be subtle. Stashing for retirement and beyond means that you may have so much yarn as to cause so-called “normal” people (if that’s what you can call people with no yarn at all) to report you to mental health authorities.

  Attempts should be made to keep extreme stashing discreet. After many years of cohabitating, my darling is still not sure exactly how much yarn I have. He knows it’s a l
ot, but through innovative and daring yarn storage strategies, I’ve managed to keep the exact quantity secret. It’s not as hard as it sounds, since I don’t think that he really wants to know.

  In my home I have an established yarn zone. This is where I pretend to keep my yarn. I do keep some yarn there, but my stash is like an iceberg; only the top 10 percent is visible. The rest of the stash lurks unseen and unknown, sunk deep below the surface of my Victorian semidetached. My smoke-screen long-term stash is more or less contained in the linen closet, stuffed into boxes, plastic containers, Ziplocs … whatever will get it in there. My short-term yarn and projects fit into enormous baskets in the living room. These portions of the stash are mostly organized in a way that would make a yarn organizer proud, though anyone who believes a stash should stop there may want to avert his or her eyes and skip to the next story in the book.

  That other 90 percent is where extreme stashers need to get creative. If you have so much yarn that you are resorting to these measures then I’m pretty sure that discretion is in order. Not everyone understands. To help get you started, here are a few strategies that work for me:

  The freezer. We have been vegetarians for quite some time. Vegetarians just don’t need chest freezers. I didn’t get rid of mine, it’s still plugged in and running, and I’m certain that you can guess why. Yes, my fellow zealots, my freezer contains four pork chops from 1986, a loaf of bread (to justify the freezer), and my enchanting (if frosty) collection of Ballybrae that I scored when the Patons outlet closed. Freezers provide lots of potential space and offer the added bonus of being 100 percent mothproof. If you can give up meat, this will work especially well for you.

  Closets. I know, I know—you’re thinking that closets aren’t discreet, that many knitters keep yarn in closets, and that if you had a closet to put more yarn in you wouldn’t have a problem in the first place. Well, my skeptical fiber friend, you gotta think outside the box. Go to the store. Buy a suit bag, the kind that you hang in the closet. Black is good, but anything other than transparent works well. Now fill the suit bag with yarn. Try to stick with wool and acrylics. Cotton is too heavy for the bag; it will break the zipper and blow your cover. When you have the bag full, just hang it in the closet and admire how it just sits there looking like a suit. (Note: Should you forget the “no-cotton” rule and have a suit bag explode in your closet, spilling yarn into plain view and causing your family to stare at you incredulously, it is best to distract them. The moment they start looking at you like you should be in treatment, ask them very loudly who was screwing around with the zipper. Take enormous care to glare at them like it is their fault that a suit bag full of yarn has just exploded in your closet.) Got more yarn? Of course you do. Start stuffing. Yarn in skeins fits beautifully down the sleeves of suits and coats. Avoid stuffing the sleeves of your mate’s clothes. I assure you that he or she will not think that this is either clever or normal behavior.

  The piano. Not everybody is going to have this option, but my piano has a panel down by my legs that can be lifted out. It reveals a space that runs the whole width of the piano and goes from pedals to keyboard. Filling this space with yarn does not change the sound of the piano in any way, assuming that you don’t pack yarn right around the pedal cables. Remember to remove the yarn before the piano tuner comes. Piano tuners don’t seem to understand yarn hoarding either.

  Kitchen cupboards. How about those top cupboards? Could you fit some yarn into the canning pot that you only use for six jars of jam once every seven years? How about your gravy boat? A lone ball of silk fits in mine. Casseroles? The cookie tins you only use at Christmas? How about the Tupperware that you don’t use at all? Get innovative—every little bit helps.

  Think outside of the box. You’ll need to, since all of your boxes are full of yarn anyway. Got a nook or a cranny? Stuff a little yarn in there. Trunk of the car? Cushions on the couch? Squirrel that yarn away and remember that with advancing years your memory will fail you, and finding your yarn again will become a pleasant surprise.

  Be innovative; ignore those who think you mad, and for goodness’ sake, if you think of somewhere good, drop me a line.

  The System

  Who says I don’t have a system?

  If you know me, then you know that as soon as the holidays come around, I become a trifle twitchy. Seeing a loved one wrapped in a really good sweater gives me a wonderful feeling. I have a tendency to get excited about wrapping everyone in this frosty climate in wool, and I overcommit to holiday gift knitting. I admit it: I tend to go over the top and cause myself a little stress.

  By “a little stress” I mean that I actually end up with so much on the needles that by the time the presents are due, I’m a raving, sleepless, knitting maniac. I do this every year. I always swear that this year I’m going to cut back. This year I’m going to be reasonable. This year I’m not going to try to knit twenty-three pairs of gift socks in four days and then beat myself up for not managing to warp the space-time continuum to get it all done. I swear that I’m not going to spoil my holiday by depriving myself of seasonal fun while grafting sock toes at 4 A.M.

  This year I have a plan for preventing the holiday meltdown: I am going to take advantage of all the half-done projects that I have ever accrued and finish them all up so that I have lots of presents in half the time. If I put these “head-start” projects into the queue with stuff that I’m already working on, it will be less of a commitment. It will both deal with tons of guilt-inducing space-occupying works-in-progress and thrill my family and friends with buckets of knitted things that are actually finished. It’s the perfect plan. Feel free to try it yourself.

  In order to execute this plan, I need to hunt up all of my projects and this means going into the stash. My stash is arranged in a format that resembles an archaeological dig. The most recent additions are near the top. Older yarn and projects emerge as I dig through the layers. Unlike more organized knitters, who have their stash put away by weight or color, mine is easily sorted into age layers. If I want something from four years ago, I know that I need to start a fair ways into the stash. Likewise, I know that if I want to find a neon-green oversized chunky-acrylic sweater with dolman sleeves that would put a flying squirrel to shame, I need only go down to the layer representing the early eighties.

  To enhance the element of surprise in my holiday endeavor, I decide to start at the bottom (oldest) layer and work my way up. I know what I’ve abandoned recently, but I usually manage conveniently to “forget” anything that’s been in the stash awhile. It may well be that I have so much stash that the newer acquisitions simply push the older stuff out of my memory. Every brain has its limits. I suppose there is also the chance that I don’t want to remember much of it—for example, that neon-green flying squirrel sweater.

  I pull out the top boxes, bins, and bags and work my way down to a plastic box that hasn’t seen the light of day in years. I’m extraordinarily excited as I dump the box onto the bed. What could be in it? The suspense is killing me. I root around among the yarn until I find a cloth bag. The first of many unfinished objects! What will it be?

  Briefly I allow myself to imagine what could be inside. A half-done sweater? Most of a scarf? A hat that only needs a seam? What treasure did I hide for myself? The possibilities boggle the mind. For the purposes of this experiment, I don’t allow myself to consider that what is in the bag might have been abandoned for a reason—say, a pair of slippers knit out of that weird plastic yarn that everybody’s strange Aunt Alma loves, or a foray into cotton intarsia kitty cats … It’s better not to imagine what sort of knitting breakdown from my past I might uncover.

  I decide that I want this moment of discovery to be perfect. I take the bag downstairs and snuggle into my knitting chair with a cup of coffee. My plan is all coming together.

  I open the bag and empty it into my lap. It’s a sock. A completely finished sock, along with the pattern I used, the needles and the yarn. A beautiful Fair Isle sock.
r />   A familiar Fair Isle sock. Really familiar, in fact.

  I look down at the knitting basket by my chair that holds my current projects and I quietly pull out another cloth bag. Unceremoniously I dump its contents onto my lap and a pattern, yarn, needles, and a single finished Fair Isle sock tumble into my lap. I confirm my suspicions and feel only unmitigated joy as I hold the current sock and the years-old one together.

  I have a pair.

  This system is going to be great.

  Moth

  Knitters are, on the whole, lovely people. It is difficult to imagine that knitting could lend itself to hateful activity. I find it improbable that many knitters are plotting to overthrow governments or planning murder while knitting booties. The act of knitting and acts of violence seem so dissimilar that I like to believe that knitters are, without exception, kind and peaceful, without an adversary in the world. But I do recognize, for all our kindness and gentle ways, knitters have a natural enemy: Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth.

  On the day that this story begins, I was poking around a yarn shop. As usual, I had far more time than money and I spent a lot of time investigating sale bins, diving into the depths of clearance boxes, and gleefully excavating the backs of displays. Brace yourself now, and if you have a weak stomach, turn back here.