Yarn Stash

This year, 2008, one of my 'hopes, goals and intentions' is to use up my yarn stash and not buy new yarn. (Oh, how hard it is to focus on this goal when I see the delectable yarns on blogs and in the daily emails from Knitting Daily.) The Professor has been making noises about the size of my stash, commenting that I have enough yarn and unspun fiber here in Willow's Cottage that I could not possibly ever run out of yarn, enough if I never bought another ball of acrylic, silk, wool or cotton yarn the rest of my life. He has a point.

There is a modest wooden five drawer dresser in the guest room closet that is filled with yarn. One drawer contains the acrylics, another the wool blends, yet another the wool yarns in all weights from sock to bulky. Some of it is unused, new skeins, although there is plenty of leftovers from finished products. I estimate it will take several years of constant eight hour a day knitting to use up the dresser drawer yarn stash.

I also admit to owning three large plastic boxes stuffed to overflowing with unspun wool and llama fiber. I cannot deny that I have already spun a lot yarn from other large plastic boxes stuffed to overflowing with fiber.

I must be honest and tell you about the baskets of natural, undyed, handspun softness that I have placed in strategic spots around the cottage so I can walk by and run my hands over the skeins and think about the llamas named Black Beauty and Ebony who gave me their fiber to turn into yarn. I can push my fingers in between the strands and remember what it felt like when the llama and silk blend was slipping through my fingers, twisting onto the bobbins, and then was being plied into a wondrous creamy two ply sport weight yarn. It feels so good to just touch this yarn that I may never knit it into anything--it is already perfect the way it is.




Then there is the Cowichan wool from Vancouver Island, Canada, that I bought in Victoria in 2003 when The Professor and I were evening guests of my Cherokee friend Singing Bird and her husband and, before we drove out to Butchart Gardens, we visited the 'back room' of a trading post and I chose a large (huge, actually) bag of luminescent silvery grey wool from the shelves of undyed genuine Cowichan wool rovings. It will take many, many evenings of spinning before I run out of roving. And how many hours of knitting will be needed to turn the Cowichan yarn into sweaters, socks or afghans?

It may be between 2011 and 2020 before I NEED to buy another ball of yarn.

Unfortunately.