Champagne and Socks

I’ve been working on writing this blog post for over a week now. But as it turns out, the process of pulling what I wanted to say together, and doing a few other things, ended up bringing me a few understandings that have changed what I wanted to write entirely.

You see, it was worrying me how much I could relate to and understand how people end up on the show Hoarders. On an episode recently, there was a sweet old lady whose house wasn’t dirty or gross but it was jam packing in with plastic boxes stacked to the ceiling filled with perfectly good craft things – books, tools, materials and so on. The probably was that everything was perfectly usable and not able to be thrown out. One of the doctors on the show said that a problem with hoarders in general was the intent, things there were going to get to or do, at some point. So of course, this woman had a problem with cleaning out her house – how could you thrown that stuff out? And in doing so, it would have involved admitted and coming to peace with the fact that she couldn’t possibly *do* all those things she intended to. David Allen describes that emotion as grief – at letting yourself and your commitments to yourself down. He also says that in taking audit and then keeping track of all your projects and commitments, you will suddenly discover the word “No”.

So all of this has had me thinking a lot about my sock yarn stash. It is this major brick wall of both guilt and of scheduled future time. If I’m actually going to knit it all. That means I’ve already decided a whole lot (and I mean a *whole lot*) of crafting I am going to do. At some point in time. And that kinda actually takes some of the fun out of it. It also means I can’t justify buying more yarn when I have so much [1]. The problem though is that your tastes gradually change over time and what you liked 5 or 10 years ago may no longer be your thing. And horrifyingly, I think I have been stashing some of this stuff that long now.

And I’m *still* buying yarn! Despite deciding I need to reduce my stash, I bought this pile in the latest Black Friday sales (of yarn I have be lusting after for years – Lorna Laces in Bittersweet, Claudia Handpainted in Watermelon, Handmaiden sea silk, ooh and a madeleintosh which I’ve only ever heard about never seen and in TPP colour!)

And I signed up for a bimonthly (every other month) subscription to KnitCrate. Here are the yarns in the January stash (Blue Sky Alpaca and Zen Yarn Gardens. Also, miniskeins which I have crocheted up already, see top picture).

I decided that I would spend this year knitting up as many pairs of socks as possible. Just to see how many I could knit. And I’ve got a couple of subprojects relating to that to work on over the year. And to that end, I thought I would cast on during the Opening Ceremony (ala the Ravellenics – the old knitters tradition of picking something ambitious in a tight timeframe and going above and beyond as the Olympic spirit to get it done by the Closing Ceremony. It’s a knitting thing). To that, I needed to figure out the first project and then wind up the skeins into balls to get going.

Easy, right? Wellllll …. I *thought*  I had attachment issues relating to my skein collection. That handpainted yarn looks so gorgeous as skeins that I couldn’t bear to ball it up for use. And that that was my problem with this whole stashing thing. Yeah, I think not so much. I mean, I do enjoy admitting the whole colour play thing but, yarn cakes are also very nice. And so is actually working with the yarn – watching the colour work into a textile.

The first projects selection (shocked how little impact this made on my stash but you gotta start somewhere.

I went to take before and after shots of some yarn skeins into cakes viz:

 And I discovered a horrible truth! The true reason most of my stash is in skeins is not because I love to admire it in such form, it’s because a long time a go, I cut corners on getting all the tools and I skimped on getting a Swift – this is the thing that you hook the skein onto so it doesn’t get tied into knots as you wind it it into the ball on the ball winder (see photo above). I think I thought I could wing it without this device and have never put it together that I hate winding up the balls because it always takes ages and I spend a lot of time undoing the knots. I really have no idea why I can’t commit to a new hobby or interest and buy all the required tools. I really don’t know why I insist on doing it half-arsed and get annoyed and never really execute things properly. I was worried all this time I was a yarn collector and not a knitter. Turns out I just forgot why I was procrastinating.

So I bought a swift online, which is still coming, and in the meanwhile, I wound these two balls up by hand to cast on during the Opening Ceremony. I’m having a go knitting two socks at the same time:

And, confession, after lusting after this yarn colourway for literally years, and then admiring it for months in skein form, knitting it up, it doesn’t really look how I thought it would. And I’m a little disappointed. It’s Claudia Handpainted in Watermelon. I thought the striping would be a bit different, more solid.

And in all this process, I had a second revelation. All this time, like seriously, for 15 years or something, I thought I could only monogamously craft – that I could either knit or quilt and would do so obsessively, but that I couldn’t do both at once and that I certainly couldn’t bounce back and forward between them. I thought I could either do one for like 6 months and then switch out. As in, that is how it’s always been. But in all this faffing around with the knitting, I’ve been quietly also progressing my most current quilting project. And the reason for that is because all the pieces have been cut and the blocks I’m working on all have the next pieces pinned in place. So it’s just a matter of picking the next piece off the pile and sewing it. There is no thinking needed about it at all. Which is the GTD philosophy in action – do all your thinking in one go and figure out the next action so that you can just crank the widgets in the moment.

And so my revelation – the reason I usually switch from one craft to the other is that I get stuck on a project and don’t know how to move forward (or I have to unpick whatever it was I had just done) and it all feels too hard so I go and pick up the other craft. And that craft has all these exciting next actions ready to go and away I plunge until I hit a wall there. None of it had anything to do with being in one head space or the other. It just was a matter of never leaving anything without knowing what the next action for progressing it should be.

I feel really weird with all these breakthroughs. Must be time to lie down. Or buy more yarn.

[1] Which is also not necessarily a bad thing given I’m a student again but there are so many yarns out there yet to try and somehow I got stuck at Blue Moon Fibre Arts![2]
[2] Also not necessarily a bad thing.