Binge and Purge

This year, like last, seems to be a year of stash dieting for many. I've already posted recently about how it is for me too.

In general, shedding of stuff, and the baggage that comes with it, seems to be a common thread, at least among certain groups, for many people.

I am no different. (On a side note, I'm often surprised at ow often I come to these realizations, only to find that a whole lot of other people have as well, often seemingly, at the same time. Am I a sheep? Do I pick up on these cultural cues without consciously noting them, process them, and think they're my own idea? Am I coming to these feelings on my own without reading the larger culture? I wish it weren't so, but these are the questions that haunt me at night sometimes.)

In my other blog, I recently posted a quote from this article.

And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

I can't stand clutter. It really does exhaust me. It stresses me out, and keeps me from getting things done. The reality is, though, that I have a small (by US standards) house, that I share with two other people, one of whom is more of a packrat than me (maybe even both of them, actually). If I have too much stuff, where "too much" is a small absolute amount, there is going to be clutter, simply because there is not enough places to store the stuff. It is an unavoidable equation, one that no amount of "creative storage" purchases from The Container Store can change. (And oh, how I love the promise of The Container Store and hold everything - the sweet promise that if I just buy the right solution, all my clutter woes will disappear. That used to suck me in every single time.)

My slow understanding and realization of the truth of my house, and the truth of where the clutter comes from, and the obvious solution to the problem fits me well, now that I can see it - although sentimental at heart, I've always been a believer in periodically clearing the decks and saving only the things you really want to keep. This was easier when we moved every couple of years - living in one house for nearly 7 years has resulted in having to make myself go through the process rather than allowing it to happen naturally.

It's not always easy, and I don't always feel like I am doing it well enough, but I am slowly making progress. And the truth of it is, I can say that the number of times I have regretted tossing something are very small.

There have long been two exceptions to my draconian purging nature. Craft supplies and books. I got over the books thing last year. Okay, "got over it" is probably overstating things - but I was able to send about 2 large boxes of books out my door without being sad. (Getting rid of old books is hard - I watch those nerdy geeky history books walk out the door, and it is as if I am saying goodbye to the 23 year old me who dreamed of getting a PhD in history "someday". It is intellectually ridiculous - with my interests, even if I were to go back to school, a book on Pre-colonial African Art is not something I will need.) I still have too many books, but I'm finding that nearly every time I go back to my shelves, I manage to find a few more volumes to toss into the donations bag.

I think the real progress with books has been my drastic decrease in purchasing new books - I carefully consider now whether a book I want to read should come home to live, or instead simply visit from the library. Increasingly, fewer and fewer books get bought, and I spend a lot of time reserving holds on my library website. If there aren't many new books coming in, there's a lot less clutter.

That, of course, is the bingeing. Buying stuff without thinking, because it's pretty, or you've convinced yourself you need it, or it's on sale (how many times have I fallen for Buy2 get 1 free?), because it's SUCH a bargain. I do it. Everyone I know does it. It feels like it's a way of life. I think maybe it IS a way of life. Constant buying leads inevitably to a near-constant need to purge. It's not healthy, and ultimately, the only final answer is slowing my rate of consumption.

So, that's books. That left, essentially, my stash as my last area of exemption.

But then, I can to a realization late last year. My stash WAS clutter. It was getting in my way. It was weighing on my mind. I'm blessed, in my house, with an excessively large bedroom. It's probably nearly 25% of the square footage of my house. I've been able to "hide" a LOT of stash in there since I started knitting in 2003. But even there, the stash was getting to an uncontrollable size. I couldn't fit it in all the spaces I'd carved out for it. I was starting to dread having to "deal with it". Clearly, all of these things are wrong, wrong, wrong.

I have gotten better, to some degree, at slowing my rate of buying yarn. Knowing I had the enormous stash looming over me has made that a bit easier. That still left me with an out of control amount of yarn in my house.

When I got a new camera for Christmas, I knew that one of my projects for the break was going to be to clear the stash. I posted about this a few weeks ago. This past weekend, one of my lovely knitting friends hosted a large swap at her house. People brought books, clothes and yarn that they no longer wanted. I'd already sold a few skeins, just from listing them on Ravelry, but the effort of packing and shipping a skein of yarn for $5 or $10 was seeming like more trouble than it was worth. When I was getting ready to go to the swap, I decided to bring the majority of what was left. I kept aside a few batches of stuff in "sweater quantity" that I think I can sell and get an amount worth my time and effort. The rest of it? It all went away. I saved out a couple skeins for one particular person who I knew would love those particular ones. The rest I just tossed into the pile. And I think it all went away with other knitters. Anything that didn't go was getting donated to charity somewhere. I got to see how happy some of my friends were, claiming new yarn for themselves, and was happy myself. I picked out NO new yarn for myself.

When I went home, I was content. My yarn had gone to new homes, with knitters who would love it. And me? I can see my bedroom floor.

Yikes.

I got a new camera for Christmas this year. Nothing fancy - in fact, less fancy even than the point and shoot my husband and I have been fighting over sharing, even. But it's wee, and easy, and lacking my least favorite feature of the other - the power button is no longer in the spot my finger thinks should be the shutter button. Three cheers for not accidentally turning off my camera anymore!

The new camera, combined with my usual New Year's urge to de-clutter, re-organize and just basically clean stuff up, meant I spent all day yesterday pulling out the stash, photographing it and jotting down its vital signs. Today was painfully slow at work, so I spent most of the day entering the newly photographed yarn into Ravelry, marking off the ones I'm willing or happy to part with.

The final tally is a sobering number, as I've calculated out the mileage. While not as bad as many, I'd say that nearly 20 miles of yarn in my wee little house may be a wee bit more than I need. Of that, about 13 miles is yarn I really want to keep, and the stuff I'm happy to see go to new homes makes up almost 7 miles. All the to-go yarns are sequestered in their own big Ziploc bag, and there's a Stash Bash to which they'll get carried at the end of the month if I've not moved my posterior about selling them before them.

That leaves me with a dresser full of yarn that I really do love.

I think this is the year that I focus on trying to knit from the stash full of yarns I adore instead of having my head turned by all the pretty shiny new yarns I come across. We'll see how well that works for me. It shouldn't be that hard to start, as right now, having it all laid out in front of me like fresh sparking new yarn, my main problem is that I can't decide where to start, but we'll see how well I can stick to it once the like-new freshness wears off again.

To close, on this chilly New Year's Eve, I'd like to wish you all the happiest of new years to come!

Flashing my Stash

The knitting secret pal swap I'm participating in for the next few months asked us to post pictures of our yarn stashes this past week. Since I'd already gone through the work of pulling it all together for ElJay, I thought I'd post it over here. Compared to a lot of the knitters in the swap, I have a lot of yarn. Im guessing compared to some of you, maybe not so much.

I realized as I was doing this, that I have a LOT of yarn. A LOT. And having my husband watching while I was doing this, now HE knows just how much I have, too. I think I'll need to lay off the yarn buying for a while. Heh. I'm okay with that - it's gotten to the point where I almost feel overwhelmed by the stash - there's just too much of it that I love and want to work with to keep buying yarn. It meant I went to NH Sheep and Wool last weekend and bought a grand total of 3 skeins of yarn - two to make hats for the husband and daughter, one to send off to my secret pal.



I'll start with some of my tools, though, since I've got a lot of those too.

First off, my needle cases. I got these from Crippenworks Needlecases, and I love them


Here's all four of them - Circulars on the left, crochet hooks and DPNs in the middle, and straights on the right.


The insides of a couple of the cases.



My swift



My ball winder. The dresser that it is attached to is where most of my yarn lives.



Most, but not all of my books.


And now, the yarn. On all the yarn pics, if you click through to Flickr, I've added notes and stuff to the pictures too.


This is my collection of ends and bits and bobs. I do actually go back to these for some projects, which is why I keep them around. There's all kinds of stuff here - cotton, wool, alpaca, silk. If it's natural, I'll knit with it, pretty much.



These are my one-offs, those single balls that you acquire either as gifties or at swaps, or because they were so divine you have to have them. I'm sure you all know what I mean. My favorites in the batch are the purple boucle and the silk my friend D brought for me from Japan.



Here's all the sock yarn - Clockwise, from the top left, Schaefer Anne, Fleece Artist merino, Running Wild cormo wool, Great Adirondack silk/wool, three colors from Sunshine Yarns on etsy, Cherry Tree Hill supersock, Koigu, Fleece Artist merino, and the few balls of Regia and Kroy. Lots of sock yarn. The koigu is officially no longer stash yarn, since I ended yesterday's session by winding it up and starting a new sock with it. Since I took this, I've added two new skeins of Sunshine Yarns - one in the Ravenclaw colorway for a friend, and another all for me!



This is my current collection of project yarn - I'm still stuck in baby knitting hell, and all of this is for that. Jaeger Matchmaker (car seat bunting), Kareoke (baby sweater), Cascade superwash (Widget sweater), Jaeger baby Merino (baby sweaters), Kertzer Butterfly Super 10 (Baby Surprise Jacket, if my figuring for stockinette stitch works).



Most of the rest of my project quantity yarn collection - Dale for ladybug sweater, Fleece Artist Thrummed mitten kit, with extra skein for hat, Alpaca from New Mexico, Mostly Merino yarn, Cotton Comfort mill ends, Touch of Twist silk-merino laceweight, Frog Tree Alpaca. My favorite out of this batch is the NM alpaca - because we got to meet the alpacas from whom the yarn came, and toured the spinning mill where it is made up in Ruidoso when we were out visiting my MiL last winter. It was a really neat side trip. I'm most excited about the Fleece Artist thrummed mittens kit that I just got.



This is my Sea colors yarn. Solar dyed in sea water, no photograph can convey the depth and pure gorgeousness of this yarn. The blue is destined to be a sweater for myself. The pink and green I bought just to have.



This last one isn't technically stash yarn, since, as you can see, I've started the project. But I love this yarn sooooo much, I had to include it - it's a lambswool cashmere blend, in a fantastic shade of true red with all different colors speckled into it - blue, yellow, purple, white. It may be my favorite yarn I've ever seen or worked with. The kicker is that I can not remember who makes it.

Well, that's my stash. There's actually more, but it's pretty boring collection of wools in natural colors, and I couldn't bring myself to haul those last bits of it out of storage yesterday afternoon.

The other thing I realized when I was pulling this all together is that I like to buy yarn when I travel, which means that a lot of the yarns in my stash have stories to them, even if it's just "Oh yeah, I found that yarn in this little store in Cleveland when I went out there for that server upgrade..." It's like a mini personal history.