When people pull back the curtains to reveal a huge yarn stash, they pretend to be embarrassed. The truth is, they’re not. Knitters with a lot of yarn own their compulsion. They’re not easily distracted by people who see their pictures online or, even worse, come into their homes and mutter things like “psychological disorder” and “in need professional help.”
Erica Thompson’s stash. This is only half of what she admits to owning. I’m a little envious because it would be sort of wonderful to want to start a project and have anything you could need at your disposal. For non-knitters, you have to think of this like a painter having every paint color s/he might need. I mean, I’ve never heard anyone use the word “hoarding” in conjunction with any of my artist friends’ supplies.
Wendy at Knit and Tonic in what just might be the best stash picture ever, and not only because I own some of the same yarn in the exact same colorway. Hi, Blue Sky cotton. You’re attached to a jacket I’m never going to finish. I haven’t pulled you out yet, though, because I’m still not over pretending that I will finish it. Yes. I will finish it. Even though every time I look at the left front I see that place where I stopped paying attention and went astray in the moss stitch border just a bit, noticed it about 18 rows later (not too far as this is supposed to be a calf-length jacket . . . 18 rows is nothing, really), but left it in because I thought it might be “charming.” And it’s not. And now, instead of fixing that one tiny thing, I want to knit something else entirely.
Today I’m going to up the ante and reveal something knitters often don’t. I am going to show you my WIPs. And I don’t mean real WIPs. It would really be a semantic assault to suggest that there is anything amounting to progress related to these pieces. These are the kind of projects that I like to refer to as RIPs, as in knitting that shall never be finished in my lifetime. Perhaps the pattern was rife with error. Maybe you misread it. Or your yarn choice was ill-considered. You were experimenting. You cast on for seventeen items when you should have cast on for two. You were almost finished but then holiday gift season descended upon you and you had to set it aside. You started knitting because you saw that article that claims knitting helps people with ADHD focus . . .
So these RIPs pile up in the back of closets, under beds, beneath craft tables. They’re in boxes and plastic bags. Sometimes you tell yourself you’re saving them to remind yourself never to make the same mistake again, but what it really comes down to, is that you’d rather throw them all out than rip them out and rewind the yarn for further use regardless of how much you love the yarn attached to the project. After all, who wants to spend all weekend ripping out failures when you could be knitting successes instead?
The problem is, I’m moving, and the only promise I’ve ever made to myself as a person is that I cannot carry baggage from one apartment to the next. That drawer full of “important papers” that I haven’t thrown out for fear of losing something important (hey, I found my birth certificate so there’s point to this exercise), the old container of costume jewelry accumulated through the years and too many weak moments on ebay and these bags full of unfinished projects — I promised not to let them come with me as is. And there’s a lot to take care of:
It’s probably important to note that even the items that look like gauge swatches aren’t, so there’s a whole lot of “What was I thinking?” in there. I would have thought the most common trend would be “I got bored and cast on for something else and never looked back” and, truthfully, there’s a lot of that there. But my number one reason for project abandonment seems to be underestimation of lack of yarn.
Embarrassingly enough, this is not all of them. I have at least ten more projects yet to unwind. And this one requires a special note for posterity:
Knit bikinis are not for me!
Why I had to cast on a knit bikini before I came to this realization is beyond me. I think I became fooled because that was the summer that they were really making a comeback. Vogue featured a few that looked nice. And, the reality is, if you have that kind of body and you have no desire to ever wet your bikini, it’s probably not a horrific concept. If you do not, and your idea of a good day by the water is to enter it, I recommend that you trust me. That is, if someone or something managed to fool you into thinking a knit bikini could be a good thing.
The good news about this is that compliments of getting most of my RIPs in order, I’ve re-acquired a new box of yarn. My available stash has essentially tripled in the past week. (Not that this prevents me from wanting to pop into my LYS for more.) And even better, while pulling out all of these RIPs, I only cast on for two new projects . . .
