A Year With My Yarn
This end of the calendar year, aka The Holiday Season, is exhausting this year. I'm trying to get an awful lot done in a very short period of time. For example, I'm writing instead of walking this morning.
Over on Ravelry, I'm one of the "Friendly Mods" of the Year of Stash Socks Group. As the group moves into 2012, two of my friends - they are the other Friendly Mods - and I are taking a serious look at our respective stashes.
The amount of yarn that I have is sobering.
We've created a year-long challenge - the first part of which is happening now: we are cataloging and getting all our yarn into our Ravelry stashes so we'll have a starting number of yards by December 31st. We've opened up the challenge to the entire group, of course, and we've had a surprising number of takers! If you're interested, it's the Slash & Smash Your Stash 2012 thread.
All the yarn. That means the weaving yarn (it's horrifying the thousands of yards that are on those cones . . . ) and the felting yarn (Lamb's Pride . . . ) and the dish rag cotton (there's always some of that on hand) and the yarn I've been stockpiling to make Kaffe Fassett's Long Leaf Coat.
I've attempted to stop buying yarn before, to various success. Knitterary and The Writing Weaver and I had a pact a couple of years ago, and we did reasonably well. Except for the standard travel dispensation, and the summer Wollmeise dispensation . . .
Right . . .
I don't do so well with deprivation, and so I'm looking at it all in new light - one that's more in keeping with how I like to live my life: in the positive. And I like to have goals. I do better when I have goals that are achievable. And lately, I've had a couple of friends who are fighting cancer. One got the news back in August that treatment was not fully successful, and another just received a diagnosis on Monday.
Yarn and cancer. What does one have to do with the other? I'm not really sure, but somehow my commitment to what started out as stash busting is tied up in my head somehow with serious goals - something simple that I should be able to do when others I care for are being forced into dealing with life altering circumstances. Do I think that my curbing some excess in my life will change theirs? No, not consciously - but this stark reminder that life is short is causing me to look at my own life and how I want to live it. And so, although I have no control over someone else's life, perhaps my own life will be changed - because I will change it. I am the only one who can. It's obviously about more than yarn.
And so, ever in the path of hope and positivity, 2012 is going to be, for me, "A Year With My Yarn." You heard it here, first.
(That's just the sunroom . . .)
Over on Ravelry, I'm one of the "Friendly Mods" of the Year of Stash Socks Group. As the group moves into 2012, two of my friends - they are the other Friendly Mods - and I are taking a serious look at our respective stashes.
The amount of yarn that I have is sobering.
We've created a year-long challenge - the first part of which is happening now: we are cataloging and getting all our yarn into our Ravelry stashes so we'll have a starting number of yards by December 31st. We've opened up the challenge to the entire group, of course, and we've had a surprising number of takers! If you're interested, it's the Slash & Smash Your Stash 2012 thread.
All the yarn. That means the weaving yarn (it's horrifying the thousands of yards that are on those cones . . . ) and the felting yarn (Lamb's Pride . . . ) and the dish rag cotton (there's always some of that on hand) and the yarn I've been stockpiling to make Kaffe Fassett's Long Leaf Coat.
I've attempted to stop buying yarn before, to various success. Knitterary and The Writing Weaver and I had a pact a couple of years ago, and we did reasonably well. Except for the standard travel dispensation, and the summer Wollmeise dispensation . . .
Right . . .
I don't do so well with deprivation, and so I'm looking at it all in new light - one that's more in keeping with how I like to live my life: in the positive. And I like to have goals. I do better when I have goals that are achievable. And lately, I've had a couple of friends who are fighting cancer. One got the news back in August that treatment was not fully successful, and another just received a diagnosis on Monday.
Yarn and cancer. What does one have to do with the other? I'm not really sure, but somehow my commitment to what started out as stash busting is tied up in my head somehow with serious goals - something simple that I should be able to do when others I care for are being forced into dealing with life altering circumstances. Do I think that my curbing some excess in my life will change theirs? No, not consciously - but this stark reminder that life is short is causing me to look at my own life and how I want to live it. And so, although I have no control over someone else's life, perhaps my own life will be changed - because I will change it. I am the only one who can. It's obviously about more than yarn.
And so, ever in the path of hope and positivity, 2012 is going to be, for me, "A Year With My Yarn." You heard it here, first.
(That's just the sunroom . . .)
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