The Gift of Stash
One of the great things about being married to my wife (10/10 would recommend) is that she unreservedly supports every aspect of my creative life. Recently, I told her that I wanted to reorganize all of my stashed yarn, which I keep in plastic totes in the basement of our house. Too many things had come in and gone out, leaving me with a sense that it was a bit of a mess in those totes. I wanted to put my fingers on all of the yarn and remember what I had.
I had been thinking about how Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (better known as the Yarn Harlot) does something she calls her “self-imposed sock club.” Every year, she goes into her stash of yarn and pulls out the materials for twelve pairs of socks. She puts the yarn for each pair in its own bag and labels the twelve bags with their month. Then, on the first of that month, she pulls out her “sock club” bag and carries it around with her for mobile sock knitting purposes. At the end of the year, if all goes well, Stephanie has twelve pairs of hand-knit socks that she’s made using yarn from her own supply.
“Maybe I should do something kind of like that,” I told my wife.
“Hold on,” she said.
The next thing I knew, she’d ordered shelving and a supply of wire baskets with scooped fronts, and we were setting them up in the dining room. Her point: “You need to be able to see your yarn and be inspired.”
Now I have a tiny yarn shop. Look at it!
I reserved two baskets in the middle for what I’m working on right now. The other baskets are for things I’m not making yet. Some of them hold special skeins. There are gifts. There’s a few vintage balls of yarn from Japan that I bought on a whim. That big cream-colored ball on the second shelf is some eighteenth-century French hemp handspun that I can’t look at without imagining a woman spinning in a cottage hundreds of years ago, thousands of miles away, producing thousands of yards of fine thread that links me to her.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with any of these yarns yet. That’s why I like looking at them. It gives inspiration plenty of room to strike.
Some of the baskets hold the beginnings of an experiment with my own version of the Self-Imposed Sock Club. The one on the left side of the third shelf, for example—a few balls of Noro Kureyon, a pop of neon and turquoise wool, some rich reds and oranges balanced against a bit of blue, gray, purple. It’s not anything right now, but it could be something. I just have to figure out what. My favorite part.
Some of the colors are leftovers from old projects, and it’s fun to see them again. The purple and gray is from a striped pullover with roses that I made my wife, and that blue in the very front is a bit of hand-dyed wool from a long-ago experiment. When I look at the basket, I remember where the yarn came from—the balls I bought at a shop, the ones I snagged from a stranger on Facebook Marketplace, the ones my mom gave me when she decided she didn’t want to keep knitting. My history as a person and a maker is here, part of the story of the yarn that I’m mulling over.
It’s one of my favorite parts of knitting—how it demands its own stretches of time; the way that when one becomes a knitter, it’s a practice that begins and ends, stalls and restarts, year by year and decade by decade. I love how yarn accumulates like a printer’s crinkled metal tubes of ink. I love the colors and the fibers, the people and the stories.
I wish there were more of what I loved in the way we talk about “stash.” We take on so much guilt around the yarn we’ve collected, as though we’re supposed to be some kind of perfect Platonic Ideal of a knitter who possesses only the exact correct number of balls of yarn she needs to make her current project and no more. How many would that be?
The truth is that yarn is our medium. We need it to make things with. The yarn I’ve collected over more than two decades of knitting is a gift of history, meaning, and inspiration—and my new living room yarn shelf is a reminder of that gift, a way of holding it in the center of my creative life and honoring it.
This one shelf doesn’t hold all of my yarn, of course. The most fun part of this stash sorting project was the part when my wife and I reorganized everything into what we’re calling “project bags.” Some of them have a purpose—she wants a new set of covers for the throw pillows on the sofa, for example—but others we put together because they made us feel something. “These want to be together,” she said quite a few times. “I don’t know what for yet. That’s your job.”
Every bag is an adventure waiting to happen. I can’t wait to find out where they take me.
