My father was a professional musician for his entire adult career. He played oboe and English horn in an orchestra, and that meant he was always making reeds. For this, he had a room filled with tools with names like mandrels and ballots and plaques and staples, along with a well-worn cutting block, spools of thread in rich, shiny colors, and a little blob of beeswax. It was like Santa's workshop, if Santa were a woodwind player.
I grew up understanding the importance of tools and supplies to a creative person.
Yarn is the reed with which we knitters make music. We, too, have our rooms filled with tools that help us carry on our craft-things with names like swifts and ball-winders and DPNs and circular needles and yarn bowls. Collectively, they make up what we call our stash.
The specific tools may vary, but the room will always have yarn. Yarn is as essential to us as paint is to the artist, flour to the baker, soil to the gardener. We can improvise on most of the tools, tying string into a stitch marker, sanding down a bamboo chopstick in a pinch. But without yarn, our hands are idle.
As many kinds of yarn exist as there are people on earth. Each has a distinct structure and texture and behavior and ideal use. With so many options, and so many directions dictated by each choice, we require a healthy supply of materials in order to do our work.
A formal definition of healthy I cannot provide. It differs for each person. Most knitters dwell somewhere between "Gosh, I love my yarn" and "Am I a hoarder?"
We stash so that we can start a project at 2:00 AM if so inclined, but the relationship between stitcher and yarn goes far beyond simply being prepared. A yarn stash is a declaration of self-esteem. It is Virginia Woolf's "room of one's own," a significant financial stake in the ground that says, "My passion is worthwhile."
Asking a knitter what he or she plans on doing with the yarn he or she just bought is like asking a squirrel what it plans on doing with that nut it just buried under a pile of leaves. Obviously we plan on using it. Now? Later? For what? How can we know? Our main priority is simply to get that yarn safely back home and stored away in our stash. We'll know when we need it.
I once asked readers in a poll, "Without moving from where you are, can you see any yarn?" While 50 percent of the respondents said no, it's worth noting that 50 percent said yes. Which means that half of the world's knitters could, at any moment, toss you a skein of yarn without putting on their shoes.
Could you say the same thing about golfers or woodworkers or people who go spelunking on weekends? Without moving from where they are seated, how many of them could see golf clubs, or lathes, or whatever it is spelunkers use?
But yarn is far more than the sum of its parts, more than just a means to an end. Yarn holds hope and energy and history; it is a declaration, a question, an obsession, and a love story.
This book is a carefully selected collection of stories, statistics, tips, and manifestos on the subject of stash-specifically (but not always), the knitter's reputation for acquiring large quantities of yarn and storing them away for future use. The writers celebrate the meaning we attribute to yarn, the stories we let it keep, and the place it holds in our homes and in our lives.
The pieces in this collection cover the comical to the earnest, the lighthearted to the deeply philosophical, in a celebration of the how, why, when, and what we've accumulated (and let go of) over the years. They open our eyes to what stash means to each of us, both individually and collectively.
You'll find a full spectrum of voices, including knitwear designers and publishers, dyers and yarn store owners, along with a sheep farmer, an illustrator, a romance novelist, a handspinner, a Fulbright scholar, and a licensed clinical social worker to help us answer that common nagging fear: Do I have a problem? We hear from a knitting humorist, a PhD-wielding feminist publisher, the daughter of a shepherd, a globetrotting textile artist based in London, and a globetrotting designer currently based in western Massachusetts who may very well have moved again by the time you read this.
As varied as the voices in this collection are, they all have one fundamental thing in common: With the exception of our sheep farmer, Eugene, who gets a pass because he grows the fibers that make our world go 'round, every person in here knits. A lot. Which means that they coexist with a strong and distinct notion of stash every single day.
If you are a knitter who struggles to explain to others why your yarn stash means what it does to you, why it deserves so much more than a dismissive eyeroll, this book can be a start.
If you struggle not, if you love your stash and tend to it daily, let this book be your celebration.
And if you are a stash-aware nonknitter who wants to understand why your beloved relates to yarn the way he or she does, why that guest room simply must be turned into the stash room, read on.
All stitchers, you don't need me to tell you what our stashes mean. You live it. I'm preaching to the choir. In fact, this book is the choir, each voice singing loud and proud.
-Clara Parkes
