BY STEPHANIE PEARL-MCPHEE
I
I am trying to do something about my stash because it has made its way into the kitchen again. I support, endorse, and love the idea of a stash that's whatever size your heart thinks it should be, but I also support and endorse the idea of being able to share your home with other humans if you so choose, and that you should be able to eat at the dining room table if that's your bag.
My stash is both large and mature. I am not a naturally tidy or organized person, so for the thing to stay usable, I need to admit that without some measure of organization (or the attempt at one, at the very least), the stash will begin oozing from room to room, becoming ever more chaotic and unstable. The system I have works pretty well-though as someone who constantly fights back against the part of her that owns two dead and dusty houseplants and is still knitting instead of doing something about that, it is inevitable that the stash will have some drift. New yarn often gets stuffed in a corner, a swatched and rejected yarn doesn't make it back into its correct spot, a mitten book (or seven) that I thumbed through while contemplating my choices ends up in the bathroom. Gradually, who I am and how infrequently I choose cleaning as an activity starts to exert itself, entropy takes over, and the stash springs free of its moorings.
I have accepted I am never going to live in the kind of home that you would see in a magazine, unless the magazine is running a contest that has something to do with the maximum amount of cat hair that can get stuck to a chair before a reasonable person does something about it. But I do try to keep the house just this side of a health code violation. I'll be damned, though, if I can figure out how to keep the stash restrained enough that it's not the thing people gape at when they arrive and talk about when they leave.
I sometimes watch this TV show Hoarders: Buried Alive. I don't really enjoy it, but it triggers fear-based cleaning behavior in me, and that's valuable. In one episode, the hoarder was a knitter, and, while I admit that the rest of her house had a lot of problems, when the professional organizer assigned to make her home livable showed up, the first thing she went after was the stash. "Four pairs of size-six needles?" she shrieked, shocked and unbelieving. "Twenty balls of yarn! All blue!" She was appalled, and the woman was ashamed, and I had no idea what to do with any of my feelings because I am pretty sure I have more yarn than the knitter on that show. As a matter of fact, I am totally confident that I have a lot more than four pairs of size-six needles-and while I can agree that I shouldn't keep my blue yarn in the bathroom or next to a stack of empty pizza boxes that goes to the ceiling, I haven't ever considered it excessive.
I watched in horror as this organizer tried to convince the knitter that she needed less yarn and fewer needles. I felt a little unglued. I wanted to intervene, to tell them that she's being so misunderstood as an artist. I wanted to explain her choices, to say that she's going to go on to knit for a long time and that this stash is just good planning and choices, not hoarding. I wanted to ask her if this is what she would say if her client were a painter. Would she be allowed to keep just one canvas? Would they tell her it was silly to have fourteen sizes of brushes and ask her to choose the two she wanted to keep? Would they tell her that she simply couldn't have so many blue paints? That she'd have to decide between cerulean, navy, midnight, cobalt, and phthalo? Limit her ability to express herself for the sake of tidiness? My feelings got bigger and I got angrier, but part of me wondered: Do I want to defend this stash so that mine is defensible? Instead of cleaning up the stash and shoving it back into the spaces that it should be in, do I want to pretend that my knitting can't be or shouldn't be cleaned up, so that I don't have to admit that I'd rather be knitting than doing the work it would take to tidy it? Is this why I bought that poster that said, A CLEAN HOUSE IS A SIGN OF A WASTED LIFE?
This knitter on the show was hearing that she had too much yarn. Mostly, I think the larger issue was that she hadn't taken a bag of garbage to the bin in seventeen years. If I were the "organizational expert," I would have started there, let me tell you, but I get that when you're storing twenty-two kilos of used paper towels in your guest room, people are going to get very critical about all your stuff.
I've heard from people that I have too much yarn. Often, they tell me that I have more yarn than I could use in a lifetime. I don't even know if they can define that. I know that to the uninitiated it might seem like a simple equation: how much you knit versus how much you buy. But that's not how it works-and not just because nobody knows how long I'll live or how much I will knit. They don't even know what I'm going to use it for.
Most of my yarn is for knitting, but some of it has a more complicated destiny as support staff: It is there to make me want to knit. It's absolutely possible that I need the green Merino to inform how I'll use the blue alpaca, and that ball of gorgeous variegated yarn? You bet I've had it for ten years, and I completely admit that it's a yarn pet. I have no intention of ever knitting it, but it's earning the real estate it takes up with how it makes me feel about knitting. It is the textile artist's equivalent of a painting hung on the wall. It's there to be beautiful and to help me dream of possibility.
I sigh and look at the yarn and projects scattered around my house, and I think about how I love the way other people's homes look. I love the idea of living in a house that is well managed and tidy. I would love it if my stash didn't keep creeping out of its confines to wind up ornamenting the kitchen, but I can't figure out how that's going to happen, as long as given any choice between tidying the stash and knitting with it, the latter is going to win most of the time. I think about cleaning it up, but don't you think I would be spending all my time organizing the stash instead of working with it-and that this would make it ridiculous to own?
My stash isn't just the stuff I'm going to knit. It's how I think about knitting and, frankly, some inspiration takes up more room than you'd imagine.
II
I am trying to do something about my stash. I've just finished culling it, an event that is practically a religious holiday in this house. Culling the stash is something I started doing about ten years ago, when I had to admit that more yarn was coming into the house than was going out, and that the math on that was pretty hard to ignore. If you buy twenty skeins of sock yarn a year, and you knit only ten pairs of socks per year, you're going to have a very compelling problem in a short period of time. I have absolutely no problem defending my yarn buying. Knitting is what I love, and it is normal, human, and smart to surround yourself with the things that make you happy and give you choices and inspiration. It is not normal to bury yourself over the course of twenty years without fighting back a little bit, even as you can see it happening. Now during the cull, I actually get rid of yarn. Some of it goes to charity, some of it gets re-homed to friends and family who will actually use it, but during the cull, the stash flow at my house reverses itself, and yarn, books, and needles leave the house.
I don't do it just because of space, because I can't end up sleeping in the bathtub, or because I can't manage my feelings about knitting and the yarn it results in. I do it because yarn sometimes finds its way into this house without deliberate and careful thought, and without curation, without a chance to reverse the recklessness that sometimes brings yarn here, the stash starts to weigh on me. It lurks around the house, looming darkly and making me feel bad.
I'm not sure what the bad feeling is, but I used to wonder if it was guilt. It would make sense; the stash is obviously an excess, and when it's at its largest there are definitely things in it that won't get used. It's more than I need, and squeezing another skein into a shelf that's already packed feels a little like scraping half a pie into the compost while children are starving in Africa. I don't feel bad about having what I need, but I sure feel a little uncomfortable about having more than I can use and letting the potential in the yarn go to waste as it gathers dust.
I thought maybe the feeling was of responsibility, some sort of culpability for having been the person who brought all this here, in whatever deranged moment of weakness unhinged me. Even if I can see now that I got that purple mohair only because it was 50 percent off, am I required to execute the penance of knitting it? If a tower of sock yarn is getting big enough to topple in the night and bury me so deeply that it will be three days before they can excavate my lifeless form, do I have to keep trying to use it up, just to avoid admitting I bought that last skein to compliment the dyer? If I made this bed, is it necessary that I have to knit it?
Then there's what I do for a living. I'm a member of the knitting industry, and sometimes people give me their yarn, or they're happy to see me buy it. I like pleasing them, and I know they hope I might knit it and they will have a little lovely publicity. I know this, and I want to help them, but I'm one person, and I worry that somewhere, they're sitting in their living room, reading my blog, and thinking, "Dammit, when is she going to knit my yarn?," and I'm sitting in my stash room, looking at the same skein, only it's next to 470 others, and I feel like I'm obligated to knit all of them really, really soon, and the next thing I know I'm feeling really sweaty.
It could be one of those reasons; it might be something else. Perhaps it's possible for all that potential just to get to be too much for me. There is a mystical moment when I have more yarn than psychic energy, and it doesn't feel good anymore. It feels like a burden, and it feels like the stash isn't something I've chosen. When that happens, it's time for a cull. I have to go into the stash, look at the yarn that's come into my life, and ask myself if it still has a right to be here. If it can't be defended in my court, where the judge is kind and generous but firm, then it's time for the yarn in question to make its way into someone else's stash.
I get a few boxes out-one for my knitting friends, one to donate-and I start going through the stash. The thing that amazes me while I'm at it is that every single skein I pick up and hold, every item-whether it was a gift or an impulse buy or a moment of weakness in the face of a ridiculous discount-all of this, no matter how it came to be here, at the time that it came into the stash, when I first held it in my hands, I wholly believed it was going to be the next thing I knit.
As I work, I try to let go of the feelings of obligation, responsibility, and commitment and look honestly at twelve balls of bulky mint-green brushed Merino that I bought in 1985 and quietly admit that my tastes have changed. I don't want that batwing sweater anymore, even if it means I wasted the money. I go through it all, sorting and deciding, and I keep going until the stash feels like what it's supposed to be, which is a pleasure. Anything that's not going to be knit by me or loved by me, or that can't explain to me exactly why it's here…that stuff moves on so that someone can enjoy it, and I can stop resenting it for being the physical embodiment of my inability to grow as a person.
I admit that my stash is large, I admit that there are a lot of reasons for yarn to be in it, and I admit that I am weak in the face of yarn. I admit it all, and I cull ruthlessly so my stash reflects who I am, because otherwise, my stash makes me feel bad.
III
I am trying to do something about my stash, to bring it in line with my personal manifesto, but I'll be the first to admit that it's not going very well. I say that I let yarn go, that I release things, that I have a vision of what my stash should be. I really believe that a stash should be a source of inspiration, motivation, and the root of creativity for a textile artist. I believe in keeping things that aren't going to be knit now, or even maybe ever, as long as they are part of your personal vision. Every skein or ball should be chosen and deliberate. I don't even think a stash can be technically too big, as long as it fits within the rules, you haven't had a visit from the local authorities who want to talk about reining it in enough so that firefighters can get to you in an emergency, and the practice hasn't negatively affected your credit rating.
Here I stand then, trying to take charge of this whole thing and keep it within the confines of my system. I am holding a ball of yarn that breaks every rule that I have and, according to all the criteria I have ever set, should be in the box I'm giving away, but I can't do it. I cannot let it go. It's one of a whole bunch of skeins that make no sense if you know me-odd yarns that you wouldn't expect to find here, that I would never buy, that don't reflect who I am as an artist, that don't contribute to my work, won't be knit, aren't inspiring, and, technically, don't reflect the way that I like to interact with my stash.
They're wild cards, with no right to be here. For example, the yarn I'm holding is variegated, with all the colors of the rainbow in it. It is dominated by a shiny filament of fake silver and a bright pink color-saccharine sweet, girly, and intense. That pink is the color of lipstick nobody buys, and not only would I never wear it, I dislike the color enough that I wouldn't even knit it for a friend who was misguided enough to think she liked it. That should be enough to get it out of here, never mind that it is a fantastically crappy acrylic. It is a yarn that you would never, ever associate with me. It's a yarn that might belong to a child who tells you that her favorite color is sparkle rainbow.
One warm day in June, about twenty years ago, when my daughters were very little, they brought me a birthday present. It was wrapped in tinfoil (very smart-you don't need tape that way) and a bit sticky. They presented it to me with pride, their little faces glowing with the delight of what they saw as a very well-executed plan. I pried open the packet, and inside was that ball of yarn, glittering brilliantly in the sunshine. They'd taken their own money, gone to the store, thought long and hard about what to get me, and settled on this particular gem. Now, true empathy is a late-blooming flower, so they didn't quite get the details right, but I still remember the way that they showed me how pink it was, how shiny it was, and explained, essentially, how it was a moonbeam of beauty, the apex of elegance. I stood there, holding a ball of yarn that was exactly what you'd get if Barbie and My Little Pony dropped acid and tried to come up with a colorway, and even though it was the exact opposite of everything I like in a yarn, I loved it. It was the first time my children tried to give me a gift that reflected who I am. I can no sooner get rid of that yarn than I can set fire to their baby pictures.
In another box are twenty-four balls of absolutely terrible yarn that my husband bought for me in China. In an afternoon that ended up a lot more complicated and expensive than he ever intended it to be, he took the time to find out where in the vast market you buy yarn, and he went there-way out of his way, navigating a country and a language he didn't know, to try to please me. It's true that when he found the yarn he panicked and opted for quantity over quality, but how do you send a gesture of love like that to charity? Horrific pantyhose shade of taupe or not, I am emotionally stuck to that big lot of yarn.
Those three over there, the ones that are neon colors, are a gift from a family friend. On her last trip here from Japan, she unloaded a great big basket of gifts from her home. Everyone got tea and rice candies and green tea-flavored everything, but I got Japanese yarn. That small white ball is all that's left of the yarn I used for my eldest daughter's baby blanket. The oatmeal-colored skeins that are about as soft as twine? I bought them at a tiny yarn shop in the basement of a house in Newfoundland, on one of the first trips my husband and I ever took together. The small ball of acid-green polyester is all that remains of the stash of my paternal grandmother-the woman who taught me how to knit. The eight balls of tweedy red yarn with odd electric-blue flecks that shreds when you try to knit it? Those are the legacy of a friend who had to give up knitting and passed them into my safekeeping, sure that I could somehow fulfill their destiny. Each monstrosity is a postcard, a treasure, and makes up a scrapbook of an unusually bulky sort.
I know what my stash is supposed to be, and mostly, it's that. My stash is useful, it is inspiration, it is the groundwork for my art, it is the magic box of paints and tools into which I reach to make things. It is my own personal store, a curated collection of things that make my knitting life possible and let me start mittens at 1:00 AM, should the magic strike me. It's the insurance policy that will let me keep knitting even if I run out of money, sheep stop bearing wool, or a zombie apocalypse closes every yarn shop in the world…but my stash is not just that.
It is also memento, remembrance, and souvenir. An expression of not just what I want to make but also who I am, who I love, where I've been, and who loves me. I'll keep as much of it as I want to, even if it's rainbow sparkle.
