I’ve written several posts on this blog about stash, and I’m sure I’ll write several more. As someone who is addicted to all things yarny, stash is just a given in my life.
Really, it’s all about being aware of what’s in my stash –and being comfortable with its size and composition. I don’t mind having full skeins of yarn in my stash. It’s those little odds and ends that get to me. I hate throwing them away – it feels like such a waste.
So to use up those little odds and ends, here’s a fun littlestashbusting project. It works best with fingering- to worsted-weight yarn. Just click on the button below to get your free stashbuster sachets pattern!
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Earlier this year, I decided I needed to knit more from my stash and spend less money on impulse yarn purchases. Not knitting from my stash was starting to fill me with guilt, and I was buying more and more yarn as a substitute for actually knitting. So I spent a day going through my stash, letting go of yarn I would never use, and making plans for what I kept.
One of the first things on my to-knit list was a stashbusting sweater, using up odds and ends of purple and gray yarn that had been lingering in my stash for ten years or more. Brilliant plan. I was going to be the stashbuster of the century. Then, after just two color repeats, I started to panic. No way would there be enough purple yarn to do what I wanted. So I went to the yarn store and bought three new skeins of yarn. Another week passed, and I started to panic again. This time, there was no way there would be enough gray. So I went back to the yarn store and bought three new skeins of gray yarn. After finishing the body of the sweater, I knew I would need just one more skein of purple yarn to get through the sleeves. Can you see where this story is going? Knitting a “stashbusting” sweater led to purchasing a whole sweater’s worth of yarn. To my credit, I did use up all the original stashbusting yarn, but ended up with about the same yardage left over from all the new yarn I bought.
If there’s a moral to the story, it’s that downsizing is hard.
Whether it’s your stash, your to-do list, or the contents of your closet, it’s always hard to let go. And if you’re like me, something inevitably creeps in to take the place of whatever you tried to let go. This is just human nature taking over. We have a natural aversion to perceived loss. If I feel like I’m losing part of my stash, my subconscious kicks into overdrive to figure out a way to replace whatever it lost. Even though I ended up with a whole sweater, my subconscious didn’t want to lose any stash. That’s how I ended up with the same amount of yarn left over as I started with. It would be easy to blame it on human nature and totally give up on the whole downsizing crusade. And it’s totally fine if you do. But if you’re committed to downsizing because it just feels right for you, then don’t let that silly human nature get in your way. You are stronger than that. Downsizing doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process, and it takes time, effort, and a good handle on whatever tricks your subconscious likes to play on you. Knowing this is the key to not giving up. Give it another shot. And another. And another. Maybe you don’t want to conquer your stash, or your to-do list. That’s okay. Maybe you want to conquer something else, like clearing your email inbox or finally writing that book. Whatever it is, these principles still apply. Making room for what you want to do is hard, because your subconscious doesn’t like change. It will do everything it can to hang on to what it “lost” or try to get you to replace it. Just be aware of what’s going on. Don’t beat yourself up. We all have a subconscious that plays these games. Notice what triggers you. Know that it’s a process, and keep trying. It’s that simple. But it’s not always easy. Previous posts in this series: Ravelry Project Page for the "Stashbusting" Sweater:
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Stashbusting. For knitters, it is one of the most controversial words there is.
If you don’t have a stash, feel free to stop reading, unless you’re really curious about the psychology of stashing, and how to talk to people who stash. (Interested in how stash happens? Read this.) If you have a stash, a pile of yarn tucked away for a rainy day, you know what I’m talking about. There’s probably yarn bought ten years ago for something you intended to make, but never got around to making. And the odd skein of something precious, only you can’t find something you want to make with it. If you have a stash, no matter how big, you probably have a mental catalog of what’s in it and even the project you were going to make with it. The laceweight baby alpaca that was going to be a shawl, the sweater’s worth of yak yarn you paid cash for while your husband was looking the other way, the skeins of yarn in every shade that were meant to be something amazing but are now just sitting there. If you have a stash, it probably also has scraps of yarn leftover from other projects. Whether it’s a lot or a little, you never know when you might need it, so it gets added to the stash. If you have a stash, you probably go to the yarn store just to see what’s new, what sparks your interest today. And you can’t resist walking out with three or four projects’ worth of yarn, even though you only came in for one skein of sock yarn. If you have a stash, you probably have guilt. Having a stash means you have to protect it from moths. That takes work, and often it means you don’t feel like you can display it out on the shelves (which is what makes it so appealing in the yarn store in the first place). You feel guilty that your beautiful yarn must be hidden away in a plastic bin at the back of a closet. Having a stash means guilt when you buy yarn only to discover you already had exactly what you needed. Having a stash means you might be spending more time shopping for yarn than actually knitting with it. If that’s what brings you joy, that’s one thing, but you’re probably feeling some guilt when you look at that credit card statement at the end of the month. Having a stash means you want to make so many, many beautiful things, but there will never be enough time. If you’re like me, you probably have some guilt over that. I’m not here to say that having a stash of yarn (or anything else for that matter) is bad. What’s bad is the meaning we attach to it – consciously or unconsciously – and the fact that when our stashes are too big, we often feel dragged down by them rather than uplifted by them. But there’s hope. You just have to say no. You have to know what to say no to, and what you’re saying yes to. Because “No” makes way for “Yes.” But before you can say “Yes!” to what you want, you probably need to learn how to say no to all that other stuff. The magical thing is, when you start to say “No” to the things you never really wanted (or the things you don’t want anymore), there’s a whole lot of space left for “Yes!”
So when it comes to your stash, you have to face it, head on, and say “No,” say goodbye, let go of the things that pull you down, so the bits of stash that really lift you up can do that.
Here’s how:
For the No’s:
Even if you can’t let all the “No’s” go all at once, make a plan to phase them out. Immediately, they will stop draining your energy, and you’ll feel like your load has been lightened – mentally and physically. For the Yes's:
If your overall goal is to make your stash manageable again, you will be well on your way. The key to keeping a manageable stash is not necessarily to eliminate stash altogether, but to be mindful of what you have and why. If you walk into the yarn store with the thought that you’ll just be throwing or giving the yarn away again in six months, will it really be worth it to spend your money on it now? More often than not, this inner monologue is what saves me hundreds of dollars on yarn each month: “I’m working on that shawl right now, and I have all the yarn I need. Then I’m going to finish those socks, and I have all the yarn for that. After that, I’ll knit that top, and I have everything I need for that. I do want to run by the yarn store to pick up some yarn for the shawl I want to make after that, but they’ll probably have it next week. Plus, the time I spend driving to and from the yarn store is time I can spend actually knitting. And if the store runs out, I can always order it online. There’s always more where that came from.” And if all of that isn’t enough to keep me from the yarn store, then that’s fine. The moment you say “Yes!” to acting on your desire is the real beginning. You just have to know what that desire is. And there’s always more where that came from.
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Knitting is one of the least expensive hobbies to start – all you need are needles and yarn, and someone to show you how. If you don’t already have the materials, you can get started for around 10 bucks. And even if you splurge on the nicest yarn and the nicest needles, your first foray into knitting shouldn’t cost you more than a hundred bucks.
And then, somewhere along the line, you get hooked. The Yarn Harlot blames it on yarn fumes. She insists we aren’t ourselves around that much wool. I’m talking about stash – loads and loads of yarn tucked away for future use. Talk to any knitter and you’ll find it’s pretty common to have one. There’s even a whole section on Ravelry devoted to cataloging your stash, and there is endless talk in some forums about de-stashing. I’m no exception. I have at least five “future sweaters” in my stash, a potential pair of slippers, a few sidelined shawls…you get the picture. Everything in my stash is something I could knit, but haven’t knit yet. And when I think about it, I want to cast on all the things at once. If I give in to that impulse, there are suddenly dozens of half-started projects around the house. Eventually, I realize none of them are going right (because I didn’t plan it out in the first place) and chuck it all back into the stash again. At some point, I realized the stash was weighing me down. Something had to give. My goal wasn’t to have “no” stash. It’s just to have a stash that doesn’t overwhelm me or fill me with guilt. The truth is, it will take me several years to knit through all the yarn I have stocked up. And every time I buy more yarn, I stuff it into the plastic bin where my yarn lives and there it sits. And then I feel guilty about it. Just like the yarn that’s already in my stash, every time I buy more yarn, I have a plan for what I’m going to use it for – and I plan to use it NOW. But when I get home from the yarn store, life calls – dishes to wash, dinner to cook, laundry to fold, you know the drill. So into the stash the yarn goes, and each time I feel a pang of guilt that I’m not the super-knitter I want to be. The thing about stash is this: none of the usual rules about decluttering apply. You can give it away, or sell it, but it is terribly difficult to throw away even a single skein of stash yarn. Which means that unless you have people lining up to relieve you of your yarn (and some people might), your stash just builds and builds. Now, I’ve been knitting for more than twelve years, and my yarn tastes have certainly changed over the years. Every now and then, I’ll either donate or give away the bits of stash that no longer fit with who I am. But still, my stash has grown over the years to a bin stuffed with yarn and several baskets of yarn placed strategically around the house. Most yarn shop owners are no help. It’s their business to sell us more, and we love them for it. A yarn diet can be a disaster too. It turns the most beautiful thing (yarn) into a four-letter word, and just like a restrictive food diet, it often leads to overindulgence when we can’t resist something really tempting. So what’s a space- and cash-strapped knitter to do? For me, it was realizing that I wasn’t buying yarn. Not really. I was buying the experience of buying yarn. There’s nothing wrong with that. I would buy yarn because I wanted to knit something, but I felt like I didn’t really have the time. Of course, a trip to the yarn store can take an hour out of my day – an hour that I could have been knitting. This, my friends, is time poverty. You tell yourself, “I don’t have the time now so I’ll just buy something that I’ll work with later.” And it’s a mess. A sense of time poverty led me to overspend and overshop, not just with yarn but in every area of my life. And shopping doesn’t bring me any additional time in my day. In fact, it does the opposite. And then, to top it all off, I have more stuff to wrangle in my house. After thinking long and hard about the causes of my yarn buying habit, I started to make some changes. I spent one Sunday afternoon going through my stash. It all went onto a pile, KonMarie style. I organized it, weighed it, and really did throw away the “junk.” I made wool dryer balls with the scrap wool I knew I’d never knit with. I made a spreadsheet of stash – complete with whether or not there was a planned project attached to that yarn. And I made a decision that my yarn purchases will now be guided by these questions:
And the last one, which isn’t really a question so much as a guided choice. When I get in the car to go home from work and feel the urge to go to the yarn store (which is dangerously close by), I tell myself this: “I can go to the yarn store or I can go home and actually knit.” Usually this gets me headed in the direction of home. I’ll let you know how it goes.
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