A Yarn's Tale

This will be a short post. I am in the midst of revisions for A Stitch in Crime which my editor needs by June 29. The good part is that I will be able to send it electronically which gives me up until the last minute.

I loved all the posts about craft economy. My only hint dates back to my early sewing days. I had watched a friend decide to take up sewing. She had to have all fancy tools right away. I don’t even think she ever ended up finishing one dress before she threw in the thread. So when I decided to start sewing, I was worried I’d lose interest as she had. She had been backed by her parents. I had only my babysitting money to use (I was in high school, so this is ancient history). I made a conscious decision to buy just what I needed to make one dress and then if I continued sewing, I would buy one tool with each thing I made. I never lost interest and ended up using everything I bought for a long time. The only things I never could quite afford were really good scissors and pinking shears. I did fine without them, anyway.

Thanks to my blog sister’s earlier posts, I was inspired to go stash shopping. Not as easy as it sounds. At one point I took all yarn I had and arranged it on a couple of book shelf. Arranged it is not quite the right word. More like stuffed it into the shelves. The problem with looking through it, is if I take anything out, the rest of the yarn comes flying out behind it. What I could see from not disturbing the arrangement made me wonder what I’d been thinking. There seems to be a lot of boring beige yarn.

When I couldn’t shove any more yarn in the shelves, I started with plastic bins you can stack on top of each other. They kind of got covered up with some projects I’d actually completed. When I finally uncovered the bins, I found way too many balls of crochet thread. Was it on sale? Or did I just forget I already had some and kept buying more?

Then came the dangerous part of stash shopping. All the plastic bags. No matter how careful I was, they kept latching onto my shoes and trying to trip me. What was inside all those white opaque bags? The wrist warmers I started, but the pattern of which had gotten separated. What size hook was I using? Which book has the pattern? Maybe it would be better to unravel and start from scratch. The partially done shrug at least had the pattern with it, but what happened to the rest of yarn? Again, I was at a loss about the hook size since it was missing from the bag. And I was clueless about where I was in the garment. Another thing for the unravel and start over pile, along with finding the rest of the yarn. I keep vowing to include notes with projects with the essentials like what size hook I used and where I am in the pattern. All good intentions so far not realized.

One really big bag has all the glow in the dark yarn. Michael’s was closing it out and bought almost all they had. How could I turn it down? It was half price and I do use it in A Stitch in Crime. I had visions of making glow in the dark flowers to give away. I could still do that. The book doesn’t come out until March.

Eventually I took a break as the mail came. There was a post card from that new wonderful yarn store I found. They’re having a sale starting tomorrow. A big discount on all their gorgeous yarn. Limited time only. Uh, oh.