yarnstash

Lost yarn and other tales

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A lost year - how can a simple ball of yarn bring up so many feelings?

Almost a year ago I had to quickly pack up the contents of our spare room - turning it into what we laughably thought was a temporary home office.

I hastily grabbed a load of project bags and yarn and packed them away into a large tub, and that was the last I saw of them until this week, when I had to go looking for some important tax papers.

There were quite a few long forgotten WIPs and yarn that I'd clearly set aside when I was naively putting together a rough 'to knit' list for the year.

This yarn, for example was clearly going to be a Christmas knit as I'd put it in my special @kalokshekellen project bag but I couldn't even remember the yarn, never mind what I intended to knit with it. (I now know that it's @edencottageyarns Brimham High Twist in Festive Fun).

If ever there was an analogy for our present situation. So much has been put on hold. I started to list all the tings that we, and more particularly, my boys have missed out on. But I deleted them as it's unhelpful at this stage to dwell on it too much.

It just makes me sad.

Luckily there were considerable upsides to unearthing my forgotten stash - more needles than I ever remember for having - for a start.

And I also took the opportunity for an impromptu 'finish or frog it' session.

So it's not all doom and gloom. And now I get to decide to what to knit with this lovely yarn, as it's certainly not going to disappear back into my stash again.

Stash Exploration

I am a huge fan of the Shinybees podcast - a UK based knitting/comedy podcast run by Jo Milmine. She has just announced a great project for 2017 called Active Stash Exploration which fits in so neatly with what I want to achieve in my knitting this year that I was literally bouncing with excitement by the time I had finished listening.

There are no cold sheep or yarn diets required and no self sacrifice. Instead the project is all about making the most of your stash, celebrating it and allowing it to shine in all its glory.

Jo speaks really passionately about how our skeins tell a story. We all have special yarn in our stash, perhaps with memories of a great holiday (any holiday where you discover a great LYS is, lets face it, a great holiday), or a skein that was a gift from a dear friend.

Those skeins deserve to be used and to be seen and #activestashexploration is all about that.

Jo has set up a new Facebook group for the podcast where you can join in with all the chat, or you can participate via Instagram with the hashtage #activestashexploration.

It will be great fun to see how this develops and I'm certainly looking forward to seeing others start to celebrate their stashes as I delve into mine.