Project Destashification

Being an academic means that I am forever on a student's timetable. This has pluses and minuses. A minus: the average age of the person that I see most often is about 20, yet I keep getting older, meaning that I remain a permanent adolescent as I enter middle age. A plus: Winter Break. I have been using this time in my customary way--knitting, traveling, reading back issues of the New Yorker, the Nation and Allure, staying up late and drinking, knitting, and thinking about knitting. All of this free time has permitted me to confront the grim realities of my stash. In two words: it's hideous. It has grown to gargantuan proportions and is making me feel mentally ill. If anyone had this much, say, vodka in their house, they'd be the object of an AA intervention right quick. Most people in my life don't know about the stash. To my kids it's just my yarn, and they think nothing of it. The Darling Resident Marxist Curmudgeon has commented on it, although not as much as I would have expected given that it embodies so many things that he despises (gluttony, greed, excess, expenditure of ca$h money). But because it's up on the third floor of our house, no one ever really sees it, so I can go on pretending that I'm actually a normal person. I can hold my head up high during the day...yet like Arthur Dimsdale in the Scarlet Letter, at night I lock myself in a closet and whip myself (ok, not really, but you get the whole self-flagellation image) for being such an evil, evil knitter. It's so much yarn, and it feels so wrong!
So I have decided to join the ranks of the Lone Knitter ( and her chastening yarn diet), Très Chic Véronique, and Wendy and knit only from my stash in 2007. Believe me, this will not be even slightly difficult! If you click here you can read about the project. I am making several modifications, however. Wendy and co. are allowing themselves to buy sock yarn. I def. will not be doing this, as sock yarn is one of my biggest problems. Buying sock yarn for me is like eating one of those fun size Snickers bars. It's so small you tell yourself that it doesn't really count, and then you wind up eating about 8 more. (Did I mention that I'm also doing Weight Watchers right now?) To illustrate how much a little can add up to a lot, I have included pictures or only my sock yarn stash. Believe me, I'm not proud of this (see below).




So, you won't catch me buying any yarn in 2007...although technically I already broke this as several days ago I ordered a gigantic project from Knitpicks that should keep me occupied for months--knowing that I now love fair isle knitting, can you guess which one it is? I'll post more info when the dust settles...