Yarn hoarder

I’ll admit it. I’m a yarn hoarder. I see pretty yarn, make a plan (sometimes) for its use, get it home, then stash it away. Once in a while, it will be used for the project I had in my head, but often it doesn’t. And since I’m also a reader and book hoarder (so easy now with Kindle), time is at a premium. Do I read? Do I knit? Do I weave?

For some time, reading has won over both knitting and weaving, with weaving coming in a distant third. I haven’t touched either loom since I moved into this condo 12 years ago. (It’s been 13 since Dan died, but who’s counting?)

I used to knit at all the ball games. Alas, COVID-19. My friend A’ndrea is a knitter, too, and we like sitting on the third base side, right above the opposing dugout. Last year, the coach of an opposing team turned around and saw us. He yelled “There’s no knitting in baseball! Watch the game!” We laughed and told him we were. Every time he turned around after that, he saw us knitting — and our eyes were on the play of the moment. He shook his head in disbelief and asked how we did that. We told him “practice!”

Back to the stash and hoarding. I very rarely throw out any yarn scrap. I have 32 16-qt. bins of yarn, and that’s not the whole of it. I have three spare bins, too. The rest of the stash is in a place I can’t get to easily right now, but that bit is actually minimal and will probably fit in the spare bins.

The reason I rarely throw out bits is because of winding out a warp. Those bits can be used as ties for the warping frame. This is why I was surprised I didn’t keep the last smidgen from a skein I used to make a pair of socks for A’ndrea and another pair for my mom, which she never wore in the two years she had them. But I digress … again.

I knit these socks for mom when she was in respite care several years ago. Last year I took them to the nursing home for mom when she was moved there for the three weeks after her last hospital stay. It was December and she was always cold. There’s nothing like a pair of cozy, hand-knit socks to keep your feet warm.

The home put name tags in every item of clothing so nothing would get misplaced in the wash cycle. After mom came home in hospice, I clipped the tags out,

and yes, (dramatic music)

I snipped a stitch.

Ok. No biggie. I could repair that if I still had the remnant of yarn.

The socks have been sitting there for over a year because I can’t decide what to do since I don’t have the remnant. I could do it with thread, but thread could cut through the yarn and ultimately make the problem worse. I could look through the stash to see if there was anything close to that. Since I know my stash, I knew that was a lost cause.

So the socks just sat there in the drawer until I could make a decision.

As I was consolidating my stash into the 32 16-qt. bins, Look What I Found!

Ta da! I can now repair the damage I did. Could I have fixed the socks with different yarn entirely? Of course. Would anyone know the difference? Not unless they got super close; in which case, I could kick them. But I would know and that would bug me so much I’d never be able to wear the socks. Yes, I might be a tad — a skootch if you will — OCD.