Smart, Yet Not Intelligent

While cleaning up the garage today, I made a drastic mistake - the memory of which will forever live in my brain. Now that I replay the outtakes in my head, I realize there may have been more than one mistake. The final count is hazy; I think I blacked out. One moment, I was cheerfully moving things from the Wrong Place (where they were dropped in a scurry of simply getting them out of the house) to the Right Place (where they actually lived on a semi-permanent basis).

Then there was a time warp of some sort because the very next moment, I remember coming to with a large crochet hook and the beginnings of a fleece rug (well, the first foot diameter) in my hands. I had to pause to attempt to recall what led me to this moment and only had a vague memory of thinking that if I could just empty some of the stash yarn cubbyholes along the wall, my stash wouldn't seem such a daunting obstacle. I did notice that one cubbyhole only had four balls of yarn in it which made it the top contender for elimination. These balls of yarn were fortunately very bulky fleece fringe (bought for pennies) I had previously tied into a continuous strand; unfortunately, they were also the size of basketballs.

Here's where I simultaneously learned two things: 1) it would not be reasonably feasible for me to clean the garage by actually working up my entire stash, and 2) I had just created another Current Project which was exactly opposite from my goal of finishing the projects I have started BEFORE beginning any new projects!

Stupid, right? Wait. There's more.

After I had sufficiently kicked myself for the fleece incident, I returned to the garage to continue the stash clean up which mostly consisted of cramming the bags of yarn into the cubbyholes in such a way that they did not fall out. Again, there was a fuzzy moment when a large number of bags fell out and my mind immediately started counting them as they landed. Let's skip the grusome details and focus on the final outcome.

I counted my stash. Each and every bag of yarn. I knew I couldn't count the actual skeins (what to do with partial skeins or oversized balls of yarn recycled from sweaters?) and only counting the bags would, I thought, give me a baseline to rate my progress. This would give me the total number of unique yarns I have in my stash. This must, I thought, be a workable number. After all, our house, and therefore our garage, is pretty small. It just can't hold that much stuff!

Well, including the 11 sweaters bought to be frogged in order to recycle the yarn and the 15 jersey knit tshirts and dresses bought to be spiral cut to make a crocheted rag rug, the final count was 240. It took me a while to fully process that number. At times throughout the day, it has seemed perfectly within the range of Normal. Other times, it seems to prove my insanity. At others, I think I must be woefully lacking in the stash department and will be judged accordingly. Maybe my mother and I were a bit hasty in our mutual pledge to forego any new stash purchases until our current stash was depleted.

When I actually did the math, however, it finally sunk in. At the rate of 10 yarns/projects a month (highly unlikely), it would take me two years to work through my stash. Two years - 730 days - 17,520 hours - with No. New. Yarn.

My first reaction was to cast on some new projects - fast, easy scarves or tiny bookmarks or something - to get a jump on the holiday season. Then I had my best thought all afternoon - something even faster and easier. This season, I could just give the gift of yarn!

So . . . how does your stash rate?