Hoarding

Various thoughts are coming together here to make me evaluate both my commitment to using up my stash and my incredible excitement (and sense of conquest) at purchasing a large quantity of discontinued yarn from Weaving Southwest.

Whenever I go searching through my closets and bins for yarn for projects, I'm thrilled with what I find in my stash. It's like going into a yarn store! The yarns I'm not searching for inspire so many creative ideas that I end up thoroughly distracted, sometimes aborting the idea that sent me searching in the first place. I have a treasure trove of beautiful materials, and I know I'm not the only one.

Many years ago I heard Daryl Lancaster give advice not to feel guilty when we impulsively buy a beautiful yarn, but to promise ourselves to 'design from our stash' in the future to ensure that those impulsive purchases get used. I've lived by this advice for decades. The down side of it is that is has allowed me add to my stash far faster than I can weave, knit, or spin. I'm not going to 'fess up to how many of spare bedrooms' closets are packed completely with my stash, not to mention the storage areas I've managed to squeeze into the basement. I've taken a sober inventory, and I realize I need to slow down. I thought a year of using the beautiful fibers and yarns I already own would be totally joyful anyway, not at all a burden.

In my current tapestry of Rob I am using only yarns that I can find in my stash or that my teacher Soyoo supplies. The combination of yarns I'm using on Rob's piece quite surprise me, as I would never have blended such hard yarns with such delicate ones in one weft bundle. I'm sure I'll pay the price for that when I release the tension on the loom, but I do want to begin to learn how to work with different qualities of yarn and be successful at it.

Meanwhile, during the past couple of weeks at Soyoo's studio, she has been talking about designing and building a new house on land she has in Korea. She is quite knowledgeable about Feng Shui, and she also knows a man who advises people on Feng Shui. It's his opinion that most Americans live way beyond their means, and he doesn't mean just monetarily. He believes we are a culture of people who hoard everything from paper towels to cars, to big houses filled with too much of everything. We become slaves to our hoarding and it drains our energy that should be used on better things. We have so much space which could be used so beautifully, and yet we fill it up with too many things like mega rolls of toilet paper, cans and bottles of soda and water, endless food... We buy so many supplies for the endeavors we love (in my case knitting, weaving, spinning) that a lot of creativity and joy gets killed under the weight of our possessions.

I know I'm pleasantly surprised that with Soyoo's help I can create the colors I need in the tapestry of Rob when I actually don't have the color. So why do I have to have every color? It's better anyway to create a color from a blend of others than to grab just the right color to start with, as we've all learned at some point in weaving.

I want to cut back on having things in order to have more freedom to express myself, instead of always trying to manage my stash, always looking for more storage, a better system to organize things. If I had less stuff I wouldn't be burdened with managing it.

Meanwhile, I really did need that yarn I bought yesterday! It's going to feel like Christmas morning when I open it, and there in lies my dilemma!