There are lots of ways for yarn to end up in your stash but most of us have a bit of yarn (sometimes a lot!) that has come our way because we didn’t know how to see an opportunity for yarn and still say “No, thank you.”
There Won’t Be Enough for Me…
Cinders operates from a feeling of yarn poverty. She is always twitchy about where the next yarn is going to come from and feels anxious that there won’t be enough. She paints a convincing picture of you sitting shivering by a miserable hearth with nothing to knit while all the cool knitters are at the big knitting retreat ball.
She squirrels away things like:
Other knitter’s left overs,
Unloved WIPs and UFOs (Works In Progress and Unfinished Objects)
Charity shop donations,
Unwanted stash,
Sale yarns and bargains.
She is the one waiting for those carrier bags of wool that you donated if you followed my earlier advice in the Ultimate Guide to Yarn Monsters (subscribe for the PDF)
Mostly she is addicted to free or bargain yarn. She finds it very hard to walk away from it, even when you try to tell her you have no idea what to do with it. She is the one who says “yes” to the offer of yarn from other people’s deceased relatives and random black bin liners of yarn at jumble sales.
Now I know Cinders very well indeed. She is an old ‘frenemy’ of mine and she still pops up given half a chance. She’s a tricky one.
The thing is she’s not a complete nuisance, occasionally she can even be helpful. Like recently when a friend was clearing out sock yarn Cinders immediately piped up that we could help with that. In that instance she was right. I have always got a pair of socks on the needles and I’m happily working my way through all that free yarn.
Occasionally those black bin liners are filled with gorgeous skeins of hand dyed yarn. She transforms into her ball gown then, looks amazingly smug and you just know that you are going to have even more trouble getting her to say “No” in future.
We are never going to completely eradicate her from our stashes and maybe we don’t want to, remember that sock yarn? The trick then is to get her onside and stop her being quite so random.
Three Tips to Get her Working for You
So here are some tips to keep her working for you rather than against.
When she sees yarn in a charity shop only allow her to have it IF it is something you would actually buy. (We are not walking away from assorted balls of pure Shetland but we can only have them if they are in colours I would use!)
If someone is destashing agree to look through it not just take the lot unseen. This will allow you to pick out what you will actually use and avoid the stuff you’d never touch.(How else do you think I ended up with pink eyelash yarn? 👀)
Have a wish list of yarns and a limited budget with which she can look for bargains. This will keep her very much onside and she might just surprise you with what she finds.