A Rash of Stash

Lots of talk about stashes lately. Lots of talk. Folks de-stashing, cataloguing stash, knitting from stash, justifying stash, measuring stash, reading stash....

I like reading stash, because it is one of those fluid concepts that have always appealed to my liberally art-ed brain. It's the classic essay question that consists of one sentence describing the topic, followed by one word: discuss. Just dive in, bang around for awhile, and out comes genius. Or, what you hope is genius anyway. You could write a poem if you felt like it, and it might work. Not on the bar exam, but pretty much everywhere else.

But the other boats, I missed. I wasn't even on the pier. In fact, I was probably sitting at the cafe next to the pier having a glass of wine after a successful yarn shopping excursion. Except for a de-stash to charity around Thanksgiving, and a stash re-org after the New Year, I haven't seriously addressed the stash question in my home apart from, apparently, adding to it.

Here's the thing. On an individual level, I get it. Knitter has too much yarn and commits to knitting a bunch of it before buying anything new, or Knitter has yarn she knows she will never knit, and finds a recipient for same. I find it curious, however, that so many people are seized by the same impulse at the same time. De-stashing is all the rage. De-stashing is the new knitting, or new yoga or new... something?

Ordinarily, I'd start ruminating about why this is the case. What is it about all of these Knitters that draws them to De-stashtown, while I am heading the opposite way, to Los Altos, home to two great yarn shops? Why was everyone knitting Clapotis, and my impulse to do so began and ended at printing out the pattern? It's really beautiful, and in a yummy yarn, and I love pretty much anything that could reasonably be called a shawl; yet I was so off the Clapotis bandwagon, that I didn't know it was pronounced Clap-oh-tee. How did you all know that? Here I was, six years of French classes under my belt, calling it Cla-paw-tiss.

The answer doesn't truly lie with all the de-stashing, Clapotis-knitting Knitters out there. They are all doing it for various worthy and perfectly unassailable reasons. I am not doing it for the same reason I have not done many, many other things:

I am not a joiner. You could have tattooed it on my forehead in Kindergarten (someone threatened this to my parents, I am sure), and it would still be relevant today. I am considering putting it on my tombstone.

One of these days, though, I might get around to somehow cataloguing or quantifying my stash in some way. Of course, I'd do it and never keep it up to date, but that's another story.