The First Step

is admitting you have a problem. I ...may have a small problem.

My name is Persian Pen Name, and I buy yarn.

This realization started yesterday, when I picked up an awesome glass-fronted cabinet off of Freecycle (which if you haven't checked out yet, you should, because it's awesome), and my first thought was yarn cabinet! So I took it home, cleaned it out, and set out to Organize The Stash.

Step 1: Centralize. All yarn that is not currently in the first yarn cabinet (now Cabinet Prime) is gathered in the dining room.

Step 2: Separate. It's yarn. It tangles. It happens.

Step 3: Wind. I hooked up the swift and ball winder to the cabinet (and how cool is it that I can hook up my swift and winder to my cabinet?) and wound like a woman gone mad.

Step 4: Stack. I've heard it said that winding your yarn into cakes before putting it into storage is a bad idea - that it stretches out the fibers, and you end up with a less fluffy yarn. I don't know if this is true (though it sounds convincing), but I will say this about cakes: they sure as hell stack better than hanks. I have made of my cabinet a veritable brick wall of yarn, completely unsorted by fiber, weight, or color. I am running out of cabinet, and still have plenty of yarn to stack. Do you know what this means?

I have two cabinets full of yarn. Two cabinets. Full. Of yarn. Just yarn. Not yarn-and-fiber, not yarn-and-whatever-else-you-put0in-a-cabinet-that-isn't-yarn. Plus, my approximately 10 lb fiber stash (admittedly, 5 lbs is still that one fleece I need to scour and send to Becky). Yarn Harlot talks of "wool blindness" affecting family members of knitters - being surrounded by so much yarn, they become so used to it, it's practically invisible. I think that knitters are maybe not immune to this themselves.

So I think I'm going to cut down on the yarn buying for a little while. I'm not going to say no yarn, because then I always end up impuse buying a few thousand yards of ColourMart Silk in a moment of weakness. And I'm not going to get back on Hastur's Challenge, because hey, I do need patterns to use up all this yarn! And of course, I'm nowhere near SABLE (I plan to live for a very LONG time, after all). But definitely I'll try and show a little more restraint.

I don't think it helps that I'm expecting both more yarn and more fiber in the mail soon.