Tag Archives: hoarders

I have not measured out my life with coffee spoons: I used yarn

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This past weekend I was at my parents’ house helping them divest of clutter. This is a difficult task because my dad is a hoarder. Literally, I was putting things into a wastebasket and he picked it up behind me and pulled them out.

I think he saved a magazine subscription offer. And face, because that way he’s in charge of what gets thrown away. It’s fine. It works.

Running errands Saturday afternoon, I ducked into a thrift store for a few minutes of therapy. Just as a woman who worked there wheeled one of those big metal racks past me. Two shelves were stacked with high end yarn.

Right time, right place, but this is where the story gets interesting. Everyone who knows me knows I have actually crocheted through weddings and Christmas services. (It’s a long story for another time. I will crochet on a train, plane, and any automobile I’m not driving. OK, once I might have… never mind. We don’t need to talk about that. The officer did not give me a ticket, he was so impressed.)

Anyway, the yarn was pima cotton, which is a special strong kind of stuff used to make lightweight summer gorgeous things. And some mercized cotton and some standard collections of acrylic, but lots of the same dye lot.

Finding multiple skeins in the same color, or organics brand new, is known in yarn thrifting circles as “a big score.”

Thing was, I don’t do that much cotton crochet, and I didn’t want to make high end summer lacy swimsuit covers. In neon jewel tones. I am enjoying making the crazy hats and a bunch of keychains right now (see previous blogs) to use up some supplies.

Use up is the operative word. I have an entire room in my house stuffed with yarn. (Our house has what’s jokingly called a secret room off the side of the staircase. It’s just a tiny bedroom created out of unused eaves space, and it’s got a fun triangular door. A friend dubbed it “Yarnia.”

I left the yarn there. Yarnia is so full of yarn that, if I crocheted 360 out of the 365 days of every year for the next twenty, I might, just might, get through all the yarn. (And that ratio of crochet days is entirely possible, so long as Netflix keeps that high quality content coming at a reasonable streaming price. But there’s always podcasts if not.)

When the Bible says teach us to number our days, I am not sure they meant with yards of yarn accomplishment, but honestly, there comes a time when a girl has to say, I have enough. At least, when it comes to yarn. Those words will not be uttered about wine, chocolate, or cats, let me reassure you.

I didn’t need the yarn. No, I didn’t WANT the yarn, which would challenge me to make something wonderful and give it away as a gift someday to the bewildered child of a friend who would look at the crocheted lacy lime green negligee and say, “Well, this is a weird wedding gift but thanks.”

No one else would have had one like it, kid, but all the same, be thankful. You’ll get potholders from the cheap yarn I bought on sale five or six years ago, because I still haven’t worked my way through the box. And, despite what Netflix movies may try to tell you about sex keeping the flame alive, trust me; the potholders will do more for your marriage.

Adding Two Rooms to our Home

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Jack and I have a big back yard. We wound up fencing it into two halves because, chickens. The other day, I referred to “the outside room” and Jack didn’t ask what I meant, just said “inner room or outer room?”

Twenty-five years of marriage counts for something in the mind reading department, but we also came to this conclusion out of common sense. The backyard added two rooms to our home. The inner room is for gracious entertaining, has most of my light garden (solar stuff that’s so pretty at night) and the flowers. The outer room keeps the chickens, the main gardens, the fruit bushes and the nut trees. (Black walnuts are why we have two gardens; some plants is juglone safe, some ain’t. Juglone is the stuff black walnuts put out while their roots are down there in the wood wide web talking to each other. Never mind cats; it’s black walnuts as seek world dominance, y’all.)

Neither of us were ever big gardeners. We grew heirloom tomatoes because I love to try blue and purple and green and yellow things that “should be” red. We grew potatoes because Jack is Scottish, and if you’re a gardener in Scotland, you are talking root vegetables. Gardening in that country takes place August 10-15.

Jack and I have always enjoyed turning something into nothing–which is an upscale way of saying “how cheaply can we do this?” We put down leftover fertilizer bags to kill weeds, dug up rocks to weight and drain tomato buckets, and otherwise tried to keep from growing veggies that cost $2.25 each once you tallied all that went into producing them. It’s been fun, not least because it looks so silly. Old chicken wire stuck to poles from a tent we no longer have, bound by an ancient blue polyester dress, make our gate. Someone gave us a wine-making tank and we took a piece of guttering that fell down and made a rain spout to fill it for watering. (Hauling 12 buckets a day will get you in shape fast, kids.)

And we drilled holes in the bottoms of about ninety-eleven-hundred plastic buckets leftover from kitty litter, which annoyed Jack no end. He didn’t mind drilling the holes to give the tomatoes we planted proper drainage. He just didn’t like validating my recurring theme that someday all those buckets we kept piling in the basement (some of which we MOVED with from our former bookstore home) would “come in handy someday.” When it turned out I was right, Jack knew there would be no stopping my future hoarding tendencies on household detritus.

He’s kinda right. We have milk jugs piled up so we can make self-watering drip containers, and an old gate salvaged from friends who said “you want this?” It’s leaning against one of the infamous walnut trees, waiting for its day. Gardeners may kinda by nature (no pun intended) be hoarders. Dunno; this is only our second year having fun with the inner and outer outside rooms of our home. Keep you posted. Meamwhile, we keep the inner room clean for visitors and stash all the stuff in the outer room, guarded by the chickens.