A walk down memory yarn

Knitting is such a huge part of who I am these days that it’s funny to remember that I’ve only been at it for just shy of 3 years now.  These days, my family wears things I’ve knit, my friends are knitters, I’m constantly knitting something or planning to knit the next thing.  My husband knew me pre-knitting, but I bet he’d say it’s hard to picture me now without my “baggage.”

Today, I tackled the long-avoided task of organizing my knitting “corner.”  It was necessary, because my whole set-up is just wrong.  I’ve been avoiding the reality that I need somewhere to keep my stash other than tucked in the corner of our living room.  And not just my stash – bins of yarn are interesting to a toddler, but not easily infiltrated, and hence not dangerous.  My needles and “notions” are a different story, though.  I DO have them organized – in a nice Sterilite drawer thingie.  But lately Lila is fond of opening those drawers, pulling out fistfuls of DPNs, popping stitch markers into her mouth, and incorporating this into her favorite “You can’t get me!”, “Oh, I am going to get you!” chasing game.  Adorable, yes.  But possibly also life-threatening.  It was time to rethink, reorganize, and move some shit around.

And so I spent most of the morning knees-deep in yarn.  I opened every bin of yarn and started in.  It was nice to get everything organized, but it was more than nice to find some memories in those bins.  I found leftover yarn from every one of my projects, ever.  Most signifigantly, I found leftovers from projects for my daughter.  This afternoon, I found myself saving all these scraps and unfinished skeins in a special bin:  the Lila bin.  I’m not sure what I’ll do with all that yarn. 

One idea is that I will knit her a patchwork ’something’.  The better idea is that I am saving this bin for her, for when she wants to learn how to knit.  I could tell her, “I saved all this yarn, to get you started.  It’s yarn from things I made for you.”  If she’s anything like the teenager I was, she’ll hate that, of course.

But if she’s anything like the grown-up I turned out to be, she will get it.  Eventually.