A Trove of Treasures

 It's amazing the stuff you can find when you're sorting through a life's worth of stuff.

8 more boxes of books, fabric, patterns and such out the door, along with a dining table that I used to use for my crafting but no longer have room for.

It's hard having to part with things but, at the same time, every box out the door is a weight off of me.

The fun part of going through all these boxes that have been packed up for years is the random stuff I either forgot I had, or have been looking for for ages.

For example:

A black cape made for a friend that got lost in the shuffle. Said friend has allowed me to keep it as she doesn't need two. This is specifically a cape based on the hooded figures found in the dog park from Welcome to Nightvale. I may have my Halloween costume for next year.

A slipper pattern that my mother has been looking for. My Grandmother had scores of these slippers, specifically the bottom right, in her house. In an effort to continue having the slipper tradition, my mother was trying to reverse engineer from a pair she still has. 

Most interesting is 4 skeins of Sami Amano. I am not a knitter who enjoys knitting with cotton. I usually do anything I can to avoid working with it. So I'm trying to scratch my brain to figure out why I have 4 skeins of Peruvian cotton stashed away in a box. I can only guess that I either had a pattern planned or I won the yarn from my local guild. I'm thinking that I have a cotton tank top in my future.

While I've gotten through most of my stash now, I'm intrigued to see what else we'll dig up as we go through the rest of the boxes.

In other news, the absolute frigid weather broke to allow the snow to melt just enough to make an itty bitty snow man with my daughter.

Progress Achieved

 

Step one to getting the craft room set up is figuring out what I have. To do that I need to dig out the dining room which has been our holding area for far too long.

Exhibit A is probably 90% of my fibre stash, the coke can is for scale. The bottom bucket is full of 2 full alpaca fleeces, and a bag of miscellaneos camelids from a conference workshop I did. The top bucket is the wool/silk/mixed fibres that I will hopefully soon get to play with. I still want to catelogue what I have so I can keep track of what I do with the various spins and what I learn.

Exhibit B is 4 of 8 boxes of fabric, patterns, and various odds and sods that I decided were not things I would use and could go find other homes.

I'm being very tough with myself this time, making sure that anything I keep has projects earmarked for it. Not that these are set in stone, but by knowing at least what garment I will make with something and that it's something I will actually wear, then I don't end up with pretty stash that has no purpose.

When I was disposing of my moth ridden stash last year, I came to terms with the fact that, while I had a lot of pretty yarn, I didn't have enough of one type of yarn to make anything with. Lots of single balls, or scraps leftover that ultimately were useless. 

Whatever stash I keep, needs to be useful.

New Spaces

New blog, new year, new craft room!

Welcome to the new spaces of 2023. I ended off 2022 with the growth of our family from 3 to 4 people (plus 2 cats) and all the adjustments that come with that. As we were coming closer to the delivery of our Little Man, we went full renovation in our basement as what was my office and the guest room needed to become a toddler room.

After 6 months of continuous work, we are finally at a point where we can get our house back!! 

The office area, which about an 8'x10' space plus a decent sized closet, is also my craft space and I'm just starting to go through all the stuff that got shoved into my dining room to wait for it's forever home. With this, I have had to make some very difficult decisions about what I'm keeping and what I'm not. Difficult because a lot of my craft stuff has more emotional value than actual craft value.

For example: I got rid of 6 tomato boxes worth of sewing patterns that were inherited from various family members that were neither my size nor my style. These were sewing patterns I was never going to make but had difficulty getting rid of due to the connection to the past. 

How I got started pulling this bandaid off was not really my planning but the universe 'assisting' me. Back in 2020, when we were first looking at slowly fixing up the basement, I went into my craft room to see a number of little bugs flutter away. Sadly, I had brought 4 oz of black wool fibre that apparently was infested with moth eggs. In the process of starting to clean that up, we discovered that we had a crack in the basement that flooded the corner and destroyed a number of boxes that were stacked on the floor filled with miscellaneous items, fabric, and yarn. I ended up tossing about 14 industrial sized garbage bags worth of craft supplies into a dumpster box that a neighbour had rented.

The only part of my stash untouched was my spinning fibre as it was packed in sealed bags.

After that loss (and a fair amount of tears) I'm going through what I have left and being very strict with myself on what I'm keeping and what's leaving. I don't have a lot of space, and honestly, looking back through the years if I was looking to start a new project I almost never went to my stash for it. At least with knitting. That makes it a hoard and not a stash. So, it's time to make the room, the stash, and all the accessories work for me from here on out. I have a feeling that once I have my space set up I'll be a lot more productive.

At least once the baby starts sleeping more than 2-3 hours at a time.