How much is enough? And what do with it all?
Last Sunday's gospel reading was a parable about talents (Matthew 25:14-30). Given five or two or one talent, should a servant invest to make more or bury the talent and keep it safe? (A talent was a large unit of money in the New Testament.) Make more, says Jesus. "For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away (v.29)."
When this lesson from Lectionary Cycle A came up in 2020 I wrote a blog post titled "Knit from Stash," which is where my mind went again this year. My yarn stash has grown since then, with beautiful, special skeins I've purchased and haven't knit yet, and more substantially, with five bins of yarn left over after a yard sale by the family of someone who had died. It's good yarn — wool, not synthetic, in many beautiful colors, some of it handspun.
There was a lot of Koigu, a springy, fingering weight commercial wool in multicolors of pink, gold, coral and brown. I love to knit with this stuff. It has energy, it's interesting — and it's not cheap. There was a lot of it, some wound into balls, some in a half-knit blanket, a type of modular knitting that I had no interest in finishing.
All of it smelled of mothballs, and not just faintly — more like instant toxic headache. This was a sign of someone taking care to preserve it, but also a big problem for me. After several internet searches and a Facebook post seeking tips on getting rid of the smell, I ripped out the blanket, unwound the balls, rewound them into skeins, and soaked it all in a vinegar solution and then in laundry detergent. I rinsed the skeins and then hung them to dry in the summer sunshine, strung on a yardstick balanced on the backs of the patio chairs. Back in my dining room, I wound the skeins again into balls, after spending hours working on the tangles created in the soaking and washing.
I was newly retired and had all the time in the world. Over the next several weeks I knit the yarn into a shawl for a dear, faraway friend who was going through breast cancer treatment.
I wish I could ask the original owner of this yarn about her stash, why she bought the skeins of Mountain Colors, who was the intended recipient of that Koigu blanket. Did she spin those skeins of red and pink herself, or did she purchase them? They're irregular — thin in places, lumpy in others, destined for my loom, perhaps, and not my knitting needles.
Some day after I'm gone someone will have to reckon with my stash of yarn (and also of quilting fabric). Will they wonder about the random skeins of bright sock yarn or the thousand-yard ball of fuzzy Icelandic laceweight that I've had for fifteen years already? Will someone appreciate all the balls of Shetland wool in twenty or thirty heathered shades of the rainbow from Jamiesons and Jamieson and Smith? (Do click on the links if your eyes are craving color on this gray day in late November.) Should my designate a special executor for my stash?
For me, there's a danger point in every project, when it's almost finished and I begin to look ahead to what I will make next. With the feeling of accomplishment come wild ambitions -- many more ideas than I can realistically make happen. These weeks before Christmas are another such time. I want to knit socks, mittens, hats for everyone! I dig through a big basket of random yarn, skeins left over from other projects, skeins bought earlier this year that hold plans yet to be executed. The gift-knitting often continues well into January.
Three nights ago I took a little detour from Christmas knitting to cast on for a baby sweater, a tiny, hopeful garment for a much-anticipated, much worried-over little one. It's made from yarn in my stash, yarn given to me by someone sorting through her deceased mother's belongings. The baby arrived early this morning, a couple weeks ahead of time. I'll finish the sweater by the end of the week, though it will not fit this child until early spring, after a winter of feeding and growing, held in her parents' loving arms.
Investments mature under our fingers. Stash reaches into the future. Hope abounds.
