I can’t use the word ‘stashbusting’ without having the Kate Bush song ‘Cloudbusting’ playing in my head. This adds an air of upbeat determination, so I recommend listening to it while you’re reading this.
See?
So, at the moment I am trying to decrease my stash by stashbusting – making things in order to use up my stash of yarn, rather than making new projects with new yarn. I’m not doing very well so far, but I haven’t bought any yarn for myself for over four months now, which is a bit of a record for me.
I’m trying to save money and empty the many boxes of yarn I realised I had when we moved house recently. I had managed to hide yarn all over our flat – at the bottom of cupboards, drawers, in bags, in the space between the legs of the coffee table… When I packed it all up I realised I had six boxes of yarn and found things I didn’t even know I owned.
It’s forcing me to look at the fibre more closely and think about what could be done with it, rather than picking the final object and buying what the pattern suggests. I am more creative with what I knit and I try new things because the pain of the expense of yarn purchasing is that little bit further behind me. There’s also the joy of the ‘Eureka!’ moment when the idea of what the yarn could be clicks into place.
My favourite stashbusted knit so far are some knitted slipper boot things that I made with some impulse buy yarn I bought in Jersey. They look more like knitted wellies than slippers, but they keep my feet toasty warm.
My oh so fetching knitted wellies.
It means I don’t know what my next project will be, I’ll just have a rumage through my boxes and see what I can find. But as Kate says, ‘I just know that something good is going to happen’.
