color

(I had plans to post this earlier this week, but I've been sucked in by more wallpaper take down and hung over by late night Olympic watching. Since I started it up again, the wallpaper take down has become a bit of an addiction, and there is always more...)

Little did I know, but, I have a small fortune of yarn. Slowly gathered over the past 5 years of my knitting life. Shades of wool, cotton, silk, and linen. It was all stashed away, some of it tangled in a horrible nest, in a large plastic storage bin. Every time I opened the bin in search of the right yarn it was like I was feeding the yarn-ness-monster. It was neither accessible nor pretty and I had no firm idea of what or how much was in my possession. As I was working through The Tangle (I'll spare you the picture of that, let's keep things pretty here), the revelation was "How can you possibly make anything if you don't know what you already have?" Ah, yes, true, true.

Can I tell you how FUN it was to fill this wall of 30 boxes? It wasn't just fun, it was thrilling. I worked on it in little blocks of time throughout the day. In the morning I began with the yarn and as I picked up the soft red flaxen wool, remnant of my first (hmm, I guess only) knitted sweater for myself, it just seemed right that it should belong top left. The rainbow of yarn and odds and ends naturally followed. Color coding the rows allowed for a certain dynamic of organized randomness, giving homes to things that would otherwise be floating around the house or else in a stash. I'm coming to dislike that word "stash".
{*Stash: a collection of materials: yarn, fabric, etc., piled in big plastic storage bins, sometimes mistaken as trash.
*Not a stash (there has got to be a word for this, help me out): a collection of materials: yarn, fabric, etc.; wound, folded, stacked, and placed on shelves where you know what you have, pieces can easily be retrieved and put away = accessible, and is pleasing and inspiring to look at.}
Stashes for me always turn into horrible messes, blocked energy, blocked possibility. So yes, the dissolving of my stashes and filling these cubbies was my idea of fun. The kind of fun had by a young child setting up a doll house. "Let's see, this bit of ribbon, it is blue, I shall place it on this bit of blue fabric. And these orange paint chips? (I'm kind of a klepto when it comes to paint chips, it's a good thing they're free.) They now belong in this orange cubby with this orange brick." Very satisfying.

My newly filled shelf reminds me of my love affair with color. I think that's why I took up knitting. That's why I filled my teenage years with FIMO clay. I want to hold, I want to touch, I want to shape color.