Editor: Shawna Mullen
Production Manager: Kathleen Gaffney
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930251
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2704-7
eISBN: 978-1-68335-162-7
Copyright © 2017 Clara Parkes
Cover illustration by Chris Silas Neal
Published in 2017 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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Foreword
Inheriting from Elizabeth Zimmermann, Meg Swansen
Stashers: Who the Heck Are We? A Peek at the Numbers, Looking for Answers, Lela Nargi
Triptych, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Without a Stash, Amy Herzog
The Life-Changing Magic of Keeping It All, Ann Shayne
Full Circle with the Traveling Stash, Gudrun Johnston
The Minimalist Speaks, Kay Gardiner
Library of Wool, Rachel Atkinson
Her Pretty String, Franklin Habit
Moving Yarn/Portable Stories, Anna Maltz
Fear Not, Sue Shankle
Yarn: A Love Story, Amy Christoffers
When It’s Gone, It’s Gone, Clara Parkes
Spinning Stash, Jillian Moreno
Stash-Changing Moments, Susan B. Anderson
Work in Progress, Lilith Green
Comfort Yarn, Rachael Herron
A Proper Stash, Kristine Vejar
On Giving, Eugene Wyatt
Knitting My Mother’s Stash, Aimée Osbourn-Gille
Mark of the Hand, Mark on the Heart, Kim McBrien Evans
Stash Bypass, Adrienne Martini
A Stash of One’s Own: Yarn as a Feminist Issue, Debbie Stoller
About the Contributors
“Perhaps there is no beginning and end to yarn, just a constant heartbeat of energy, a long chain of shifting shapes, from lamb to landfill, that started with the Big Bang and won’t end until the next Big Bang. All we have . . . is the here and now. The yarn in our hands and on our needles at this very moment: That’s our stash.”
—CLARA PARKES, “WHEN IT’S GONE, IT’S GONE”
My father was a professional musician for his entire adult career. He played oboe and English horn in an orchestra, and that meant he was always making reeds. For this, he had a room filled with tools with names like mandrels and ballots and plaques and staples, along with a well-worn cutting block, spools of thread in rich, shiny colors, and a little blob of beeswax. It was like Santa’s workshop, if Santa were a woodwind player.
I grew up understanding the importance of tools and supplies to a creative person.
Yarn is the reed with which we knitters make music. We, too, have our rooms filled with tools that help us carry on our craft—things with names like swifts and ball-winders and DPNs and circular needles and yarn bowls. Collectively, they make up what we call our stash.
The specific tools may vary, but the room will always have yarn. Yarn is as essential to us as paint is to the artist, flour to the baker, soil to the gardener. We can improvise on most of the tools, tying string into a stitch marker, sanding down a bamboo chopstick in a pinch. But without yarn, our hands are idle.
As many kinds of yarn exist as there are people on earth. Each has a distinct structure and texture and behavior and ideal use. With so many options, and so many directions dictated by each choice, we require a healthy supply of materials in order to do our work.
A formal definition of healthy I cannot provide. It differs for each person. Most knitters dwell somewhere between “Gosh, I love my yarn” and “Am I a hoarder?”
We stash so that we can start a project at 2:00 AM if so inclined, but the relationship between stitcher and yarn goes far beyond simply being prepared. A yarn stash is a declaration of self-esteem. It is Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” a significant financial stake in the ground that says, “My passion is worthwhile.”
Asking a knitter what he or she plans on doing with the yarn he or she just bought is like asking a squirrel what it plans on doing with that nut it just buried under a pile of leaves. Obviously we plan on using it. Now? Later? For what? How can we know? Our main priority is simply to get that yarn safely back home and stored away in our stash. We’ll know when we need it.
I once asked readers in a poll, “Without moving from where you are, can you see any yarn?” While 50 percent of the respondents said no, it’s worth noting that 50 percent said yes. Which means that half of the world’s knitters could, at any moment, toss you a skein of yarn without putting on their shoes.
Could you say the same thing about golfers or woodworkers or people who go spelunking on weekends? Without moving from where they are seated, how many of them could see golf clubs, or lathes, or whatever it is spelunkers use?
But yarn is far more than the sum of its parts, more than just a means to an end. Yarn holds hope and energy and history; it is a declaration, a question, an obsession, and a love story.
This book is a carefully selected collection of stories, statistics, tips, and manifestos on the subject of stash—specifically (but not always), the knitter’s reputation for acquiring large quantities of yarn and storing them away for future use. The writers celebrate the meaning we attribute to yarn, the stories we let it keep, and the place it holds in our homes and in our lives.
The pieces in this collection cover the comical to the earnest, the lighthearted to the deeply philosophical, in a celebration of the how, why, when, and what we’ve accumulated (and let go of) over the years. They open our eyes to what stash means to each of us, both individually and collectively.
You’ll find a full spectrum of voices, including knitwear designers and publishers, dyers and yarn store owners, along with a sheep farmer, an illustrator, a romance novelist, a handspinner, a Fulbright scholar, and a licensed clinical social worker to help us answer that common nagging fear: Do I have a problem? We hear from a knitting humorist, a PhD-wielding feminist publisher, the daughter of a shepherd, a globetrotting textile artist based in London, and a globetrotting designer currently based in western Massachusetts who may very well have moved again by the time you read this.
As varied as the voices in this collection are, they all have one fundamental thing in common: With the exception of our sheep farmer, Eugene, who gets a pass because he grows the fibers that make our world go ’round, every person in here knits. A lot. Which means that they coexist with a strong and distinct notion of stash every single day.
If you are a knitter who struggles to explain to others why your yarn stash means what it does to you, why it deserves so much more than a dismissive eyeroll, this book can be a start.
If you struggle not, if you love your stash and tend to it daily, let this book be your celebration.
And if you are a stash-aware nonknitter who wants to understand why your beloved relates to yarn the way he or she does, why that guest room simply must be turned into the stash room, read on.
All stitchers, you don’t need me to tell you what our stashes mean. You live it. I’m preaching to the choir. In fact, this book is the choir, each voice singing loud and proud.
—Clara Parkes
I am the youngest of Arnold and Elizabeth Zimmermann’s three children. One evening when I was about seven, my mother divided a large sheet of paper into three vertical columns; she wrote one of our names at the top of each column. The paper was then passed around to each of us in turn, and we were to write down—one item at a time—whatever family artifacts we wished to inherit. Being so young, it didn’t occur to me to put down the Things of Great Value that belonged to my family (as my brother and sister were doing). My very first choice was the dictionary. It was a grand dictionary—too large for me to lift—and it lived on its own lectern in the living room. The words look it up were frequently spoken at our house.
My choice was not based on a forward flash of intuition that my future as a teacher, writer, and publisher would be so entwined with words. Rather, with both my parents being multilingual, words were important, and the dictionary was revered. Like most families, we had our own invented words, and even an entire “cat language” we spoke to our cats (this having been acquired by my mother from her father).
Besides the dictionary, I inherited a tome of knowledge directly from my mother. We wrote each other silly letters in our made-up language and characters. Through her, I have memorized countless poems (both proper and inane). We also shared a passion for knitting, which gradually evolved from Elizabeth Zimmermann, Ltd., into Schoolhouse Press, a business that the two of us operated together with my husband, Chris—and which today is run by our son, Cully, and his wife, Michelle.
My mother taught me how to knit when I was about four. We lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania. My memory of it is quite vivid: We were on the back porch overlooking the Delaware River, and I sat on her lap. She had her arms around me, guiding my hands through the moves. I was pleased and proud, and I knitted sporadically over the next decade. Being first-generation Americans, we had no relatives in the United States, so we sent and received Christmas presents to and from various family members in Germany and the United Kingdom. The first actual “project” I can remember was a scarf I knitted for my auntie Pete when I was about six or seven, back and forth in garter stitch—but with a series of short rows around the back of the neck to form a horseshoe curve. I had no idea what I was doing; I just followed my mother’s verbal instructions. (Barbara G. Walker had not yet invented “Short Rows and Wrapping.”)
During the decades with my mum, I inherited tips, tricks, ideas, and innovations through our knitting failures and triumphs. As I got older, we occasionally disagreed on a technique—like her idea to knit both strands together when joining in a new skein. Aargh! No. Leave two tails and darn them in later. Actually, that may have been when I taught myself to spit-splice.
I also absorbed Elizabeth’s philosophical attitude toward knitting and life, which resonates through all her books: You are the boss of your knitting and can do what you like; there is no “wrong” in knitting as long as you are pleased with the results. In her first book, Knitting Without Tears, she wrote, “Now comes what I perhaps inflatedly call my philosophy of knitting. Like many philosophies, it is hard to express in a few words. Its main tenets are enjoyment and satisfaction, accompanied by thrift, inventiveness, an appearance of industry, and, above all, resourcefulness.”
When you are obsessed by wool and knitting for as long as my mother was, you are bound to accumulate an impressive stash; not only masses of wool and needles, but books, tools, and other accoutrements of knitting. Included in her cache were swatches, fragments of knitting, abandoned projects, a sweater body with no sleeves, a single sleeve with no body, and even some unidentifiable artifacts still on their needles, for which there was no explanation. All these items were stashed throughout a vast collection of knitting bags, baskets, drawers, shelves, boxes, and bins.
Of equal (or perhaps more) importance are Elizabeth’s journals, which contain notes, directions, charts, and sketches; some are complete, but many are just a shell of an idea, like a few bones of a skeleton. Can a knitting archaeologist build an entire garment from these sketchy clues? Some of the journals are overflowing with extra pages paper-clipped or held in by rubber bands. We also found stacks of loose papers: typed or handwritten pages, charts on graph paper, drawings, or hieroglyphic directions on the backs of envelopes or on hotel notepads. A knitting journal can be a fascinating chronicle of a knitter’s life, where ideas, observations, failed attempts, and successful garments are all recorded unexpurgated; it becomes a stash of knowledge and a reflection of the author’s creative mind.
One of my favorite finds is Fune Feat, her design for garter-stitch slippers. The idea was sketched and notated on a small memo pad from my father’s office. As I knitted what may have been the very first pair of these slippers (I never saw this concept realized by Elizabeth), I didn’t understand all the short rows across the middle of the foot until I was finished. Ah yes; to keep the sides from flopping out. It is a brilliant bit of knitted sculpture.
Elizabeth’s archive is extensive. We are still unearthing things that, upon reading and/or comprehending what she was driving at, bring her back into the present day. Along with everything mentioned above, there are stacks of scrapbooks, plus correspondence with Barbara G. Walker, Kaffe Fassett, Gladys Thompson, and other designers and authors, many of whom Elizabeth both inspired and supported as they made their own way in this business. We have come upon a slew of drafts and published manuscripts, letters to and from publishers, notebooks of ideas, plus several accountants’ ledgers filled with the minutiae of Elizabeth’s early mail-order business records. I may even still have the thousands of file cards we kept, one for each of our customers, with every order recorded on the card as it was shipped.
Several scholars have spent time with this material over the past ten years. In 2006, Molly Greenfield, a graduate student in textiles at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, curated an exhibit of some of the archive as part of her thesis work. The exhibit, titled New School Knitting: The Influence of Elizabeth Zimmermann and Schoolhouse Press, was well executed, and I spoke at the filled-to-capacity opening event. In 2009, Kathryn Parks, an undergraduate student in history at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, and her professor Colleen McFarland visited Schoolhouse Press and spent time examining sweaters and documents as they researched for their in-depth article in Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 2011/2012, with a photo of Elizabeth on the cover: Stitch by Stitch: The Life and Legacy of Elizabeth Zimmermann. The Wisconsin Historical Society was stunned by the onslaught of knitters ordering copies, and they quickly had to reprint that issue. Most recently, Lily Marsh spent several weeks over two summers with Elizabeth’s works as she completed her dissertation at Purdue University. Other scholars have expressed interest in bringing the archive material to light. Though we do not know its eventual destiny, we are exploring ideas to make at least some of the archive accessible to knitters.
Elizabeth Zimmermann’s remarkably unique approach to knitting was not inherited by me alone. It was delivered to innumerable knitters over many decades—both in person and in written form—through her frequent workshops, many knitting books, TV programs, and videos, as well as her semiannual publications, Newsletter and Wool Gathering. Elizabeth’s “family” and “heirs” include all who read and are swayed by her words to this day.
When I was a kid, my mother’s dear friend and knitting buddy was our neighbor Ruth. Our fenced backyards were adjacent. Since the two of them visited each other so frequently, my father and Ruth’s husband, Frederick, teamed up to build a stile over the fence, which enabled Ruth and Elizabeth to zip back and forth with ease.
Decades later, when Ruth died, Elizabeth lamented deeply. My mum later told me how she had wished for something of Ruth’s to hold—a knitting needle, book, pen, thimble—something relatively mundane that Ruth had cherished. With Ruth’s family in mourning, it was impossible to hint (much less ask outright) for some small memento and, sadly, none was ever forthcoming.
I remembered that conversation clearly when my mother died, and the following summer I sorted through scores of her small knitted garments, some items still on the needles, bits of ribbing, the start of a sock, a single mitten or glove, a test Moebius twist, a bit of I-cord, and numerous Aran swatches. From this assortment, I put one article into each of sixty-five new bags and tied them with wool. Then all the bags went into a large burlap wool sack, which I took to our Oft-Timers’ Knitting Camp.
I told the campers my mother’s story about Ruth and that I imagined many of them felt the same way about Elizabeth. Most of them had been coming annually since the early years (beginning in 1974) and were doted upon by my mother. Over the next few days, during Show-and-Tell, each knitter was asked to reach into the sack—with eyes closed—for a tangible remembrance of their friend and teacher. The campers were touched and delighted, many going so far as to frame their “inheritance.”
The most treasured feature of my mother’s stash is her collection of finished garments: prototypes of her designs for sweaters, shawls, coats, jackets, baby things, endless caps, socks, mittens, and blankets. Many of the articles are missing from the collection, as Elizabeth was generous about sending her knitted pieces to friends, and to family overseas. The things that remained in her stash are now merged with my own, and together they live in a cedar-lined room.
For many decades before, all sweaters lived in large wooden boxes made by my husband, Chris. They were airtight and lined with eastern red cedar. In 2006, when my son, Cully, designed a new office/warehouse building down the hill from my schoolhouse, I requested a Sweater Room. It is in the middle of the building, and the walls are covered with eastern red cedar shelves. This is a wonderful solution to the issue of stash storage and preservation. All of our finished garments are within easy reach, and we often turn to them for inspiration or for solutions to technical difficulties. Like my mother, I keep my current stash at home all around me, and once a design is finished and published, it goes into the Sweater Room.
Elizabeth’s philosophy of openness and dissemination of information is one I continue, and because of this, some of her garments travel to and from our annual Knitting Camps for participants to examine and scrutinize for their innovation and ingenuity.
They are especially treasured because her knitted garments represent love. Indeed, although Elizabeth’s works were designed and knitted as tangible representations of the explorations of a brilliantly creative mind, they still serve as comforting, warm, functional garments for those she loved. I can trace the growth of our children by the successively larger sweaters their grandmother knitted for them. Those same sweaters have been worn again by the great-grandchildren she never met.
Elizabeth Zimmermann’s stash lives on: both the physical garments that I inherited and, more importantly and enduringly, her transformative ideas, which she has bequeathed to all knitters.
Wherever there are knitters, there are, inevitably, stashers—those of us who accumulate great numbers of balls of fiber for reasons ranging from incidental (“Oops, I bought more pashmina than I needed for that cardigan”) to slightly deranged (“That skein of Knit Collage Gypsy Garden was literally calling my name as I walked into the shop, so I had to buy it. In triplicate. In all ten colorways”). One species of stasher will inevitably look askance at the others, certain their reasons fall more into the category of “reasons” than others (insert eyeroll and scornful pffffft here). But is there more that binds us than separates us? Can math provide a counterpoint to answers that rely solely on illogical emotion? With the help of the online fiber-craft community Ravelry, I rustled up some numbers to see if they would lend any clarity to the matter.
However, before we take a soul-searching sift through the stats about stashes and us stashers, let’s first give some consideration to the word itself. Stash, the noun, entered our American English vernacular in 1914, with decidedly criminal overtones. Someone who stashed a stash was likely a thief, squirreling away stolen goods. You could also stash your stash in a stash—that is, hole the loot up in your hideout. Although it took only a few decades for stash to be sanitized of intimations of illegal activity, contemporary yarn stashers, when discussing their . . . we’ll call them collections . . . can often feel as though they are confessing some wrongdoing, without any clear understanding of the nature of their crime.
What is it we fear we might be guilty of? Let’s have a look.
It’s hard to know for sure what percentage of all knitters are also stashers. We do know that a mere 5 percent of Ravelry’s 6.6 million users (some 307,000 knitters, weavers, and crocheters total) are stashers—or rather, use Ravelry to publicly track (or admit to) their stash. The numbers seem to further indicate that the greatest American stashers, by a long shot, are Californian—almost double the next demographics, of New Yorkers, or Texans. The largest group of non-English-speaking stashers are German, followed by French, then a succession of Scandinavians.
As temperatures and humidity rise, the number of stashers drops precipitously, but they’re still in evidence: there are two stashers each in Guam, American Samoa, and the Federated States of Micronesia. There’s one each in an impressively diverse assemblage of international locales, including Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, the Maldives, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Liechtenstein, Vatican City, Kosovo, Bouvet Island, East Timor, Botswana, French Southern and Antarctic Lands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Kyrgyzstan, Aruba, Saint Lucia, Northern Mariana Islands, Heard and McDonald Islands, Sri Lanka, Togo, Tuvalu, New Caledonia, the Falkland Islands, the Seychelles, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Tunisia, Niue, the Marshall Islands, Cuba, Madagascar, the British Virgin Islands, Haiti, and Albania. All by way of saying, pretty much anywhere in the world, if you run out of yarn and there is no local yarn store (LYS) available to you, chances are high that you’ll find at least one human who can hook you up with a yarn fix.
Together, this very particular accumulation of Ravelry folk has more than 20,647,000 skeins of yarn logged into their virtual stashes. That averages out to more than sixty-eight skeins per person.
So far none of this sounds like the activity of nefarious masterminds, though.
Not if we assume that each one of these twenty million–plus skeins was come by legally (disappointingly, Ravelry doesn’t track stolen skeins), either by purchase, gift or trade, or home-spinning. And not if we consider, too, that the aim of a stasher using the goods in his or her stash is to create hats—or mittens—or blankets—or socks, possibly with the further goal of giving them away as gifts. Yes, Ravelry stashers are sometimes looking to divest themselves of bits and pieces of their collections—some 53,000 of them are actively engaged in that pursuit as you read this. But on average, according to my in-house sources at Ravelry, they are probably more interested in using the site’s stash function in order to figure out which skeins to yank out in preparation for the next work in progress (WIP). Why go through your whole collection manually when you can see it all tidy online, alongside already-completed projects, in various colorways, stitched up by your knitting compatriots?
All those stashed skeins weigh in at an incredible 8.4 million pounds—more than the combined heft of a small bridge, a drilling rig, a giant sequoia, and one blue whale. Unwind them and you’ve got almost 5 billion yards of yarn. Yeah, you read that right. Five billion yards. Which is 2.8 million miles. Ignoring weight and gauge, that’s enough to knit 22 million socks. Or about four-and-a-half million medium-size women’s sweaters.
Most of those socks (or sweaters) are probably going to be knit from yarn containing Merino or generic wool (more than 6.3 million stashed skeins) in the color blue (537,000 skeins) or green (443,000). Sock knitters will feel comfortable with the fact that the most popular stashed yarn weight is fingering or light fingering (3.2 million skeins). Sweater-fanciers will revel in this statistic: The combined total number of sport, DK, worsted, and Aran is a robust 5,070,148 skeins.
We appear to be less enthused about thread-weight hemp in yellow-green colorways—only one such skein is currently stashed—although we deem that slightly more desirable than the possibility of cobweb-weight qiviut or yak in shades of yellow-orange, currently not featured in any stash whatsoever.
Of the 10.2 million stash entries marked as “in stash” on Ravelry, there are an almost equal number that consist of one skein (3.9 million) and multiple skeins (3.8 million). Slightly more than 830,000 entries consist of less than an entire skein. What’s the largest number of skeins anyone has tucked into their Ravelry stash? You will be either glad or very sorry you asked—regardless, the owner is doubtless someone you’d like to cozy up to. She or he is the proud stasher of 11,839 skeins of yarn; the next stasher in line has a still-impressive 11,522 skeins in his or her collection.
If these figures seem boggling or even worrisome, please consider the German word for stash: vorrat. Its translation is devoid of illicit overtones, rather connoting a stock or reserve of materials that a mindful person will need for some future purpose. As an added bonus, the term also happens to contain the word rat, which Austrian knitting designer Veronika Persché tells me literally means “advice.” “So,” she says, “it is a wise thing to build a vorrat, in order to be prepared in times of need.”
Now, that’s a definition to stash away and pull out if ever (whenever) our beloved co-dwellers demand to know exactly what the heck is going on here, and if it really requires the exclusive use of six closets, the guest bedroom, and the entire garage. “It’s not illegal to stash yarn,” you can assert with a straight face and a clear conscience. “And besides, I need this.”
I am trying to do something about my stash because it has made its way into the kitchen again. I support, endorse, and love the idea of a stash that’s whatever size your heart thinks it should be, but I also support and endorse the idea of being able to share your home with other humans if you so choose, and that you should be able to eat at the dining room table if that’s your bag.