Why I Could Never be President

This fall I really felt my home office needed a refresh. The room’s closet serves as off-season clothing storage, with the bureau, shelves, and the entire guest bed loft area as the crafty project supply depot. I wanted to remove the clothes that haven’t made it back into rotation, and the clutter and art & craft supplies I don’t expect to ever go back to and make it possible for my sister to have a place to stay now that she is over 3 hours’ drive away. For this I needed to pull out some tools from the toolkit of skills and strategies I’ve learned in project management, process improvement, and avoiding complete chaos to tackle the job. 

First thing to do was to set some goals and requirements: Primary goal of fresh space for me to work, feeling less like a closet, and opening up the loft bed without exploding everything out to the rest of our living quarters or renting out a storage unit. 

Some of the crochet beanies from the yarn stash

I dug into my personal lessons learned and decided against selling clothes or craft supplies online. Even if you have only dabbled in this you probably know why. Instead, I joined local Zero Waste and Buy Nothing groups on Facebook (and had to promise myself not to respond to other offers!) This has been a good solution for many, many things. Good-bye felting kit, needles, and tutorials; fancy edger scissors – you’ll get better use scrapbooking with that young family; to the lady still making masks for free – here are all my funky fat quarters and some thread! When and why did I get a laminator? 

But – the yarn stash that occupies the entire guest bed loft area – ugh. I’d been working the different segments of the room and – yeah – avoiding the stash. I can’t usually see it from my desk. Out of sight/out of mind. Why could I never be President?…because my Cabinet would be chock full of yarn. 

No joke; there’s a lot of it. And it is so much harder for me to part with it than other supplies. Maybe because there is a thread of the textile profession in my family history. Multiple family members were in the R&D and manufacturing aspects of making thread, yarns and fabric. It was always around; everyone had a basket or bag with a textile or fiber project. I was taught to crochet, knit & tat before learning to write my letters. While I didn’t pursue it for advanced studies, I twice won school Science Fairs with presentations on thread spinning, dying, and quilting techniques. It’s in the blood.    

I really wanted to create things with the yarn, not just dispose of it! A lot of it was selected and purchased with specific projects and people in mind, which also contributed to my reluctance. Poring over patterns and yarns to make something special – your heart is already invested even before the first stitch. The sunk costs from the daydream planning can’t be re-couped, but a Ziplock full of yarn and a pattern isn’t a gift most people look forward to. I needed a different action plan for the yarn stash. 

Looking to my own advice in big projects, I knew I needed to pivot and revise the deliverables into smaller time investments. Most of the initial plans were big projects – like sweaters and blankets – which can sometimes take months to finish. Breaking it down into little items, with simpler steps and stitches, that I could finish quickly – Who doesn’t love a quick win?  – it would give me the satisfaction of creating and completing something. *Poof* Look what I made! With this in mind, I decided I wanted my success and happiness metrics to stay aligned: clearing out the space but to also contribute something more to the local community.  

Example of a the stash busting beanie pattern

Even then it was important to drop some projects/yarn that were opportunistic – yarn I bought on discount or that was gifted to me, some partial skeins of scratchy basic acrylic yarn purchased for kids’ toys created years ago – good in the wash, but that is yucky to wear as a garment. I made bundles for the Buy Nothing/Zero Waste groups of this category. In hours, that cleared out a nice-sized swath and let me see some progress (namely a corner of the mattress.) 

With that decision made, and first pass at releasing the no-value-add products completed, next was to figure out what to make, whether to create or buy a pattern, and select the best yarn for donated hats. Some wool can be washed, most cannot – I wanted washable hats so selected non-shrink varieties. Now, I had some requirements to work with.

I believe hats are the perfect item for handmaking quick accessories. Scarves are a close second, but sometimes present challenges in keeping every stitch lined up AND in accommodating the variety of weight and lengths of available yarn. I found it took me several iterations to proto-type and stitch up the perfect hat pattern: simple, quick to memorize, but interesting enough to look at. The beanie I found & modified is easy enough to make while watching TV or listening to podcasts/books, and forgiving enough to hide any mistakes, slubs or yarn joins.  

The ongoing efforts to find interesting and attractive color combinations from suitable yarn had some external risks. Keeping the cats disinterested in the whole process presented some challenges because they are cats, and I like to pull out a few different skeins to compare at once. Cats & string/thread/dental floss is a baaaad combination. The mitigation strategy for this was to keep potential skeins to a clear portable storage box. I could see different combinations without tempting the cats, and I drilled a hole in the top to thread thru the yarn. I learned to institute the exact same concept to protect the completed hats from becoming cat beds. No one wants a cat fur hat – except maybe a cat. (See Briar in my first failed storage solution.) 

Briar disturbed from her nap in the bag of hats

I have some more yarn to go, so more hats in my future and maybe still a few larger projects with the yarn that cannot be washed, but so far have gained about ½ a bed back and have made over 100 hats which I will gift to local community organizations like Haley House, More than Words, and Harvard Square Homeless Shelter. The remaining yarn now just needs a better storage solution so I can take up all the shelving space that was freed up by gifting that laminator.  

If you need a new beanie or would actually like a Ziplock bag of yarn + pattern – please let me know.