Stash Toss

I may have mentioned that I have too many hobbies.  I sew—clothes, quilts, household goods, toys, costumes.  I knit—socks, lace, sweaters, toys, apple jackets.  I make crafty little weird things from time to time.  I encourage my children to do the same.  Their projects often involve small pieces of wood and copious amounts of scotch tape and glue.  And also sometimes paint.  I write—yes, I think right now this counts as a hobby, so seldom do I do it, but I aspire to shift this from hobby to, well, to something more involved at some point.  Oh, and I used to be a runner, and hope someday to be one again.  

That doesn’t count reading, which isn’t so much a hobby as a need.  And cooking, ditto need.  And gardening, which truthfully doesn’t involve me as often as it does Partner, but I’m there in a pinch.  

Each of these activities has accumulated stuff.  Reading: books.  Gardening:  uh, dirt, and vegetables, gloves, tools, blisters.  Knitting:  yarn, needles, scissors, patterns.  Sewing: boxes and boxes of fabric, and stuffing, elastic, buttons, snaps, velcro, thread, patterns and two sewing machines (ok, one is a serger and I haven’t actually used it successfully yet, but I’m hopeful).  

The craft stuff has filled an entire closet in my house.  I’ve admitted to my yarn stash being fairly reasonable and modest.  After tossing the craft closet, the yarn now occupies two plastic file boxes and one plastic blanket bag.  The fabric is another story altogether—several bins, a couple of garbage bags, and slouchy stacks.  

All of this stuff wears down my brain.  Even when it is successfully crammed into the closet with the door shut, I know it is there, occupying space.  Making me feel guilty with the unfulfilled promise and possibility that all of those raw materials represent.  

Before his death, trying to finish one last album before cancer finished him off, Warren Zevon noted about his love of reading that buying new books does not buy the time it takes to read them.  Not the happiest thought, but it is a realistic assessment that each of us has only a limited amount of time in any day, week or life, and that the accumulation of stuff does not magically expand our hours.  

When I shop (which I really dislike doing), I often ask myself the basic question, ‘Do I need this?’  That’s fairly easy to answer, but harder often is the next question, ‘Do I have time for this?’  I can cascade from there into sub-questions about whether I’m willing to make time for something that I need or something that I will find fulfilling for other reasons.  This basic personal consumption questioning has helped to keep the stashes under some semblance of control.  

Fabric and yarn are difficult for me though.  I can see the possibility in every piece of fabric I have.  The things that I could make.  I have the skill, the creativity, the enthusiasm.  So when someone says, ‘Hey, I don’t need this fabric/these bedsheets/this old quilt/this yarn, would you like to have it?’  I often can’t say no, especially if they are walking to the trash can as they say it.  When the yarn or fabric is super-cheap, I often can’t say no.  But the generosity of neighbors, the lure of a good deal, the infinite possibilities that those materials could become, do not give me the extra time to actually use them.  

So, in the interest of simplifying my closets, life, brain/clutter distress, I tossed my craft closet last night.  I wanted to be firm.  I planned ahead.  I had decided to keep all yarn, but sort it (and, oh, did I find some of the flashiest, sluttiest red mohair yarn that I did not know I had—I would link to a pic, but it’s discontinued and I can’t find it online: Pingouin Panache Mohair.  I don’t even know where it came from.  Yarn fairies?  There are at least two lace scarves coming out of that).  I had decided to keep fabric that I like that would be useful in the creation of quilts (I will quilt again.  I will.  I feel a moral compunction here.  I made quilts for some friends/family for their babies, and feel certain that I will want to do the same again for future babies.  Also, my sonars are outgrowing their kid quilts, and one day I will want to make them growing-up quilts that fit their big bodies.)  I had decided to keep any garment fabric that was already cut or paired with a specific pattern.  In other words, I would finish what I’d started in there.  

Out the door I had planned to throw all other apparel fabric, all weird fabric, all upholstery fabric, all stinky fabric (I inherited a bunch of stuff from my grandmother’s garage), all ugly fabric, and any clothes that were beyond reasonable mending.  

The will is strong in theory and weak in the face of the actual stuff.  

As I started to unload the closet, I was struck by how much more stuff was in there than I realized.  It really was worse than I thought.  Some things were easy:  8 yards of stinky, yellow, knit terry cloth.  Gone.  Ditto the 50 yards of stinky, navy, woven terry.  I fudged a bit, keeping the old sheets because I thought they might make a good bottom layer for summer quilts.  I completely faltered at the fleece-lined neoprene.  I mean, seriously, I know it’s red and black, and I know I bought it for a ridiculously low price, but what if one of the Sonars needs a wet-suit one day?  I could make it!!  It could happen.  We do live on the coast.  Maybe one of them will become a surfer.  Or a kiteboarder.  

It was painful.  Two hours later I had two large trashbags full of fabric to freecycle.  Which is good.  But I really did want to get rid of more.  I am left with one giant bin full of quilting fabric (loosely defined).  A giant bin of various works in progress, and apparel fabric that I just couldn’t get rid of (the pink/orange/drapey Hawaiian print that my grandma bought a whole bolt of on vacation 800 years ago and which she begrudgingly shared 3 yards with me, among other things).  A smaller bin full of upholstery fabric, which is really just too handy and versatile to part with (and oh, what if I need drapes sometime?).  In there is also about half of the array of lining fabrics that I inherited from my mother-in-law (seriously, we could have lined anything to match.  The woman had collected everything from shell pink to blood red to chocolate brown to caramel paisley—I kept the caramel paisley).  There is a file box full of patterns.  Ditto a file box full of notions (which really needs its own toss, but I was too drained to do it last night).  

Remind me not to look in the garbage bags again before I get rid of it.  I might take stuff out.  

Do I have time now to knit the slutty red lace?  

Go Cook this

It’s fast (you really can have it finished in thirty minutes).  It’s easy.  It’s cheap.  And oh my, does it taste yummy.  

You might have to give up an email address to get to the recipes, but they’re both free recipes that were on America’s Test Kitchen on PBS recently.  In the show, they suggested that the garlic-shy could use as few as three cloves of garlic, but seriously, you want to use all six.  The house will smell fantastic for hours. 

Ziti

This one uses a bit of cream.  Which I did not have on hand.  So I used milk with a dollop of butter.  I also used 16 ounces of pasta and increased the water to four cups—in a bigger pan of course.

  

Ziti with Putanesca Sauce

This is a variation on the theme, using some anchovy and olive, and substituting red wine for the cream.  I’ll do this one next time.  Side note, I can’t read ‘Putanesca’ without thinking of the scene in the first Lemony Snicket book, where Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are forced to cook dinner for Count Olaf and his troupe of ‘actors.’  

You know you wanna.

I have nothing good to say, so I'm saying it*

*From a song-in-progress by Brother-in-law (songwriter/guitar player)

The house is quiet just now.  After a chaotic weekend involving hot dogs, water balloons, watermelon and a wading pool filled with children under 9, only Sonar X3 and I remain.  Partner is at work.  The other two Sonars  abandoned us to spend a week being spoiled by Grandma and Granddad.  Sonar X3 could have gone too, but was daunted by the idea of getting in a car with his sibs and driving away to leave us here alone for a week.  Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t know what to do without him?  

With only one child in the house, I find that there is a lot more time in my day.  It is unnecessary to do a load of wash every day.  And there are half as many dishes.  Ditto half as much crap strewn on the floor.

So I’m working on Ravenclaw-ish socks for Sonar X5, and also started a lace scarf just for the heck of it.  I finished reading The Girl With No Shadow by Joanne Harris (her sequel to Chocolat).  Seriously, if you haven’t read any of her books, go find one.  Her development of character is great, and she is a master at pacing a book so that I am slowly pulled along, with the tension and the emotion increasing incrementally until she just blows me away in the last quarter of each book.  I find myself dabbling with her books for the first half, just reading a bit here and there, savoring her attention to the details of smell and taste.  But by the time I get to that last quarter, I can hardly put them down wanting to know how this complicated tangle of humanity works itself out.  Good stuff.  Really good stuff.  

Next on the stack is The Good, the Bad, and the Undead by Kim Harrison, and then Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin.  

This weekend we will retrieve the Sonars.  Partner has one more week of work before his six week vacation.  Just today we contrived a plot to visit family in New Mexico the last week of June.  Gas prices, hash smices.  If we can drive the whole fourteen hours in one day, we won’t have to dish out for hotels.  That’s right.  I said fourteen hours of driving with the three Sonars in a car that is equipped with neither personal DVD players nor video gaming of any kind.  

I’ll try to remember to pack the sedatives.  For me.  

Sonar X8

Any of you remember this little chunk?

Happy Birthday baby!