I’m organizing the Fibordello. This is an experience at once practical, enlightening, and humbling. I urge you to set aside time for it as soon as possible. Observe, friends:

On the shelf, we have bags of yarn sufficient for sweaters. Ten sweaters. And a big stole. And a blanket. Jumbled on top of the tower of drawers are oddments – leftover partial balls (you never know what they might be useful for, and who can stand to throw away perfectly decent yarn?) and a bunch of Koigu ends for making booties. Top drawer of the tower: sock yarn. Middle drawer: fancy stuff (silk blends, mohair, and alpaca, mostly) and laceweight. In here is my Lotus Blossom Shawl, about one fifth complete. Bottom drawer: Aran and bulkier wool. To the left of the tower, we have a bag of roving. We can blame my friends the Spiders for that one. Top wider drawer: cotton and cotton blends. Bottommost drawer: odd skeins of mid-weight wool, and needles. And I’m baring it all: I’ve left out all my most ancient unfinished projects – from left to right, half an enormous mitten, half a cotton baby hat, a mateless Retro Rib sock, Viennese shrug, and that toddler-size circular sweater I was working on last fall when I should have been doing Christmas knitting.

I think it’s pretty clear that I never need to buy another skein of yarn. I’m teetering on the brink of Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy, and I’m not even 27 yet.

Underneath it all, I found Charlotte.

   

Apologies for the cruddy picture (although the desk it’s sitting on is pretty slick – thanks, Granny!), but it’s well indicative of Charlotte’s sorry state. Here she is, the first sweater I ever knit for myself, still in pieces. I put her aside lo these five seasons past in a fit of discouragement: I was going to run out of yarn, even though I’d shortened the sleeves to 3/4 length, and I was pretty sure she was going to be too big anyway. All this time I’ve meant to frog her and start afresh. But I thought I’d pin her up against my body again today, and maybe she’s not that bad. I’m actually considering sewing her up, buying one more skein to finish her collar, and giving her a light fulling in my top-loading washing machine to see if she’ll shrink just a little bit. Because I have a top-loading washing machine now. And because I’ve got ten more sweaters’ worth of yarn in my closet and only so many knitting hours in the day, folks. The yarn is Rowan Yorkshire Aran Tweed. What wisdom, friends? Words of advice? Of caution? Of encouragement? Of impending doom?