Vintage Pattern Acquisition

Interestingly, being cold sheep does not actually seem to have saved me a lot of money.  The money that was previously being spent on yarn simply gets diverted into pattern acquisition.  And not just your average pattern acquisition, but fairly expensive, vintage British patterns. My relationship with pdf reproductions of vintage patterns is fraught with tension - I like that they provide access to rare patterns, but I hate having to search around them when looking for originals, and am also leery of the copyright issues involved.

 It should probably surprise no one that as a historian, I love vintage patterns.  There is something very thrilling about holding in your hands a pattern that a knitter from a previous generation liked enough to purchase and preserve. I find that the thrill is particularly strong for WWII-era British patterns.  Knowing the hardships that women of that period lived through, and the shortages and privations they had to deal with, I imagine that knitting booklets were one of the only bright spots in a frequently difficult, stressful existence.  When I hold a 1942 issue of Stitchcraft, I imagine the woman who originally received it with her post being as excited as I am to receive an issue of Interweave, and rushing inside to put on the kettle so she could sit down for twenty minutes to leaf through the patterns with her cuppa.

Bestway, Sun-Glo, and Stitchcraft are my favorites - all of which are on the pricier end of the spectrum, of course.  I love Stitchcraft in particular because of the adverts, for wonderful things like Potato Pete's Recipe Book or Bunco's Toilet Paper ("We ask your indulgence if your retailer is temporarily out of stock").

Material culture is fantastic, and as a medievalist, it is not something I'm used to possessing, so I have been - and still am - willing to spend ridiculous amounts in order to own original vintage patterns.  I just can't allow myself to spend time on Ebay and Webs within the same month.

Stash flash #1

Hi.  My name is Caitlin, and I have a knitting problem.

Well, not so much a knitting problem, because if the knitting were the problem, the stash wouldn't be.  Let's say I have a yarn problem.

It looks a little bit like this:

Pardon me for *ahem* flashing my stash.  But even this is actually quite an improvement over the state of the thing at the beginning of January, before I buckled down and got organized.  Now each yarn is in a plastic bag, and if I know what I plan to make with it (and I do for about 70% of the yarn in that pile), the pattern has been printed and put into the bag.  And a half hour after this picture was taken, all the loose yarn you see was similarly corralled into ziplock baggies and placed into the storage bins you see in the background.

But no matter how beautifully organized it now is, it's still an overwhelmingly large stash.  Especially because more than of it than I would like is squeaky acrylic or dry and halo-y cotton, which won't cut it for the vintage patterns I now love to make.

I tried going Cold Sheep (ravelry link) last year, which went quite well until it...didn't anymore (yarn is a perfectly acceptable way of rewarding oneself for being a successful grown up, what are you talking about?).  My goal was to make it from the end of May to the end of December.  I made it from May through the end of September.  In penance for falling off the wagon - and boy, did I ever? -  I have signed back on for another three-ish months (til the NC Fiber Fest, in April) of being totally cold sheep, and, as I've already noted, I've pledged to spend 2013 knitting from my stash.

And in attempt to stay accountable to myself, I am also making myself accountable to you.  I will periodically flash my stash, to show that it is decreasing rather than increasing, and will have to publicly shame myself by announcing it here if I do add any new yarn.  Hopefully, you will help to keep me honest and on the wagon for the duration of 2013.