When you have your hand in every little bit of crafting like I do, it can get pretty dang pricey. Having a fabric stash, and a paper stash, and a bead stash, and a yarn stash….you get the idea.
Nowadays I deal with this dilemma by not having a stash at all. The only stuff I buy now is stuff that I want for a specific project. Except paper. You can’t buy paper for every little thing. That’s just crazy.
But I used to try to stock up on everything, I’d just buy the cheap stuff. Huge mistake. HUGE. I’d spend all this time working on something, only to have it fall apart in a couple of months. If I even made it that far. I’d often give up halfway through the making because the fabric was bunching or the yarn was uncomfortable.
This yarn was so much fun to knit with. It was soft and spongy and wicked cheap, I got a ton of this stuff back when I worked at Michael’s.
I should have listened to Crysta. I made her a blanket out of this yarn and a few months later she warned me that it tended to pill. I didn’t pay attention because I loved working with the yarn, and it all pills eventually. Ho boy. Crysta was trying to be kind. This yarn doesn’t just pill, it turns into velcro.
I made a green blanket for myself, and I just loved it. I had a whole bunch of this yarn left over in different colors, so I cast on for Mason Dixon’s Log Cabin blanket. I’ve been carting that one around for years as my “car project.”
But now I see. Oh boy do I see. After a few times in the wash the fringe of the green blanket is mushed together in balled up dreads. It clings on to hair and fuzzballs like it’s magnetized. It’s sad, but that one is finished. I’ll deal with it until I gt so sick of the whole thing that I just chop the fringe off and the blanket finds its way to the back of a cupboard somewhere.
But the log cabin one still has a long way to go. I still have time to save myself. I picked it up to work on it during a drive the other day, and there was an audible “Riiiiiiiip” as I pulled it off the floormat.
It has turned to Velcro, it’s time to walk away.