Destashing... but Keeping it in the Family

Yesterday, we got pretty new floors in my house - gratuitous floor shots here - and part of the preparation for said onslaught involved emptying the floor of my crafts closet, which is where my yarn lives. So, while it was out, I gave it a critical glare and decided that I was holding onto far too much acrylic that I was just never going to use.

Acrylic has its place, mind you. I'm certain I'll be buying more at some point, because I have children and they have legs and those legs allow them to get dirty. And I really need to throw at least their sweaters, if not the entire children, directly into the washing machine at the end of a busy day. But what I had here was not a collection of sweaters-to-be; it was odds and ends from former projects, some of my own and most of my great-grandmother's, whose stash I inherited in 2005. Bless her heart, but Grandma O loved her some acrylics.

So I decided, last night, that instead of simply returning my stash, unaltered, into the craft closet, I would pare it down, as ruthlessly as possible. Having two sisters who are relatively new knitters and on budgets that have not yet allowed them to become yarn snobs (though Sarah, the college one, has apparently started sniffing out "real" yarn stores... I think she's right on the brink. Mary, the high school one, is still happy with dishcloth cotton and 100% acrylic, and more power to her)... I had a perfect audience for my discards. I'm sending it all home with Mary next week, and have asked that they donate whatever they don't want to a local women's shelter or substance abuse treatment center, both of which use knitting as a hand-occupying productive addiction to replace the anxieties and stresses of leaving behind a difficult lifestyle.

So, farewell, old friends. Have good, useful lives... out of the closet.