We spent some time today clearing off one shelving unit of rayon chenille, bagging it up after sorting into the 3 'sizes' represented there. and labelling the bags of yarn with the number of yards/pound for easy identification.
l have agonized for months (years!) over this yarn. I used to make rayon chenille scarves and sold them as part of one of my 'lines' of scarves at craft fairs. People tended to love them. The bright saturated colours, the texture, the drape. But they were not a lot of fun to make, honestly. I got pretty good at working with colours, usually in stripes of one sort or another. And I learned a lot about how colour mixes in a woven cloth, so it wasn't really a hardship. Just limited in scope. Plus I grew to really dislike the fringe twisting because it was hard on my fingers/hands.
But I loved the colours. I like working with saturated colours, and having a shelf full of nice bright colours of all sorts (because I had to make a range of colours, ones that weren't my personal favourite, included.)
As my health deteriorated, I would glance at the shelf full of yarn and quickly look away. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt about hanging onto it. Some of it was likely getting too old to be useful as warp - and of course you can't tell until you get it into the loom.
I toyed around with selling it on, but I had dribs and drabs as well as full cones, too much of some colours, not enough of others. I offered it on here for free if someone would save me the emotional toll of packing it up and taking it away.
And then I heard that the guild was going to offer members to recycle their stashes by having a 'stash busting' sale in January.
I asked if I could donate my rayon chenille and the guild could have the money and was instantly accepted. The time line isn't long, which was even better. No time to re-think. No time to select some of the yarn and keep it in case I wanted to weave with it again. Just a nice short timeline to deliver it all to the guild room in the new year and clear it out of my studio.
Intellectually I was more than happy to do this. As it was happening, however, I found that I still had an emotional tie to the yarn. I have a pretty good idea of how much money it took to invest in that yarn - in production quantities. I have a decent idea of how many scarves a person could make with it. Or to replace it if I should desire to do so (I don't. I won't.)
But I cannot. It is beyond my capacity to do. And even IF I can recover more of my physical fitness, do I really want to spend what little time I have left on making more rayon chenille scarves?
The honest answer is...no. Much better that I let someone else have the pleasure of making something with the yarn, than let it degrade further so that it won't be useful for anything much?
I have no idea if there are enough weavers in this town to buy even half of the yarn that will be delivered to the guild room in January. But the guild has a 'yarn by donation' corner, so perhaps it will eventually find a home.
And one less thing for me to see in the corner of my eye and feel guilty about not using. One way or another - my stash must shrink.
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