Stash Appreciation: Jade Sapphire Seeing Red

So I have a confession.

I love my stash.  I love every skein of cashmere, every scrap of merino and silk and camel and bamboo and mohair.  If one were to make a scientific study of my stash, they would see that I gravitate towards skinny yarns: my sock and laceweight stash is almost as big as my larger-weight stash.  In terms of actual yardage or number of skeins, there might be more.  I love knitting socks, and I love knitting lace, which is funny because they are so different in their usage.  Socks you can wear the minute you weave in all the ends, and wear until they have holes in the toes and heels from love.  Lace, on the other hand, is more work-intensive to care for, more valuable.  I wear my shawls every day, but I wear them with a sort of care only afforded to the most important pieces in my wardrobe.  You won't see my lace going to the washing machine, ever.  And yet they share the same space on my shelves of stash, and I look at them with the same yarn-lust in my eyes.

And if I ever really, really take a step back to look at my stash, I will find that there is almost nothing in it that I don't love.  I have stories from almost all of my yarn, from trips and people and times in my life that I can remember by making something wooly out of them.  Some things are best kept in the skein until the right moment has come along to use them.  And whenever I add something new, I undoubtedly love it just as much as everything else in my stash.  Some days I have a hard time deciding what to knit because I want to knit it all, right now.

On that note, Smith's got in six colors of glorious Jade Sapphire this week.  I bought three skeins of a deep, ruby colored silk/cashmere 2-ply, colorway Seeing Red, for a large shawl, despite the fact that I have five more skeins of the stuff in my stash already.  My love for Jade Sapphire is deep and abiding -  it's one of my favorite yarns ever, and this color is unlike any I've seen before: it's the perfect red, unphotographable in its luminosity.

I haven't decided what to make with it yet.  But just having it is good enough for now.  Because in the end, that's why I love my stash: it's full of possibility and beauty just as it is, and knitting it up doesn't increase or subtract from its beauty, it just changes its form.

Happy Friday, everybody!