214 Enough

Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy. It’s a joke until you do the maths. Eight complete sweaters-worths of yarn in DK and fingering weight alone, not counting the oddballs, the luxury fibre, or the container of 2-ply jumper weight — one 25g ball of every single colour Jamieson & Smith make. (Shut up. That was for research.)

The stash stopped being weight when it got a job. Three questions — what do I need, what do I want to wear, what do I want to make — and a capsule of twenty garments across five categories. Ghost in the Apple Orchard, the red tweed vest from Episode 1, is done. Big Love, the soft teal cardigan, needs its bind off. Gilliatt is on the last ball. The next knit — a December-not-Christmas jumper in claret Shepherd’s Wool Worsted — came from the stash, not the shop, because the plan said claret and the stash had claret.

Enough is not a number. It’s a relationship between what you have and what you’re making.

To Be of Use, the audio piece from A Knitter’s Manifesto, is what a garment’s full life sounds like — from the making through the wearing to the mending. Sound design by Dr Felicity Ford.

FURTHER READING

* Max Weber on consumerism / acquisition as virtue

* Glenn Adamson, Fewer, Better Things

* Moral licensing as the mechanism by which an ethical act becomes permission for more consumption

* Yanagi / mingei and the beauty of use

MUSIC

* Drop of Rain (Acoustic) — Instrumental by sød ven

* Fly by Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors

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