There are shelves to either side and there used to be a high stack of bins up the center blocking one’s access to right or left or any of the yarn without wrangling each bin sideways one by one to get it entirely out the door there and over the furniture and into the room. And then the next. And the next.

Now you can just pull the one you want straight onto or above the middle of the open closet floor.

She did the lifting, I did the sorting, and two friends have made initial claims on the better of the old yarns.

So much space had been taken up by half-empty ziplock bags inside the bins. On the other hand, the only sign of moth damage after all these years was to two skeins that inexplicably were not in one; they went straight to the trash outside.

I found that I did in fact have leftovers of possibly all the colors from making a llama/wool (remember Classic Elite?) baby-cabled sweater in the 90’s in which each half of each cable was a different color, a la Kaffe Fassette. I’d long wished I’d made it a cardigan. There is one untouched skein in the background color and all those accents; I could actually cut it open and do that now.

Naaahhhh… It’s not soft enough to put in the time, but it’s good to know I could.

I found the front of a more elaborately cabled handspun sweater in two colors (should have taken that picture) from my very earliest spinning and dyeing days. It’s fabulous. But I knew halfway through that it would never be finished: the teacher I was taking classes from had us try dyeing with unsweetened Koolaid, more or less on a lark and because she knew we would hear of other people doing that.

I got some pretty nice colors! And I used them in that sweater.

So then I tried dyeing small batches in lots of flavors to see what range I could get.

Which led to my calling my neighbor and apologizing if she found any pink hairs on her cat because it kept insisting on lying on my wet wool–and I knew my teacher’s light gray cat had dyed itself green by climbing into the actual dyepot she’d set out on her porch to cool.

I have long chuckled at the idea of the neighbors doing the dishes and looking out the window to see a green cat waiting for its hair to grow out!

Next, I wanted to see how colorfast this stuff was. Using commercial dyes that are meant to be dyes made more sense to me, but on the other hand, any summer grocery run will net you some of this when you need it. So I left little bits of it outside in direct sun for two weeks, the neighbor’s cat notwithstanding.

Three things happened: some of it changed very little or not at all. One color blanched at the thought and faded fast into the palest of grays before the time was up.

And the rest (or what I could find of it)?

Our kindergarten teacher found the nest when it blew off the roof of the school: it was made of bright pink koolaided wool woven with twigs and leaves and a downy feather or two. But the pink! The wool! She knew I’d be interested and waited to show it to me and I instantly knew exactly where that had come from–and we’re a quarter mile away!

I wondered how many others there were out there. Clearly it wasn’t just the wind picking the stuff up.

So, yeah. All that colored cabling work, cherry I think was the darker one, that one… Well, at least it held up in a dark closet for 31 years.

But I’ve had an inherited half of a cotton sweater front serving time as my favorite dish towel for a long time. I can rip this thing back to the start of the armscye (or just leave it as is) and shrink it into a trivet. Or a dust mitt. Or a dishtowel. It deserves to be used and enjoyed; it’s waited long enough.

Let me go read the new inscriptions on those bins so I can figure out which one it went back into.

Out of the eleven, there are four empty bins now.