I was always interested in collections.As a little girl, I was all about gathering any and every thing that intrigued me, from rocks to bird's nests, porcelain dolls and critter's bones, beautiful feathers, bookmarks, and Pogs.
The impulse is still there (and perhaps that's a hallmark of a knitter... or at least, all the ones I've ever met. Yes, say hello to the stash!)
Now, I've moved on to (the obvious) yarn, fabric and other fibre, but have added to the mix a somewhat bizarre attraction to lovely blank note books.
Here you see pictured a very small sampling of my beauties.
Recently I've been trying to be very good and responsible, and actually make use of these items/this collection; though, I continually have the dread feeling that what I'm defacing the gorgeous object with my little words and thoughts, which could never be wonderful enough to do the object justice!
Setting that aside, I think the utilization of this collection recontextualizes it and (demotes it?) from the status of collected item to functional object.
As I'm asking knitters, I'm sure many of you will answer in the affirmative:
Do you collect anything? Did you have the same impulse as a child? If so, have your interests changed?
(To own the truth , I still am drawn to feathers, nests, bones and the like, but certainly don't have the impulse to retrieve them from nature and keep them in my home!)
9 comments:
I do the same thing with blank books! I always have a few, even if I have nothing to write in them.
Yarn has definitely become my collection. I love to look up yarn shops before I go on vacation and buy "souvenir" yarn. Sometimes this yarn becomes a project, but sometimes it just sits on my bookcase and looks pretty while reminding me of a nice holiday.
I feel that way about books, particularly old books, or by an author that I adore. I'm also a sucker for brooches, and I don't think you can ever have too many. Conversely, I find blank notebooks scary- the question of living up to their outer beauty is always there!
I used to do the same thing with blank books, until I realized that I too never write in them for fear of messing them up. I also collected stationary.
I used to collect pretty stones (just regular ones lying by the wayside or on lake shores), shells (whenever we went to a beach, because I love the ocean, and living in Austria, there really isn't much of it nearby), random things from the woods, etc. I would have collected more (like interesting sticks) if I'd had the space. Also, candles, soaps (there was a animal-shaped soap craze at school at one point), and of course books. Lots of them. I still do - that's the one thing I can't stop doing.
Collecting things that have a creative potential for me is a problem - I'll collect art supplies, yarn, things off the beach, beautiful notebooks, all because 'one day' I'll do something cool with them.
Once I'd identified that, I collect less, and do more! One way of breaking in a new notebook is gluing in a nice bookplate and/or leaving the first couple of pages blank for an index that I will/may fill once I've started to fill the book.
I do the same thing with journals. I get the same feeling from a new ball of yarn as I do from a new, fresh, blank page. There are so many possibilities in them, and it's almost better to leave them blank and appreciate the possibilities than to narrow the field by knitting a stitch or writing a word.
I collected keys I found as a child. I have a lot of skeleton and other strange keys. I also collected (and still collect) stickers, hollow birds' eggs, old birds' nests, empty snail shells, and rocks.
Oh, I collect yarn, craft project materials, books, post cards with positive sayings, pictures... Yikes, methinks I have a collection problem!
Definitely a collector! Aside from yarn, I collect books, beads, antique keys, spices...
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