Craft anxiety is at least a different flavour

Have taken both of my sewing machines (regular + overlocker) in for a service, and am now quite anxious about getting them back before second lockdown. I can’t imagine we won’t have another lockdown, the way things are going. Anyway it’s quite funny that I should be anxious about that, given that I’ve had these machines for what, six years or so, and used them hardly at all. But you see, now I feel I can use them, and if lockdown happens I shall want to use them, and should be able to! …so obviously what’s going to happen is that I’ll get them back, and lockdown will happen, and yet I somehow won’t touch them again for years.

Am also experiencing fabric stash anxiety. Stash anxiety is that feeling that your collection of yarn or fabric or whatever is not, in fact, a glorious and well-curated collection of artistic potential, but rather a to-do list, and it’s out of control. Oddly, this feeling doesn’t usual prevent the sufferer from acquiring more stash. Anyway I have had this problem with yarn for years, and now I’m having it with fabric, too, even though I started buying fabric only fairly recently. Not very intelligently, though. I am a Big Girl, it takes a lot of fabric to make me a garment (especially the kind of long, full skirts I like to wear), so why did I ever even bother buying fabric in 1m or 1.5m lengths?! Ah well. It’ll come in handy for something one day. Probably.

I’m also, more oddly, feeling something like actual knitwear anxiety. I have a lot of yarn; it will make a lot of things. Way more than I actually need, or can even give away. (Not everybody likes to wear the kind of thing that knitters enjoy knitting, made from the kind of yarn that knitters enjoy collecting.) I don’t enjoy accumulating Stuff, even stuff that I made and adore. So, imagining that hypothetical and frankly unlikely future in which I have actually knit up my enormous stash, it doesn’t make me happy. Instead I have two competing feelings: the urgent need to knit more, so I can reduce the stash; and reluctance to knit that much, for fear of drowning in knits. What is to become of me! I am suddenly contemplating the strange and unlikely idea of actually developing a different hobby. Like embroidery. Embellishing the fairly basic things I am likely to be sewing, so that they’re more appealing to wear – that could be quite fun. One day. Not ready to stop knitting just yet, though. My wardrobe does still have quite a lot of woolly gaps.