A PEEK AT THE NUMBERS, LOOKING FOR ANSWERS
BY LELA NARGI
Wherever there are knitters, there are, inevitably, stashers-those of us who accumulate great numbers of balls of fiber for reasons ranging from incidental ("Oops, I bought more pashmina than I needed for that cardigan") to slightly deranged ("That skein of Knit Collage Gypsy Garden was literally calling my name as I walked into the shop, so I had to buy it. In triplicate. In all ten colorways"). One species of stasher will inevitably look askance at the others, certain their reasons fall more into the category of "reasons" than others (insert eyeroll and scornful pffffft here). But is there more that binds us than separates us? Can math provide a counterpoint to answers that rely solely on illogical emotion? With the help of the online fiber-craft community Ravelry, I rustled up some numbers to see if they would lend any clarity to the matter.
However, before we take a soul-searching sift through the stats about stashes and us stashers, let's first give some consideration to the word itself. Stash, the noun, entered our American English vernacular in 1914, with decidedly criminal overtones. Someone who stashed a stash was likely a thief, squirreling away stolen goods. You could also stash your stash in a stash-that is, hole the loot up in your hideout. Although it took only a few decades for stash to be sanitized of intimations of illegal activity, contemporary yarn stashers, when discussing their…we'll call them collections…can often feel as though they are confessing some wrongdoing, without any clear understanding of the nature of their crime.
What is it we fear we might be guilty of? Let's have a look.
It's hard to know for sure what percentage of all knitters are also stashers. We do know that a mere 5 percent of Ravelry's 6.6 million users (some 307,000 knitters, weavers, and crocheters total) are stashers-or rather, use Ravelry to publicly track (or admit to) their stash. The numbers seem to further indicate that the greatest American stashers, by a long shot, are Californian-almost double the next demographics, of New Yorkers, or Texans. The largest group of non-English-speaking stashers are German, followed by French, then a succession of Scandinavians.
As temperatures and humidity rise, the number of stashers drops precipitously, but they're still in evidence: there are two stashers each in Guam, American Samoa, and the Federated States of Micronesia. There's one each in an impressively diverse assemblage of international locales, including Niger, C?te d'Ivoire, the Maldives, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Liechtenstein, Vatican City, Kosovo, Bouvet Island, East Timor, Botswana, French Southern and Antarctic Lands, Vanuatu, Tonga, Kyrgyzstan, Aruba, Saint Lucia, Northern Mariana Islands, Heard and McDonald Islands, Sri Lanka, Togo, Tuvalu, New Caledonia, the Falkland Islands, the Seychelles, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Tunisia, Niue, the Marshall Islands, Cuba, Madagascar, the British Virgin Islands, Haiti, and Albania. All by way of saying, pretty much anywhere in the world, if you run out of yarn and there is no local yarn store (LYS) available to you, chances are high that you'll find at least one human who can hook you up with a yarn fix.
Together, this very particular accumulation of Ravelry folk has more than 20,647,000 skeins of yarn logged into their virtual stashes. That averages out to more than sixty-eight skeins per person.
So far none of this sounds like the activity of nefarious masterminds, though.
Not if we assume that each one of these twenty million-plus skeins was come by legally (disappointingly, Ravelry doesn't track stolen skeins), either by purchase, gift or trade, or home-spinning. And not if we consider, too, that the aim of a stasher using the goods in his or her stash is to create hats-or mittens-or blankets-or socks, possibly with the further goal of giving them away as gifts. Yes, Ravelry stashers are sometimes looking to divest themselves of bits and pieces of their collections-some 53,000 of them are actively engaged in that pursuit as you read this. But on average, according to my in-house sources at Ravelry, they are probably more interested in using the site's stash function in order to figure out which skeins to yank out in preparation for the next work in progress (WIP). Why go through your whole collection manually when you can see it all tidy online, alongside already-completed projects, in various colorways, stitched up by your knitting compatriots?
All those stashed skeins weigh in at an incredible 8.4 million pounds-more than the combined heft of a small bridge, a drilling rig, a giant sequoia, and one blue whale. Unwind them and you've got almost 5 billion yards of yarn. Yeah, you read that right. Five billion yards. Which is 2.8 million miles. Ignoring weight and gauge, that's enough to knit 22 million socks. Or about four-and-a-half million medium-size women's sweaters.
Most of those socks (or sweaters) are probably going to be knit from yarn containing Merino or generic wool (more than 6.3 million stashed skeins) in the color blue (537,000 skeins) or green (443,000). Sock knitters will feel comfortable with the fact that the most popular stashed yarn weight is fingering or light fingering (3.2 million skeins). Sweater-fanciers will revel in this statistic: The combined total number of sport, DK, worsted, and Aran is a robust 5,070,148 skeins.
We appear to be less enthused about thread-weight hemp in yellow-green colorways-only one such skein is currently stashed-although we deem that slightly more desirable than the possibility of cobweb-weight qiviut or yak in shades of yellow-orange, currently not featured in any stash whatsoever.
Of the 10.2 million stash entries marked as "in stash" on Ravelry, there are an almost equal number that consist of one skein (3.9 million) and multiple skeins (3.8 million). Slightly more than 830,000 entries consist of less than an entire skein. What's the largest number of skeins anyone has tucked into their Ravelry stash? You will be either glad or very sorry you asked-regardless, the owner is doubtless someone you'd like to cozy up to. She or he is the proud stasher of 11,839 skeins of yarn; the next stasher in line has a still-impressive 11,522 skeins in his or her collection.
If these figures seem boggling or even worrisome, please consider the German word for stash: vorrat. Its translation is devoid of illicit overtones, rather connoting a stock or reserve of materials that a mindful person will need for some future purpose. As an added bonus, the term also happens to contain the word rat, which Austrian knitting designer Veronika Persché tells me literally means "advice." "So," she says, "it is a wise thing to build a vorrat, in order to be prepared in times of need."
Now, that's a definition to stash away and pull out if ever (whenever) our beloved co-dwellers demand to know exactly what the heck is going on here, and if it really requires the exclusive use of six closets, the guest bedroom, and the entire garage. "It's not illegal to stash yarn," you can assert with a straight face and a clear conscience. "And besides, I need this."
