Hoarding versus Collecting

Hello Blogfriends,

Yes it has been since forever from my last post. I have let many obstacles get in my way that have stopped me from writing...I am not tech savvy...I can't take good photos...no one wants to hear my ramblings, and so on and so on. My husband said don't worry about all of that just write!

So, here I go and I will try to improve on all the other points but this is a diary after all and writing is the main focus.

I have knit tons in the past few months, deadlines to meet, gifts to be sent, and my needles have been busy. The other day I turned on the telly during daylight, weird for me but I just wanted the noise. By the way there really is nothing on during the day...I had no new Oprahs to watch so I tuned in to a show on TLC called Hoarders.

The premise of the show is that some poor soul has accumulated so much stuff to the point of being trapped in their lives and unable to function normally and through concern for their lives get professional help reorganizing everything.

I was fascinated and repelled at the same time...I think this basic voyeuristic gene is in all humans, you know like watching a traffic accident that makes this show successful.

Both hoarders were women that just couldn't stop buying stuff, one was probably early 70's, she had so much junk plus cats and those two things together do not make a good pair. Thank God we do not have "smellivision"!

The second lady lived in a small apartment in New York and she was an empty nester but then her son moved back home with all his stuff, plus she had inherited some relatives stuff when they had passed.

She had such a sweet sadness about her, I think I would have been friends with her if she lived here. The reason I know this is that she was a knitter...she had oodles of yarn, boxes of needles, and she even had a swift and ball winder.

The stash she had was quality...I can recognize Addi packages a mile away, her yarn was beautiful. What happened to her is that she fully embraced the sport of knitting and then she got stuck on a project and could not move forward, so then she abandoned it.

The "professional" organizer came into her home and zoned in on the box of needles and said do you really need all of these, the "hoarder" said in a soft and tentative voice that no she probably didn't need it and would probably never knit.

Well, I wish that she had the support of the LYS that she got all that stuff from. Surely they would have gotten her back on track and made the knitting help heal a part of her grief that she felt from losing her relatives.

Maybe a kind word of encouragement would have given her the confidence to move forward and make her feel good about herself. Who knows, maybe if all of the above things happened she might not have become a hoarder.

I am so lucky that I get to work for a wonderful yarn shop where we make every single person feel welcome. Who knows maybe we in some small way make people feel good about themselves and alleviate some worry in their lives.

I can only imagine the joy that some thrift store shopper felt when they scored some of those Addi needles!

By the way someone needs to turn that organizer lady on to knitting and she will then know the difference between a "hoarder" and "collector"!