Clara Parkes’ latest book is here!
A Stash of One’s Own is a collection of essays by Clara Parkes and over twenty other knitters about loving, living with, and letting go of yarn. Each essay reveals the complicated relationship between knitters and their yarn collections, one that can be marked by everything from pleasure, grief, pride, and shame, to creativity and sometimes anxiety.
Meg Swansen’s essay opens the book with a remembrance of her mother, Elizabeth Zimmermann, and her stash of unfinished objects, notebooks, designs in progress. Debbie Stoller’s essay closes the book, a feminist take on what it means to stash yarn. In between, there are essays from well-known knitwear designers like Gudrun Johnston, Amy Herzog, and Amy Christoffers, writers and humorists like Franklin Habit, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, and Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne of Mason-Dixon Knitting, and many others whose names were new to me. Whether I related personally to them or not, I found that nearly all of these stories resonated with me, for their common theme was that our materials mean something to us.
Whether you have a stash or not, A Stash of One’s Own is an interesting read for those who work with yarn. Look for it on the teacart here at the shop, where the latest books and magazines overfloweth!