The Evil Yarn Shelf
Happy (almost) Father’s Day to all the wonderful dads out there, especially my awesome father who is the hero of this story!
Yarn! Yarn! Yarn! What to do with all my yarn?
This question was running through my head last summer when all my stuff was piled in the basement, and accessing my yarn was a nightmare because it was in a bunch of plastic bins that I had to rearrange every time I needed to grab something. I hate spending money on organizational stuff because it’s always so expensive, but I thought I’d better bite the bullet to prevent insanity. I found this shelf on Amazon that didn’t look sturdy enough to hold anything except yarn. After deliberating what size to get, I finally decided to get the largest one, because my stash is only going to keep growing no matter how much I tell myself otherwise.
This shelf is 5 by 6 units, and each unit is a 14 inch cube. Assembling the shelf was such a pain because it had to be assembled one piece at a time from the bottom up, not unit by unit. I finished it in the middle of the night, and I’m sure my family could tell I had finished by the sudden cease of expletives.
I spent the next day organizing my yarn in the different compartments. Each compartment has a separate door. So the shelf was built, and the yarn moved in! Yay! Job done! But not quite!
When my sister moved out, my father moved his office out of the basement which allowed me to expand my craft space….yay! I wanted to turn the yarn shelf around, with all the yarn in it, but wasn’t really sure if that would work. My father agreed to help me move it, but it immediately started falling apart! He suggested we lay it down on a blanket and turn it around that way. Tragically, it started to fall apart when we laid it down. In a fit of rage I took all the yarn out and began dismantling the shelf piece by piece knowing that was the only way to move the shelf. Nathan saw how distressed I was and kindly helped me take the yarn out and put them in A.C. Moore (R.I.P.) bags as their temporary housing. I was not looking forward to putting it back together, so my father offered to help me reassemble it. We got a pretty good system going: I took it apart, and he reassembled it facing the other way. I’m very thankful to my dad for jumping in and helping me when I get distressed while doing crafty things. Ironically it was in a moment of distress that he helped me understand the instructions in a book I was looking at while learning to knit, so it is only fitting that he helped put the shelf back together all these years later.
