I was scrolling through my Facebook feed one morning. That’s what I do once I wake up, I grab my phone which I never shut off and consume posts and YouTube videos until I absolutely needed to get out of bed. A Buzzfeed video came on screen about this woman who had watched a Netflix documentary about Minimalism. Minimalism is defined as a discovery of freedom by eliminating unnecessary excess from your life. The woman from the Buzzfeed video had gone a week by boxing up most of her belongings and lived with the basics during that time.

I told myself that I didn’t want to jump on this bandwagon. I had just moved into my apartment two months ago and space is much smaller than my parent’s condo. I knew that I didn’t want to get rid of my books or my films or my music. I still have clothes from high school. Those clothes are up to 4 to 7 years old.

The Minimalism documentary stuck in my mind and I found myself watching it. I love the idea of eliminating the unnecessary, but I’ve labeled myself based on the things that I own. How can this post possibly connect with APOP or knitting? Well, I also was watching on YouTube a channel all about life in Japan. What I gathered from those videos was that everything in an apartment is very small but useful. The top of a toilet can be a sink using filtered and recycled water. Okay, now to connect this to the knitting world.

On YouTube and other social media, knitters online like to show their Hauls of the month. The process of a video is to show knitting projects that are unfinished objects (UFO) or finished objects (FO). Then the product placements begin. The knitters like to mention that they aren’t sponsored to provide the content, but they do act as a sort of commercialism. These knitters show that they have boxes and shelves of plastic wrapped skeins of yarn and then each month the knitter just “can’t resist” buying another ball of pure alpaca yarn worth $25 dollars a skein.

Some knitters do realize that their collection has grown too large and that they most likely wouldn’t use certain materials or skeins. They “unhaul” and mail to interested people the yarns. My mother had bought me whatever yarn I wanted for a project. Because the store was an independent, five different colored yarn skeins cost upward of $200. I felt so guilty about this expensive yarn. I tried to back out of the purchase, but Mom told me the yarn was of good quality. Since then, I have been using the leftover yarn from that day for as many projects as I could. I have made the baby blanket for my friend, the cardigan for my baby niece, and yarn still remains.

In my knitting, I don’t buy yarn when I see it at the store. I must have a project in mind, a person to have that project, and a reason for that person to use the finished object. In the last year, I have bought only two balls of yarn. That purchase was for a commissioned hat, and that was only because I couldn’t find a yarn in my collection to fit the project. I walked to the yarn store today with a specific needle in mind. I went in and came across this really sweet medium chunky cotton yarn that I keep dreaming of making into a pastel themed sweater. I have too many sweaters and I don’t plan to make any for friends, so I just felt it and only bought the needles. Living with purpose at least in the crafting sense helps me make sense of which project takes precedence. I had the thought of buying more stitch markers because my usual amount has been used up by at least two projects in progress. I knew after having that thought, I cannot buy another package because that would feed into making more unfinished objects and never make any progress.