I love the idea of mentoring. My dad was a very good mentor. My daughter followed in his footsteps. Mentors must be chosen with care. A recommendation from a trusted friend or teacher is a good place to start. I personally don’t recommend that everyone should be a mentor or teacher. A bad mentor can leave you cleaning up the mess that they taught you was absolutely necessary for years. If a mentor pushes more is better in terms of supplies turn and run away as fast as you can. Don’t get me wrong, especially in the arts you need a certain amount of resources also known as supplies.
More is not better. Let me explain why. Do you have so many supplies that you spend more time searching for the supplies to start your project than it takes to make your artwork? Do you find it’s faster to rebuy what you need to use rather than take the time to look for them? How many rooms are filled with supplies for the art projects? Do you have extra supplies stored in the garage or basement up to the ceiling? Do the amount of supplies you have, cause you anxiety? Do you spend too much money on your supplies? Could you survive an epidemic or the Zombie apocalypse with no problem? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions you picked the wrong mentor. The great part about the solution is that you don’t need a mentor to fix the problem.
All you need is a few good friends willing to help you out. Take my friend Louise for example. Louise on more occasions than I can count has willingly come to my house and filled her car up with yarn. Her family lives in an area with no local yarn or craft stores. Over 2 hours from a Walmart. So she has brought a lot of my for no better word for it is a horde of yarn home with her. Her family is enjoying the bounty.
I have donated to my local knitting guild. In fact I filled up the back of a Ford F150 pickup truck with yarn and still had too much. I have donated odds and ends with leftover yarn for camp projects. Had more friends pick out yarn for their next project and still had too much yarn. I have mailed yarn to random people who could not afford yarn.
What I am politely trying to say is this will take time. Each time you give away more of your yarn or other art stash it will hurt. You will berate yourself for spending so much money. You will berate yourself for not completing the projects you planned. You will feel like you let yourself and your family down. You will have second thoughts about giving all those supplies away. This is all perfectly normal. You will also find more supplies that you totally forgot about. This is normal too.
In the end after more than a few years of going through this process please know that your family will be very appreciative of your efforts. I have helped clean out enough family members homes to know that this is true.
I brought this up because in talking with my taller half we talked about my former mentor. How it took 3 Goodwill trucks to haul away her stash of yarn. It took them months of selling random 66 gallon trash bags stuffed to the brim with yarn at $5 a bag to get rid of it all. My goal is not to be that person. To get my yarn supplies into one room Then leave the multi purpose room to its original design. To be a sewing, jewelry making and guest room rolled into one neat and tidy space.
As I am writing this, I have filled up bags of yarn to the tune of 6 cubic feet. Then I found 2 more boxes that I had forgotten about to go through. Well after I finish this post, you know what I will be doing.
All this while resisting the urge to buy more yarn.
