I had to buy two more bins this past weekend for my ever-growing yarn collection. I am now up to 21 bins. I know that some people have a lot more yarn than I do, but I can only knit so fast, and I don't always remember what's in the bins (yeah, yeah, gotta get it all catalogued). My friend Sue came up with a twelve step programme for yarn buyers, and with due respects to AA, I offer it here.

1. We admitted we were powerless over yarn, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, then quickly dismissed this idea.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care and knitting of natural fibres as we understand them.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our freezers (and bins, and closets, and underwear drawers, and crawl spaces).
5. Admitted to God, but not to ourselves, or to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs, because we have none.
6. Were entirely ready to have friends remove all these remnants and then remembered item #2 and hid everything.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove. . . wait. . . humbly? Pshaw!
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends by sucking up to them with knitted fineries.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would require using any yarn that I wanted to keep for myself. Forever.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. Said no knitter. Ever.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with yarn, as we understood it, praying only for knowledge of yarn's will for us and the power to carry that out. Then realising this is a giant FAIL.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to other knitters, and to practise these principles in all our affairs. Alas, affairs bite us in the ass, and so we turn to knitting.