1.19 Divesting oneself of things

Getting the clutter out of my house is a common theme on my wishlist. With four packrats in the house, it's a problem. When we got married, my husband still had every piece of clothing he had had since high school, mostly because, many years later, they all still fit. How can you get rid of things that still fit? (Never mind the fact that he's never going to wear orange polyester double knit again.) I'm not just pointing the finger at him - I'm just as bad, just not about clothing. I hate spending money on something I've already spent money on once before. If I may ever want to use it again, I want to keep it. Never mind the fact that we've now spent three times as much money in moving it twice between times of using it.

We've been working on divesting ourselves of things we don't need. However, unfortunately (fortunately?) other members of our family are going through similar divestiture attempts. My mother is taking a serious look at the items she thinks she will no longer use, and ridding the house of them. Things that she thinks we (her three offspring) may want to use, she's sending to us. When what she's sending me is something I want, how can I turn it down?

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This is one of a stack of books she has recently sent me, and of all the books it's the one I want to keep the most. I had a copy of this book two moves ago, and either it is somewhere in a box I haven't opened yet (which I can't quite believe) or it disappeared somewhere along the way. By the time I missed it, it was out of print.
I miss the old Compuserve fibercrafts forum. There were several nice things about that forum that I've not found duplicated anywhere else, although the blogosphere comes the closest. Once of the things I miss is that other related fiber crafts were just a click away from the ones I followed, and there were volunteers who pruned the chat lists, not by telling people to stay on topic, or, worse, letting them babble unrestrained, but by moving the thread into Unraveling Threads, a chat section where eventually everybody got dumped for offtopic content. There was only one Unraveling Threads, so if you followed threads there, eventually you wound up meeting people who only hung out in sections other than your own.
I am not a quilter, but I met a bunch of quilters there - I'm not a fabric dyer, except that after a while I dabbled in it, trying the things other people were chatting about. (I wasn't a spinner either, only suddenly I was and things have never been the same.)
One of the things I dabbled in was baggie dyeing with fabric. There were a number of recipes floating around just then for low water immersion dyeing of fabric; right about the time we were playing with it, this book came out. It was sort of a cross between several of the recipes and the instructions were pretty clear. I'm not a fabric dyer nor a quilter, so I played with it for a while and then set it aside, not bothering to keep the recipes because I had the book. And then I didn't have the book and the Fibercrafts forum dissolved, killed off by the growing email lists, and I moved on into spinning and knitting from the embroidery which had led me into the C'serve forum to start with.
But now I have the book again. And it's going on my shelf, not yet to be passed on to someone else.