Stash Confessional: Minnesota Yarns

This week’s (month’s???) stash confessional is very different than most. Not that it doesn’t mean I didn’t acquire some stash, because I definitely did. Just that I lost significantly more stash than I acquired. Which, you know, is the goal. Still, it puts me decidedly ahead in the plan to be 24,000m lighter by the end of the year. That said, I’m pretty sure I’ll never again get rid of this much yarn at one time, so I suppose I should preface this with a “results not typical” sort of statement.

A bit of background for anyone who might be a new reader. As part of my “own less in 2015” goals, I made a commitment to knit or otherwise rid myself of 2000m of yarn per month. Which . . . considering a worsted weight sweater takes ~900m of yarn is pretty lofty if I were just knitting it all, but it includes knit AND destash. That said, I don’t have THAT MUCH yarn I’m willing to part with as destash, and after Sunday I have even less.

Sunday. I took a birthday trip north (halfway to Canada, as I like to phrase it) and made it a point to stop in to the LYS in town (home of Three Irish Girls) both because I had heard good things about the store (all correct) and because I wanted to get myself some TIG from the source, as it were. While investigating the store, I found out they’re a drop-off location for the charity knitting group F.L.O.C.K. (For Love of Charity Knitting). F.L.O.C.K. will basically take whatever yarn you want to give them and distribute it to various group members who want to charity knit for someone, which I think is great. I would love to do more charity knitting myself, but I also like knitting things FOR myself, so I don’t get around to charity knitting as much as I do in my dreams. I figured this was a good way to go through my stash, figure out what I would have probably designated into charity knitting projects once I got to it anyway, put it all in two giant plastic bags, drive it 2.5 hours north, and drop it off for other people to play with.

All told, I dropped off 4457.65m (2580g) of yarn from my stash. That puts me TWO MONTHS ahead on my stashdown goals, provided I don’t actually purchase more yarn. But you know where this is going, right?

As I said, my primary goal in hitting up the LYS was to PURCHASE yarn, and purchase yarn I did, though I’m incredibly proud of my ability to make decisions, especially in the face of a wall of Kauni and a front-and-centre display of ALL THE THREE IRISH GIRLS with the best colourway names and things I had never seen before. So I came home with 5 new skeins of yarn, all of them local to my area, some of them handspun by lovely people I would like to meet someday so I can praise them for providing me with handspun Border Leicester, for a total of 1453.6m (581g) of new yarn, which evens my destash to acquisition total for this trip to 30004.5m (1999g). Not bad. I count that a mega win! I’m still well ahead for the month of January and still knitting away on a project and swatching for the next.

This probably won’t be the final acquisition post for the month since my mother gave me a $50 US gift card to my LYS with the instruction to “Knit something beautiful” for myself, so I’m betting I’ll be back again next week with more stash confessions.

Which brings us to the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Stash confessional #1 for the year:

1 skein of Three Irish Girls Adorn sock in the “Cooler Bythe Lake” colourway. I actually had this and a “Land of the Loon” colourway that were SUPER similar, but Jonas and I rationalised that although both were awesome, the blue makes this one better. Plus, “Cooler By the Lake” was the tagline of my childhood hometown for a while in the 80’s/90;s so even though I know this meant a different lake, I still felt like it was made just for my home.

 

1 skein of Three Irish Girls Adorn sock in the “Cair Paravel”colourway. And okay . . . it’s named after the castle in Narnia. Do I need to rationalise it beyond that?

1 skein of Three Irish Girls Glenhaven Cashmerino Worsted inthe “Observation Hill” colourway. Which is pretty. And is named after a place in the city we were visiting (which is where TIG dye out of). But also there was a place in the city I went to University in (my second home) called Observatory Hill and I spent a LOT of time on that hill and I felt like this colour could also represent that place. Plus did I mention it’s pretty?

1 skein of super awesome amazing hand spun Border Leicesteryarn in the “Natural Dark” colourway from a local spinner. It’s 225m in a beautiful chocolate brown and I’m SO EXCITED to work with Border Leicester. No idea what it will become, but whatever it is will almost certainly be warm and happy and made with love from start to finish.

1 skein of super awesome amazing hand spun BLF/Silk in the “LanikaiHike” colourway (presumably inspired by Hawai’i) from a spinner that’s evenmore local to me. It’s beautiful barberpoled brown and blue (you know how much I love brown and blue together!) and is 240m of DK weight. Again, no idea what it will become, but it is sure to be made with love.

Note that despite a WALL OF KAUNI I did not purchase any. This doesn’t mean I didn’t have three different colourways in my hand at one time, it does mean that I decided that Kauni skeins have a LOT of yardage and I still haven’t decided what the three skeins of Kauni I purchased back in May are going to be, so I reluctantly returned them from whence they came because although I love Denmark and Danish yarns/knitting something fierce, 2015 is all about making good decisions with stash and I could walk away feeling comfortable with what I purchased.