Stash Confessional: Birthday money!

Hi again. I’ve got another stash confessional, though a smaller one this time. My wonderful mother, being the amazing, thoughtful, kind, caring person she is, bought me the perfect birthday gift of a gift card to my LYS with the instructions that I was to “Use this to make yourself something beautiful”. So, I took that as a license to buy some really nice yarn that I’ve always wanted and never purchased for myself.

I initially brought it in while the LYS was having a 20% off sale on all the things on the wall and tried to buy myself some Quince & Co. for a sweater, but the amounts and the colours and all the factors weren’t working out. Besides, I have one sweater quantity of Quince & Co. wound up and ready to be a sweater whenever I get to it and one sweater quantity of Quince & Co. on infinite backorder, so I figured maybe this was the yarn gods telling me this wasn’t the correct use of my free $50US. I left with nothing (proud of myself…not too often I can say that during 20% off everything on the wall day. Nearly the whole store is stocked on the walls…at least most of the practical yarn. It’s hard not to buy *something*), and decided that when I came back for my regular knitting night on Thursday I would buy myself something nice. Maybe finally buy some Madeline Tosh despite my opinions about Madeline Tosh or some Malabrigo.

Come back I did, and although I stood staring at the Madeline Tosh and Malabrigo wall for a good half an hour, thinking about hats and cowls and all manner of things I could make, nothing seemed special enough. Nothing seemed right. Then finally, I found it. A yarn store exclusive that oneof the local dyers created for a recent Shop Hop. Colourways inspired by the local Zoological Gardens. All the teal/blue/brown variegation I always wanted and never bought because what was I going to do with all that fingering weight sock yarn? Only now I’m a sock knitter! So I bought it. It’s not lush. It’s not luxurious. But it is the exact colours I love. And it is locally created and locally inspired. And it’s called “More Otter than Sea”. All these things were a win.

 

Now, of course, this didn’t take up all my money (close though…it wasn’t inexpensive sock yarn), so I had to think of what else I could manage to get 1 skein of and still be able to make something. The answer to that, it turns out, was Leading Men Fiber Arts. I’ve been hearing about their yarn (and meaning to listen to their podcast) for a while now, so I was excited to see it in the store a few weeks ago. The colours were beautiful and vibrant and, really, the big problem here was deciding what colour I wanted. I could only get 1 skein of sport weight, so I figure this will turn into a hat or a small cowl or maybe mittens, so it needed to match with my coats and still serve a purpose. Problem is, my coats are brown or blue. And the colours I picked up were either beautiful oranges (still regret not being able to buy that one) or grey or dark green. So, I was forced to use the tiebreaker method and buy on colourway name. Which means the grey won out just because they decided to name it London Fog. Now I need to knit myself just the right thing to take me back to a grey London day where you need the softest cowl to snuggle down into against the damp mist that chills you to the bone and everything will be perfect.

 

So…added some meters to the stash (720.5 m/ 200g), but it’s for a good cause and I'm still grossly ahead of schedule thanks to my destash.Besides, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one or both of these is used up before the year is out.

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.

Video Game Swap Part 1: Yarn Dyeing

So, now that it’s over and the recipient has received all their things, I can talk about the most recent yarn/knitting/crafting swap I got myself into on Ravelry.

There’s a group called the Odd Duck Swaps of Ravelry, and they organize thematic swaps every single month of the year. The way it works is you generally have about a month to sign up, two months to actually craft/shop/mail the swap package, and then you post a thank you when you’ve received your package and the swap is completed. After hearing about how much fun people were having doing this, I decided to scope out the group. On my first visit there, I found out they were just starting sign-ups for a video game swap.

Now, (without getting into the whole ri-fuckin-diculous gamergate situation) I’m not the sort of person who has ever considered myself a “gamer”. I mean, I usually (but not always) enjoy games when I play them, but I didn’t grow up with video games and I don’t keep up with the latest releases and I don’t have a steam account or any of that. It’s just that it so happens that my first “real” fandom, and the fandom that just won’t quit and I never want to, is for a series of video games. So I’m basically SUPER into one video game and have played a few more and have a general knowledge of even more than that. But still, I thought the swap would be fun and I felt like I was comfortable enough with video games to be able to participate. So I signed up. And it was fun. And I will do more of them in the future, because it turns out I really like making things for someone else and the excitement of seeing their virtual excitement over receiving the items I crafted them.

This post is going to be the first of a two-parter on two of the new(ish) undertakings I began with this swap package. I included more than these things (I knitted this Zelda Triforce Scarf that was easy enough to make, but still deserves mention, for one thing), but these are the two things that really stretched into the crafting me of the future, if you will (and I will . . . sorry, that’s a reflexive inside joke that zero of you reading this will understand.)
Without further ado . . . yarn dyeing!

My recipient mentioned that their favourite game was Baten Kaitos, which is a Dreamcast (I think) game that I had never heard of, but my far more knowledgeable gamer husband and his college roommate had spent time playing. Because this game is old and I think it has a pretty small fanbase, there isn’t any merchandise out there for it AT ALL. This is okay, since my recipient also mentioned that they like Zelda and Skylanders and all sorts of things that have way more popularity than Baten Kaitos, but as a person who’s only into video games that have next-to-no crafting fanbase (as in, there aren’t indie dyed yarns or fabrics or patterns or any of that) I sort of knew how excited the recipient would be if something from a fandom you don’t expect to see anything from showed up in the package. So, since I’m newly immersed in a commitment to yarn dyeing, I decided to make my first real yarn dyeing adventure something inspired by my recipient’s favourite charater in Baten Kaitos, Kalas.
 
So, going off the photos I could find online, it seems like the character wears a light blue and darker blue armour set offset with brown leather strappings, so I decided that my yarn was going to be the dark blue transitioning into brighter blue and then the leathery brown. The bare yarn I selected to dye was a fingering weight 75% superwash wool, 25% nylon yarn. I had three 50g skeins, but this was my first time dyeing and I didn’t want to screw up three skeins of yarn in the event that everything went horribly wrong, so I only dyed one of them. I knew this would mean that I was giving the recipient barely enough yarn to do anything with and really it would be better if I could dye two skeins at once and at least give 100g, but I was really afraid of messing it up. Turns out I had no need, because this yarn is one of the best I’ve made to date. That could be because I’m a sucker for the blue/brown variegation, but all reports from those who’ve seen it in person are that it’s pretty badass.

I dyed the whole thing with Wilton’s Icing Gels using a plain stainless steel kitchen pot. Minimal mess, no harsh chemicals, beautiful colour. I highly recommend this method for anyone who might be thinking about dyeing some yarn, but doesn’t have a large kitchen or space for extra equipment or is even just a little nervous about the harsh chemicals in a working kitchen like I was. I’ve since dyed 20 more skeins of yarn in various colourways using this methodology, and the only thing I haven’t been able to get right so far is grey. Not a bad track record, and I hope you’ll all follow along with me on my yarn dyeing journey as I grow into this and figure it out and post all the pictures of my progress here for you to see. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll probably get a quicker peek at what I'm working on, but I'll make sure that everything eventually gets posted here as well!

To start . . . here’s a few photos of the special edition Baten Kaitos – Kalas yarn I did for this swap. Not bad for a first start, if I may say so myself!

 


Stay tuned for part 2 of the swap, where I give you a detailed tutorial on how I made a project bag!

Hi again readers.

I was doing so well on keeping on top of updating you and then I sort of fell off the wagon again. Maybe third (fortieth???) time’s the charm? We shall see.

Today’s post is all about some confessions. Namely . . . I have too much yarn, but tangentially, I have too much stuff overall. It has come to my attention that if all goes according to plan, I will need to move from my current not-all-that-large 2 bedroom flat into a likely even smaller 2-bedroom (I hope) flat within the next year. Since my current flat, I have come to realise, is at (maybe slightly beyond, depending on your definition system) capacity, this means that I absolutely need to have a “no net gain” of possessions, and ideally will have a net loss of possessions before May-June of next year. In an attempt to get organised for this thing, (prompted by the fact that I bought 4 skeins of yarn and then had to basically cram them in the drawers to get them stashed), and because I’d been thinking about my stash recently and how near it was to capacity, and because it’s been bothering me that all my yarn didn’t have accurate weights/lengths and photos catalogued on Ravelry, I took the better part of a day about a month ago and went through my stash. All of it. The bitter truth. And I had SO help me so he could see the actual impact of the amount of yarn I owned and could stop being a terrible enabler at the LYS.

Now, I realise that compared to many, I have next to no stash at all. However, this isn’t about a contest or a comparison. It’s about me feeling like I have acquired at too great a rate and needed to put things into perspective. I remember the early(ish) days of Knitmore Girls Podcast when Jasmin and her friend Tika made an agreement they called “The Social Pressure Experiment”. It was basically about re-evaluating their stash purchasing and becoming smarter consumers. Really thinking about what you were buying and knowing that you had to give up the equivalent amount of that thing puts your purchasing habits into perspective, and I loved listening to how Jasmin’s purchasing philosophy evolved during the 8ish months of the challenge and how they became sort of permanently ingrained afterward. I’ve recently been trying to apply that philosophy to everything in my life . . . do not consume a thing unless you absolutely NEED to have it. If you do consume it, please identify an equivalent thing that can get re-homed. It’s going well so far, but it’s only been a month.

On to the yarn stash. And accountability. This will get long.


Because I don’t have a big enough room and because I don’t have a good place to take a photo of things even if I did have a big enough room, I don’t have one photo of all the yarn together. Instead I have photos of each grouping of yarn I split things into. Doing it this way also REALLY helped me identify problem areas in my stash, which was very helpful. Plus . . . now everything is in Ravelry and is searchable and sortable and I can make plans about knitting. I already have my knitting booked until at least mid-December, I’m pretty sure. I also identified some things that I listed for destash (some of which, if actually requested, will be pretty hard for me to part with because I’m sentimentally attached to them). It’s likely no one will want most of them, as it’s a lot of acrylic, but I have plans to either use it or donate it if I get to its position in the new chronological knitting plan and no one has claimed it yet.

We started with all my fingering weight yarn. I didn’t expect there to be as much of it as there was, because I don’t knit socks or shawls or many of the things that require fingering weight yarn, but gosh was I wrong. Admittedly, much of it is yarn that I acquired from Knit Picks during their annual sale when I got the brilliant idea to use Palette and the Imagination Yarn to make all the Song of Ice and Fire things on Etsy. I still think that was a good idea, although no one has actually purchased one yet, so perhaps I’m being more than a bit naïve. After weighing out the partial skeins and sorting everything, I ended up having ~20,551 yards (18,791 meters) among the 74 skeins of fingering weight yarn in my stash. It surprised me, too.

Here it all is!

 


Next was all my sport weight yarn. Only 12 different kinds of yarn this kind, so this is a bit of a “stash deficiency” as it were. If I really do need to knit something in a sport weight and I cannot make one of these 12 yarns work, I do have permission to acquire what I need. In fact, I already did that to get another skein of Knit Picks Brava to make some hats. It’s not in my stash yet, but SO made it an allowable purchase because he is benefitting from it I will be knitting it right away in a project that’s on a deadline. In total, this ends up being ~ 5205 yards (4760 meters) of yarn among the 20 skeins of sport weight yarn in my stash. (this number is off from the actual stash management day numbers because I’m currently knitting with some of the sport weight so I’m at 2 skeins less than I was then). Manageable and not too shabby, since really this is just 12 different kinds of yarn and at least 5 of the skeins should be out of my stash by the end of the year. Still shouldn’t acquire unless needed, but far less dire than some.

Here’s the sport weight.

 

We move on to DK weight, which is definitely the yarn I have the least of. I don’t know if it’s that DK weight yarn is just rare or if I just happen to never knit with it or never be drawn to it or some combination of all those things, but if a major project came up that needed DK weight yarn, I’m not sure I’d be able to swing it without a purchase. Which is good. That’s where I want to be, mostly. Not that I’m against having a stash, I just like the idea that most of the yarn in my stash is dedicated to a project and has a clear, foreseeable future. I only have 6 “projects” worth of DK weight, and much of that is remnants from other projects and/or is designated for destash. It ends up being ~2350 yards (2148 meters) in 13 skeins (6 of which are designated for destash). This is manageable and somewhat realistic, although if for some reason I start making more projects that call for DK weight, I’ll probably need to think about bulking up this part of the stash. For now, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and if one comes up, I’ll figure that out.

Here’s the DK weight. It and the sport weight are sharing a drawer right now.

 

Aaaannnnd now we come to the “problem area” also known as my worsted weight yarn stash. Specifically the acrylic bits of my worsted weight yarn stash, but really all of it is problematic. I actually split it into acrylic vs non-acrylic just to make it more manageable. Also, because in most cases involving my stash the distinction between worsted and Aran weight is thin at best, I have combined “worsted” and “aran” into one category. Truly some of what is labeled aran in Ravelry is actually aran weight, but most of it can all be classified the same, imo. So, I think it’s no secret that I like knitting sweaters, which generally means that I buy sweater quantities of worsted weight yarn. In the past, it meant I bought sweater quantities of worsted weight acrylic yarn because I still hadn’t figured out that acrylic sweaters mostly just make you sweat a lot. And also because I got a lot of the worsted weight acrylic I have for free when I was doing some charity knitting and people foisted off their acrylic yarn on me. To be fair, I also rather like a lot of the worsted weight acrylic I have. I’m not trashing on it in the least, I just know better than to think of it as the default anymore.

First . . . non-acrylic 10-ply (worsted or Aran weight). I have ~13, 153 yards (12,027 meters) in my stash, spread among 59 skeins of 30 different yarns. Which isn’t all that bad, actually, when I compare it with the fingering weight. At least I *knew* I had a lot of worsted weight yarn. Much of it is remnant WoTA from Fourth Doctor scarves, really.




Then we move to . . . acrylic 10-ply (worsted or Aran weight). The numbers are less exact here than they are elsewhere because I have lost ball bands or things are committed in projects that will be frogged and reknit and I haven’t figured all the yardage yet, but it’s close(ish). It ends up being ~1902 yards (1739 meters) among 19 skeins of 14 different yarns. I mean, in the grand scheme of my yarn stash that’s not a ton, but it’s a ton considering it’s a lot of sweaters or large projects worth of acrylic. I’ll use it for things, but it’s something I need to think about. I mean, I haven’t purchased acrylic yarn (save the purchasing of Knit Picks Brava for specific projects or the yarn for my WTNV bag) since June of 2013, so I feel reformed. I also feel weirdly compelled to finish making the sweaters I got this acrylic for. Reality is, some of it will probably end up as hats or bags or some other accessory. I’m not really purchasing this anymore, but I still feel guilty about having it in the first place for some reason. It’s because I use it in inappropriate ways and the reason I still have all of this is because (as previously alluded to on this blog) I try to make garments with acrylic yarn and then they don’t work out and I’m unhappy and frog them. No. More. Acrylic. Sweaters. Not for moral reasons, just because I’ve come to realise they are almost always a bad idea.



In total, all my worsted weight yarn adds up to 15,055 yards (13,766 meters) among 72 skeins of 44 different yarns. Because worsted skeins take up more space than fingering weight skeins, this has become A PROBLEM and will subsequently stop.

Finally . . . bulky and superbulky. It honestly amazed me that I had *any* of this yarn in my stash, as I never use it, but then I remembered I made some bad decisions at a Michael’s sale a few times. It turns out, though, that I actually have identified uses for much of this, despite it all being in destash. Maybe someday I’ll get to it. This is another yarn family that I need to just buy on an as-needed basis. The odds of me needing some around in case something comes up are so very low, at this point. I’ll use, sell, or donate what I have and only purchase if I absolutely see a need. Right now I have ~1449 yards (1325 meters) in 19 skeins of 6 different yarns, most of them in destash.

 

In total, I end up with ~53477 yards (48899 meters) in 202 skeins of 101 different kinds of yarn in my stash. Again, that might not sound like terribly a lot to you, but I’m currently finishing off my most productive knitting year by far (which included THREE Fourth Doctor scarves) and it’s looking like I’m going to hit a knitting total of around 15,500 yards (14, 242 meters) so even if I do manage to sustain this mad knitting pace (which I likely will not), it would take me 3.5 years to knit through all this stash. That’s a lot, and I need to scale back. The great yarn un-purchasing of 2014 starts . . . now. (well . . . actually, it started on August 30, 2014, but I’m telling all of you now. Keep me accountable.

Happy smart stashing!

Stash Enhancement: Doctor Who Yarns!

Shortly after arriving home from my summer of travel, which should probably also be known as the “summer of buy all the yarn while you’re on vacation”, I was browsing around LYS’s website (for some reason…probably they sent me an email) and saw that they had a new yarn in their "Nerd Alert Yarn" series. Many (most) of these are Doctor Who themed (because the staff at my LYS are my kind of people) and this one was no exception. They’d actually added quite a few new Doctor Who/Torchwood themed colourways to the series, but I knew there was only one of them that NEEDED to come home with me.

"A Centurion is Faithful 100%"

Now, since most of you don’t know me in real life and haven’t heard me gush for hours about how much I ADORED the Ponds (basically because that IS my relationship…I’m not making that up), you don’t know how much this yarn needed to come to me and be something amazing in my life, but trust me…there was no option.

One major problem is that I don’t knit socks. I don’t WANT to knit socks. Which means I needed to buy more than one skein so that I could potentially make something substantial that is NOT socks. So, before heading to the store I did a bit of research and queued up a few patterns that I thought I could manage with two skeins. All of them were sweaters, but they were short sleeved and should be feasible with the yardage of two skeins.

Then I went to the store, bent on buying this yarn and only this yarn, and the shop staff, being the terrible enablers they are, showed me ALL of the new Doctor Who yarns they had. Which led to me ALSO purchasing two skeins of Three Irish Girls Adorn Sock in the “Exterminate” colourway. And still feeling proud of myself because I only bought TWO yarns instead of all ten that Jeremy showed me!

Fortunately, I had a groupon, so I only paid about half as much as I would have, but when you keep saying you’re not going to purchase more yarn because you are out of room, buying four more skeins isn’t the way to accomplish things. Especially when you get home and have to literally CRAM these four skeins in your yarn drawers (meaning you’re somewhat damaging the skeins/labels every time you open the drawer). That, combined with the lingering thought that you might be moving soon and the idea that you will soon need a goodly sum of extra money (for various reasons) meant…

It’s time for a yarn intervention…

Stay tuned. There will be photos of my stash. All of it.

Finished Object: Fourth Doctor Scarf the Fourth

Near the beginning of August, just as I was thinking I was going to let the listing expire without getting an order to knit a Fourth Doctor scarf, another order came in. This one was my first overseas Etsy order (Germany!) and came with the (totally valid) request to change the purple colour I traditionally use from a less red purple to a more purple purple. Which is valid. The colour I use isn’t actually the best and I think I might like the purple I used for this scarf better. The buyer was lovely in looking on the Knit Picks site and picking out the colour she wanted and the whole process was very painless and yielded a lovely scarf.

Because I’m not the sort of person who likes having a ton of random scrap yarns around, I dug out all the Knit Picks WoTA worsted (fortunately I keep it all in one bag) from the previous full WoTA worsted scarf, took out my trusty yarn scale, weighed what I had, and then adjusted the ratio of how much to purchase.The one concern I had was that I had no idea how close KP matches colours between dye lots, as I was clearly using yarn I’d purchased a year ago and expected the dye lots to be drastically different. Good news…they weren’t. Even in the sections of the scarf where I *know* I joined a ball of the old colour to a ball of the new colour mid-section, I cannot even tell the slightest colour difference. I wouldn’t put 100% faith on this working all the time, but it worked out this time and I’ll probably take this gamble again.

The only real problem is that even though I made sure that when I ordered, the total amount of each colour I ended up with was greater than what was recommended on the pattern, but I still ran out of red, grey, and tan just before the end of the scarf. This put me a little bit behind schedule because I was on vacation when this happened and even though I ordered more yarn (from Ravelry destash and some from Knit Picks), I had to wait until I got back home to get to finishing the last quarter of the scarf. Fortunately, the buyer is a knitter as well, so they were very understanding about the slight delay and were perfectly lovely about everything, even when the package got stuck in customs in Berlin for a week and they had to call and take care of all of those problems.

Overall, this is the scarf I’m the most happy with since the first WoTA scarf  (which I got to see “in the wild” at the end of August, as I saw the person I made it for and she was wearing it. It’s wearing well and looked great even a year later!) I made, thus reinforcing my new policy of only making scarves in WoTA (or Cascade 220 if a person wants superwash) because it is the best yarn I’ve used for this process. Plus, because I have a new yarn scale and did a better job of monitoring how much yarn I had at the start and end, I have a WAY better estimate of how much of each colour I actually need for the scarf, so maybe the next time I open the listing up (might be a while…I knit this and then immediately knit a stockinette scarf in the round, so I have garter stitch burnout right now), I might not actually have to reorder yarn two times to get to the end.

Here’s a photo of the finished scarf. It’s pretty beautiful. Almost all credit to Knit Picks Wool of the Andes for being such a great yarn for this project.

Stash Enhancement: Buy all the Yarns

Sorry, all. Got WOEFULLY behind on posting again just when I told myself I was going to work even harder to stick to a regular posting schedule. I’ve had so many posts in the drafts that were basically outlines and needed to get posted, but I just never had/made the time to actually get to them.

Many things in the works, so I do promise to be better about making time to write posts!
To start, I want to talk about what I honestly mean this time is THE LAST MAJOR YARN PURCHASING OF 2014 (more on that later).

I took another trip across the border to visit my family, and this time I was there for a week. In that week, I managed to make one trip to a new yarn store (which I am IN LOVE with…they have ALL THE QUINCE & CO.) and also purchased yarn at a festival (not a yarn festival). The festival was the main reason I found myself in town and I knew that they’d had a yarn vendor there previously, so I was fully expecting to purchase some yarn at the festival. I was not expecting to purchase what I did.

For context, the festival in question is a rather large Irish heritage festival (my mother’s mother is from Ireland), and in the past they have had a charming independent vendor from Ireland selling some of the yarn spun from their sheep. I’ve never actually purchased any of this yarn, but this year I told myself that if they were back, I would make the commitment to purchasing a bit of yarn. Well, this particular vendor was not there, but I was not disappointed on the yarn front. This year, the festival had a representative from Studio Donegal, and she had brought several baskets of various colours of their Soft Donegal yarn. Having just purchased two skeins of their Soft Donegal back in July during my trip to California, I knew that I wanted to buy enough to make myself an Aran sweater. So, after much deliberation of colours and much of my mother raising her eyebrows at me about how much I was about to spend on yarn, I purchased 5 skeins of their purple colour. And then, upon getting it home, I realised that in order to make the sweater I wanted I probably needed 6 skeins. But I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.



A few days after the festival, I wanted to take a trip to another one of the few local yarn stores I had discovered the last time I was in town. This one had hours that were rather inconvenient (my mother was going to work during the week and I was working from my parents’ house) as the only day they were open past 6pm was the day I was leaving town at noon. But I managed to convinced my mother to leave work early one day so that we could go, and I’m really glad we did.

The shop was charming on the inside AND the outside, and the two women working there were extremely kind and helpful. On top of that, they wound all my yarn into cakes for me, which I greatly appreciate as I don’t own a swift. But, best of all, they had shelves upon shelves upon shelves of Quince & Co. Even better than that, I was in mighty need of some Quince & Co. to make one of the billions of Cecily Glowik-MacDonald sweaters I had added to my Ravelry queue. Previously, I’d taken some time with SO to sit down and narrow down some of the sweater options and taken notes on which yarn I would need and how much of it I would need and then headed to my LYS (where they used to have a shelf of Quince & Co.), but their shelves were rather bare on the Quince & Co. front and I ended up not purchasing. So, after many frantic text messages to SO to ask him if he happened to be home and could look at the list, then several texts back from him about what yarns I had picked out for which sweater I managed to pick out just what I needed.

The yarn is Quince & Co. Chickadee in the River colourway, and it’s destined to become the Irina sweater by Cecily Glowik MacDonald (hopefully sometime this fall)



While I was there, I also picked up some other yarn that I needed for some gift knitting projects. For a Ravelry swap I’m in, I needed to knit someone a scarf, so I picked up a few skeins of Cascade 220 in forest green and yellow. I can’t yet talk about what the scarf design is since the swap package hasn’t arrived yet, but I will post about it as soon as I can.
I also picked up some Cascade 220 superwash sport (which I’m still bitter about not being 220 yards/skein) in basic black to knit a hat for my father for his birthday at the end of October.

So…overall I managed to come home with 18 new skeins of yarn to put in an already full yarn drawer, but I told myself that 6 of them are getting used nearly immediately and if all goes well the Quince & Co will be getting knit up soon too. Still…I knew it meant that I was about to need a yarn intervention. It was a few more weeks before that happened, but it has happened and I’ll be sure to tell you all about it as soon as we get through the pile of other things that happened in the interim.

It’s been an exciting summer/end of summer on the crafting front, and has no promises of slowing down. Thanks for making the journey with me.

New Project: Falling in Love With Yarn

Okay, so I’m not sure it’s “the one” yet, but I am knitting a new thing and I just listened to a podcast that compared making a swatch to a first date and I liked the analogy so I thought I’d run with it.



As a promise to my SO, I said I’d use up some of my stash yarn before I buy new yarn for myself (yarn for Etsy projects doesn’t count) and because I do things systematically, I sorted my Ravelry stash by date stashed and I’m finding projects I can make (in the time I have when I’m not making hats like I work in a factory) starting with the oldest yarns first.
This led me to Malabrigo Yarns Rios. Way back when I was a brand new knitter sometime in 2010, I got it in my mind that I was going to make SO a brown vest (per request). We trekked down to one of our many LYS in town (this is how long ago it was…the store is no longer where it used to be, it has since moved and is, in fact, the place where I bought my emergency ball of Rowan Pure Wool DK tan for 4th Doctor Scarf of Frustration) and started looking for brown yarn. What you should know is that this was literally the first time I had bought yarn anywhere that wasn’t a big box craft store and I had no idea what I was doing. The poor employee had to watch me while I  wandered around for half an hour lamenting the price of yarn, then had to show me how to wind the yarn into cakes because I’d never seen an actual yarn hank before, then asked me if I knew about stranding with that yarn (obviously I didn’t since I didn’t even know WTF that yarn was). I said “yes” though, because I can’t possibly admit to a complete stranger who might be able to help me that I don’t know something. That’s just a particular quirk of me though. I imagine I had at least done something smart like write down what weight of yarn and what length of yarn I needed for the project, but I can’t be sure that ending up with the right amount wasn’t just a happy accident. So…if I bought the yarn for the vest, then what’s going on with it now?
Well. I made the vest a few months ago (after about 5 tries because SO is bigger than the pattern and I don’t can maths), but I ended up making it out of Red Heart Soft. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me why. I imagine it was because I decided that after I spent US$45+ on yarn I was making something for myself out of it, dammit. So it sat in my stash, probably waiting for me to make *myself* a vest.

Then, at some point, I realized that I don’t wear vests.

For a long time, this was *still* my only trip to a non-chain craft store and my non-big brand acrylic yarn purchase. What can I say, no one ever raised me with the stigmas against acrylic yarns. Michael’s/JoAnn/Hancock would sell me yarn on the cheap, so I bough it. I ain’t ashamed. But, since I’m a borderline hoarder, and the Rios was still the most expensive yarn in my stash, I knew I needed to do something important with it and I didn’t have anything important to do.

Fast forward to now-ish. Periodically, I’d pull out the Rios (now not the only nice yarn in my stash) and think “I should make this into a thing”, but not have the time or the energy or the whatever to actually do anything about it. So it would sit there. And I’d buy more yarn (funny thing, I now own like 4 colours of Malabrigo worsted that I *also* don’t know what to do with). I had these plans for what order I was going to knit things in, but then I opened an Etsy store and had to make like a billion hats and forty 4th Doctor scarves, so that threw all my plans out the window.

Since I got hardcore into knitting podcasts over the last month, I’ve been getting all sorts of inspiration and ideas (usually from back in 2009) lately. One particular podcast did a challenge over the course of 2012 (yeah, I’m behind…story of my life) that encouraged people to post their goals for the year in the Ravelry group and then they’d draw prizes once a month for everyone who posted in that month’s thread that they had met a goal. Most of the goals included using up stash. Which, of course, was what gave me the revelation that I should use up stash. It wasn’t possibly the fact that I recently bought a plastic shelving unit to keep my yarn in so it wasn’t just haphazardly piled in paper bags in the corner of the bedroom and all the yarn STILL didn’t fit in there and had to expand into the ottoman and the antique chest that SO’s mom gave us. No. It was people talking about using up stash.
But, it’s gotten me down this road and I’ve finally finished up some other things (I frogged a sweater that I’d made last fall and decided to reknit it…I’m blaming/thanking Ravellenic games for that one), so today I was home and I knit a swatch. Well, I knit two swatches in one, which is why the photo looks a bit wonky. I’m sure that’s not the approved method of swatching, but I’m lazy and I’m sure as hell not cutting any of this yarn (I’m not actually sure I have enough for the project I chose), so it is what it is.

I learned some things about swatching from yet another podcast, but that’s another post. I’ll keep you posted on how the Rios sweater adventure turns out.

Future Project: The Yarn Dyeing Rabbit Hole

I just got a really big bug to learn yarn dyeing so I can make character/other things inspired colourways for my fandoms that don’t have yarn colourways *cough*DragonAge*cough* (curse my sudden craving for Anders inspired yarns.

I have no knowledge of how to do this, very little time, probably no skill in actually creating variegations, and absolutely no available space. This is probably going to be a chaotic trip down a rabbit hole unless I get some quick intervention from those who love me (and share my flat).

Wish me luck.