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 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.

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.